Making Class Invisible

“When the media doesn’t turn its attention to the poor, it offers a series of contradictory messages and portrayals.”
“In another example of media coverage, we are told that the poor live in a personal and cultural cycle of poverty that hopelessly imprisons them.”-Media Magic by Gregory Mantsios

In the article Media Magic, Mantsios proves the point that poverty is violence. Instead of people and media helping the poor, they just use the impoverished people to portray contradictory messages and create negative statistics. Therefore, by us not helping the impoverished people is the same as if we’re inflicting violence upon them. The media seems to recognize and also help the public to recognize how poor the impoverished actually are yet no one seems to take the time to help them out. In the article it states that “the media tells us that the affluent in our society are a kind, understanding, giving people- which we are not.”

“Economic data show that huge swaths of low- and middle-income families, both in California and across the nation, are barely scraping by. By many measures, their living standards are stagnating or declining as the prices of such necessities as food, fuel and medicine rise faster than wages.”
- “Rich getting richer, poor getting poorer” by Sam Zuckerman
- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/09/BUVI10258K.DTL

This quote from the article “Rich are getting richer, poor getting poorer” clearly proves that the media is aware and makes it aware for others to see what the low income families are going through. This also gives the impression that wealthier people are greedy, which in some cases can be proven to be true. One cannot argue that the wealthy is unaware of the lower class families out there suffering. Yet, no one takes precautions and instead, just lets them be.


The picture above I feel portrays an image as well a quote that relates to the information. "The rich is getting richer as the poor is getting poorer." That quote just proves more that the rich is all about themselves. As poorer families continue to get poor, richer ones continuously get richer. Yet, they do not help the poor people they just go on living their lives as if everything is fine but by them not giving the poor help is the same as if their inflicting violence.