House of Lies

Media Magic : Making Class Invisible

   One thing that truly saddens me is how truthful the reading Media Magic: Making Class Invisible is. This reading by Gregory Mantsios talks about how the media influences the way in which we view the poor. The media is a fixed agent of society owned by only a couple of corporations, therefor the information we get is managed by them. I can agree with Mantsios on the statement that (us) minorities are portrayed to others as a danger to society, especially the poor. The news only show the negative aspects instead of positive qualities a minority may posses. One thing that this reading made me think of is the fact that organizations advertise "save a child from starvation in Africa", meanwhile there are kids in our country starving as well. I think that in the case of Africa, people would argue that people have no choice there, but what about the kids here in the U.S. who have no choice either? That is not their fault. I took a road trip down to Florida for the first time in the summer and although I was only going to Florida, I was able to see that in some areas close enough to home, people are less fortunate.  The poor are invisible to us in many instances, but when they are noticeable is only for the worst. they are only visible to the naked eye when they commit a crime or when the media tries to show how much the starving population is weighing the whole country down. All this brings me back to Weber's life chances, which is s person's likelihood to be able to obtain valued economic and cultural resources. A poor person is basically powerless in many situations because they do not have enough resources to influence their social status and move up the social ladder. Poor people are often exposed to suffer classism as we can see from the reading. They are seen as bacteria that other social classes cannot prevent, meanwhile poor people are the victims of rich corporations in many cases due to social inequality. Another thing that happens to people living in poor areas of the country is that distribution of resources is unequally giving to them. For instance, I have experienced the difference between observing kids from extremely wealthy suburbs and the ones from just more average income. I live in Port Washington which is located on the North Shore area of Long Island. Most of the towns on the North Shore area are pretty wealthy, but you can still find the difference of unequal distribution within many school districts. When I started school at BMCC I could not comprehend why some of the students were even sitting in a college classroom; not because they did not deserve an education, but because it seemed to me that they did not have the level of education to be in college yet.