Social Class and the media

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Social Class and the media

• The powerful influence most denied in the United
  States

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Social stratification

• In all societies there is some form of hierarchy
• Distribution of social rewards/values is not
  entirely equal in any society
• Hierarchy varies
• How steep
• Bases for hierarchy

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Social Class

• Stratification within a society based on a number
  of variables
• Income
• Education
• Breeding (Tastes)
• Blood (Old rich v. nouveau riche)

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Does class exist in America?

• Largely denied by U.S. culture
• Classless society
• The belief that the United States is a classless
  society or, alternatively, that most Americans
  are middle class persists . . . despite
  pervasive socioeconomic stratification
• (Bullock, Wyche and Williams, 2001)

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Reasons for denial

• Meritocracy
• Market system
• Equal opportunity
• Legal blindness to most demographic differences
• Upward mobility
• Overshadowed by other concerns
• Race
• Sex (Gender)
• Religion
• Nationalism

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Yessocial class exists in America

• Vast differences among Americans in their
  incomes, property, power
• Life chances largely determined by social class
  at birth
• Education
• Access to technology
• Network of opportunities

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• But things are getting better, right?

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What about social mobility?

• Mobility among classes is relatively common in
  the United States, but
• Children of the rich tend to be afforded a great
  deal of advantage in education, networking,
  ability to try and fail, etc.
• People of different classes have fairly limited
  personal contact
• Geographic segregation
• PRIZM
• Intermarriage across widely differing social
  classes is uncommon
• Cinderella
• Pretty Woman
• Princess and the Pea
• The Nanny
• Old money tends to maintain the class position of
  the next generation
• Greatest access to higher circles has been
  through technology

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Social class affects

• Media access/choice
• Content preferences
• Interpretation of media content
• Representation within media content
• Power over media

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Social class and media use

• Access to media
• More expensive media tend to be used more by the
  relatively well-to-do
• Digital divide
• Literacy levels
• Written materials
• Taste cultures
• High culture v. low culture (popular culture)
• Opera v. hip-hop

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Internet use by household income
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• iPods/MP3 players are gadgets for the upscale.
  Fully 18 of those who live in households earning
  more than 75,000 have them 13 of those living
  in households earning 50,000 to 75,000 have
  them 9 of those living in households earning
  30,000-50,000 own them and 7 of those living
  in households earning less than 30,000 have
  them. (20 of respondents did not tell us their
  household income.)
• Source Pew Internet and American Life Project

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Source Mediamark Research, Inc.
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Content Preferences
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Source 2000 Porter Novelli Healthstyles Survey
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Interpretation of content

• Class-based worldview influences interpretations

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Working-class preferences

• Working-class men preferred shows featuring a
  character sympathetic to working-class values.
  They identified with working-class types even
  when those types were written as peripheral
  characters or villains. They contradicted the
  notion of working-class viewers as passive and
  gullible.

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Stereotypes

• Just as for African Americans or women, etc.
  there are stereotypes that go with being working
  class or lower class
• Usually negative for those lower on the status
  hierarchy

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Prime Time programming

• Early television included a number of
  working-class leads
• Ralph Cramden
• Marty
• More recent examples
• All in the Family
• Roseanne

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What are lower-class women like?

• Trashy
• Oversexed
• Unsophisticated
• Domestic
• Kids
• Dependant/Golddigger
• Focused on men

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What are lower-class men like?

• Violent
• Brutish
• Dominant
• Stupid
• Ignorant
• Focused on cars, sports, sex
• Racist
• Sexist
• Engage in hair-brained schemes to get ahead
• Lack taste

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What does all this lead to?

• Blaming the victim
• Maintenance of a heavily hierarchical reward
  system
• Low self-esteem among lower classes
• Ability of the well-to-do to engage in modern
  Social Darwinism
• Dont have to face their own responsibility for
  poor conditions many live under
• Exultation of self-interest
• Mean World (for real)

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Media facilitate classless society myth by

• Presenting the interests of the well-off (e.g.,
  stock, financial portfolios, and leisure time) as
  general concerns
• Downplaying the structural economic concerns
  (e.g., job security, income) of the working class
  and poor, and
• Emphasizing shared interclass concerns (e.g.,
  safety, crime)
• Portraying the middle class as the norm, with
  little representation of interclass tension

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The Hatfiel Clan
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Media use

• Working-class families used television as
  background or fillerthe TV was constantly on
• Middle-class families turned the TV on and off,
  based on selective viewing of particular content

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When lower- and working-class people are depicted

• Tend to be portrayed as foolish or ignorant
• Trailer trash can be portrayed in ways that
  would cause significant outcry if applied to
  racial minorities, etc.
• Archie Bunker
• Homer Simpson

