Media Magic: Making Class Invisible

When reading this selection, it was extremely shocking to me that there are forty million people living in poverty in America alone. To think that forty million povished Americans can fill seven northeast states is mind-blowing. Gregory Mantsios states "in those instances when inequities are revealed, we are provided with messages that obscure the nature of class realities and blame the victims of class-dominated society for their own plight."
Who provides these messages? Mainly, the media. Another astounding statistic is that the average American will watch twenty-eight hours of television a week! And this number does not even include watching movies. The media also hands out messages in the form of periodicals, newspapers, journals, and magazines. While there are forty million povished Americans, the middle and upper class are, for the most part, unaware of how serious the situations actually are. This is done by the media desensitizing the information provided to us.
The media desensitizes the poverty in America by reducing the poverty to a number. In this way, it is providing the "wealthy" with quantity, but not quality. We have no idea how serious this situation actually is. We do not live through the suffering, indignities, and misery that they live through each and every day. The only way we would have any slight idea is through information from the media. Since they desensitize the information, we think of the issue and nothing, and that provides for a list of more troubling issues. Also, by giving reducing the issue to a quantitative number, it makes the povished Americans faceless.
The media also portrays the idea to Americans that the poor only have themselves to blame for their life of misery. They focus in on typical black urban communities or women with attitudes that lead to divorce or single-motherhood. While these examples can sometimes be true, the idea as a whole is not realistic. Many Americans work just as hard, they simply did not his the genetic lottery or had the money to afford college. This is not their fault by any means. Telling the poor that they are the ones to be blamed puts a negative image in the minds of middle and upper class Americans. If only the media would be more realistic in their explanations and choices of words, maybe the poverty number could be lowered in some instances, or at least be more recognized by the wealthy in America.