The media affect nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Newspapers, blogs, radio, television, texts, we are saturated in media messages constantly. But what messages are the media sending us, and who controls those messages? In the article, "Media Magic: Making Class Invisible," Gregory Mantsios examines how the media manages to essentially minimize the plight of impoverished peoples and erases the working and poor classes from the messages we recieve.
Mantsios describes the many ways in which the media accomplishes the erasure of class from the public discourse. "The news media provides meager coverage of poor people and poverty...it is often distorted and misleading." The article gives a figure of forty million impoverished people in the united states, whose stories are ignored by the mass media. Another figure given states that only one in one thousand articles in the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature are about poverty. Mantsios claims that the media are likely to focus attention on the poor in cases of national tradgedy, such as hurricane Sandy, or when presenting the poor as poeple who just hapen to be down on their luck temporarily. An example given is that of "Yule time" stories, about impoverished people/families who may have had a family tragedy or job loss. The people featured usually happen to be white. These people are seen as deserving of our empathy because they have become part of the "poor" class due to no fault of thier own. They aren't "really" poor, they're just in a bad situation.
Conversely, minorities are often seen as permanent members of the poor class, and undeserving of attention or help. They have brought their situation upon themselves, and need to stop asking for handouts and pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Mantsios describes this as blaming the victim; instead of thinking about how factors, like race, or sex, affect access to jobs, education or the ability to seek assistance, it is easier to believe that impoverished people somehow at fault. Mantisos claims that poverty is "systemic," a product of societal forces which collude to disadvantage people.
Other factors which aid in the erasure of the underclass from media: The praise of individuals who have "made it on their own." If they can do it, why can't you?? The ownership of mass media by a handful of corporations. The majority of the media, newspapers, television stations, radio, websites, are owned by a few people who are able to control what we observe, and how we observe it. Mantsios posits that the media intentionally "blurs the lines between the working...and upper class," creating a "universal middle class" who are different from "the poor." "We," the "middle class," have different issues to worry about than "the poor, " they are not like us. The poor are othered into nonexistence, in the media, at least.
The media likes to portray impoverishment as an anomaly. It is something that only happens to middle class white families with 2.5 kids, not through any wrongdoing on their part. At the same time, it portrays the poor, the homeless, as dregs of society, people who want to leech off of "the rest of us." I feel that this is inaccurate, dangerous, and sad. As a society we cannot ignore the plight of poor peoples and call ourselves civilized. Do you agree that the media presents us with confusing images of the poor? Do impoverished people simply need to "pick themselves up by the bootstraps?"
The media is part of our everyday lives which is why this article was so interesting. I found this article to be interesting and shocking in some ways. It’s interesting to see how the media has been used to form people’s opinions and take on things. Much of what was said in the article is true the media tends to portray the poor in a bad light while portraying the rich in a good one. The media also focuses on putting the middle class against the poor in order to keep them from seeing the real problem in this country, which is the unequal distribution of wealth in this country and the people who are really bringing the poor/middle class down. The media is used as a way of making the mass adapt to a way of thinking that somehow takes their focus off the things that really make this country unfair. As said in the article the reason why the media can portray the poor in that way is because the people that run the media are upper class therefore they are looking out for their own interest, which is a shame.
ReplyDeleteI found this post very interesting because I also agree that the media does shape the way people think and this in fact is very dangerous because as described by Nb "instead of thinking about how factors, like race, or sex, affect access to jobs, education or the ability to seek assistance, it is easier to believe that impoverished people somehow at fault. Mantisos claims that poverty is "systemic," a product of societal forces which collude to disadvantage people." The fact that people blame the poor for the conditions in which they were forced live in by a flawed system is unfair, because many wealthy people refuse to see that poor are in disadvantages because of many structural barriers in which prevents from having any success or social mobility in this society.
ReplyDeleteWhat really fascinates me is this idea of the "universal middle class," where individuals and families in a variety income- and wealth-levels largely consider themselves to be neither wealthy nor poor, but rather on the high or low end of average. In addition to erasing the poor through pretending they're either temporarily impoverished or hopelessly lazy and entitled, we are erasing the rich by understating their economic stature. We act as if extreme wealth is the inevitable end of hard work, and waive the word "rich" aside with euphemisms like "comfortable" or "secure," placing the non-rich in the categories of "unstable" and "insecure."
ReplyDeletePoverty is indeed systemic, and the internalization of this idea of "boot-strapping" by the poor who are unable to do so only exacerbates the problem. If we are going to bridge the disparities between socioeconomic classes, we must first stop trying to hide the gaps.
Good comments, everyone. Antonio Gramsci created the concept of cultural hegemony in which he suggested that the ruling norms are the usually the norms of the ruling class. In other words, the ruling class is usually able to successfully put forth their definitions of reality, views of the world, etc. as the common sense understandings our world. This reading highlights the extent to which the media is complicit in reproducing this hegemony.
ReplyDeleteConsider some recent coverage of different "natural disasters"-- e.g. Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, or the stories of individual successes such as Samantha Garvey...