blog# 8

In “Media Magic: Making Class Invisible”, Gregory Mantsios points what the media show us about social class explaining how they hide the reality or truth of these social classes. He explains that the media is lacking quality and tend to falsify or deform poor people and poverty in the U.S. He claims that the media doesn’t talk about how faster poverty grows and only one in a thousand articles in the Reader’s Guide to Periodic literature or one in five hundred articles in the New York Times talks about poverty. He points out that the poor are undeserved and are considered deviant because they are not part of the “norms” defined by the rich. He also says that the poor have to blame themselves only because they have chosen it. The media also denies the existence of the wealthy as a class even though all they talk about is mostly about their occupations. However they create middle class “we are all middle class” explains Time magazine. The media separates however, working class and middle class. He concludes “that the mass media is neither, objective, balanced, independent, nor neutral.”  

This is related to the video People Like Us on YouTube which discuss social class, poverty…, The first video explains that people who belong in the same social hang out together meaning that we separate ourselves from the one we doesn’t fit in our social class. There are a like of classes in the U.S such as what kind of neighborhood we live, what type of food we eat… We usually send our kids to private school because we don’t want to associate with the poor. We can understand by the reading that the media has done something about it. It almost makes us understand why most of thinks that we were middle class. Most of us are refusing to be poor.  One of the video points out that a little middle class family struggle and their beliefs of moving up has collapse because everything is more expensive and earnings aren’t ( college, car, house…).  In another video we understand that a lot of America doesn’t believe in “the American dream” anymore because cost of living is higher than our income (capitalism) and all their focus to get their children to college.

Going back to the book, we see that working class in Columbia, Ohio…, has been affected by the budget cuts in the past. That explains the mobility of class social and I understand that these days there are a lot of people from middle class who move to working class just as show in these video: “I used to be your neighbor.”

I believe that the media should care more about people especially on the poor since they are can change or even motivate other we can help to lift up a little the poor. People are getting poorer and they are trying a lot different ways such as girl who are trying to get married (video) with the rich guy, violence... however the wealthy are getting wealthier and they are the one who are shape our beliefs, norms…