Clampetts go to Maui
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Blue Collar Males

• Seen as sexist, racist, violent, unintelligent
  and entirely lacking in taste
• Jerry Springer
• WWE
• Blue Collar Comedy

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Butsch

• The prototypical working-class male is
  incompetent and ineffectual, often a buffoon,
  well-intentioned but dumb.
• Ralph Kramden
• Fred Flintstone
• Archie Bunker
• Homer Simpson

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• He fails in his role as a father and a husband,
  is lovable but not respected. Heightening this
  failure is the depiction of working-class wives
  as exceeding the bounds of their feminine status,
  being more intelligent, rational, and sensible
  than their husbands. In other words gender is
  inverted, with the head of the house, whose
  occupation defines the families social class,
  demeaned in the process. . . . Working-class men
  are de-masculinized by depicting them as
  child-like their wives act as mothers.

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Representation

• Over-representation of professionals and
  relatively well-to-do on TV
• Parallel situation in film, though more varied
• Working class and poor invisible
• Except as cops and criminals
• Occasional representations are often stereotypic

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• However, the tone of Prime Time is heavily
  white-collar/professional or upper class
• The main exceptions are law enforcement personnel
  in cop shows, reality shows and daytime talk
  shows
• Often connect poor and working class with
  negative depictions, low culture

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• In most middle-class series, however, both
  parents are mature, sensible and competent,
  especially when there are children in the
  series.

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Tabloid news shows

• Tabloid news shows tended to focus on stories
  involving upper-class criminals, particularly
  celebrities, whereas highbrow news programs
  were more likely to focus on stories involving
  working-class, unemployed criminals.
• Also tend to show rags to riches stories or the
  hollowness of wealth

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• Welfare recipients are among the . . . the most
  hated and stereotyped groups in contemporary
  society
• Out of 17 stereotyped groups (feminists,
  housewives, retarded people, Blacks, migrant
  workers, etc.) welfare recipients were the only
  one that respondents both disliked and
  disrespected.
• Lacking both competence and warmth
• However, most common group of welfare recipients
  is poor children
• Media representations concentrate on their mothers

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Connection to race

• European Americans greatly overestimate the
  percentage of African Americans who are poor

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• Their personal shortcomings lead to a need for
  care from professionals
• Problems stem from personal failings (not
  society, actions of others)
• Jerry Springer
• WWE
• Implies that social policy should protect the
  populace from a dangerous, personally lacking
  group rather than treating a structural problem
  

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Soap operas

• On soap operas, single mothers are typically
  portrayed as White, upper-middle-class
  professionals, with nurturing male friends and an
  abundance of reliable child care providers
  (Larson, 1996).
• Teenage girls who were heavy viewers of soap
  operas were more likely than lighter viewers to
  underestimate the relationship between single
  motherhood and poverty and to overestimate the
  percentage of single mothers in high-paying jobs.

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Stereotypes in media and popular culture

• African American menmembers of threatening and
  violent underclass
• African American womenwelfare queens or as
  ignorant, promiscuous women caught in a
  self-perpetuating cycle of dependency
• Emphasis on African Americans tends to render
  white poor invisible in popular culture

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• Popular music draws heavily from urban lower
  class and rural working class

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Social mobility

• Reinforcing the middle-class ideal was an
  exaggerated display of affluence and upward
  mobility.
• Lewis Freeman found that upward mobility in
  sitcoms of 1990-1992 was achieved through
  self-sacrifice and resilience, reinforcing the
  ethic of individualism which makes each person
  responsible for his or her socio-economic status.

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Depictions of drug crimes

• Although the typical drug consumer and dealer
  is an employed, high-school-educated European
  American man, the majority of arrests depicted on
  reality-based crime programs involve African
  American and Latino men in densely populated,
  urban areas (Anderson, 1994).

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• In a recent study of soap operas and their
  viewers . . . Working-class women viewers of
  daytime serials rejected the affluent long
  suffering heroines in favour of villainesses who
  transgressed feminine norms and thus cast off
  middle class respectability.
• Butsch

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Example

• Many media stories talk about the economy
  overall, citing recovery etc. but do not look
  at the differential class-based effect of various
  policies and events

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• By dedicating little broadcast time or print
  space to stories that openly discuss class
  privilege, class-based power differences, and
  inequalities, the poor are either rendered
  invisible or portrayed in terms of
  characterological deficiencies and moral failings
  (e.g., substance abuse, crime, sexual,
  availability, violence).

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Depictions of drug crimes

• Although the typical drug consumer and dealer
  is an employed, high-school-educated European
  American man, the majority of arrests depicted on
  reality-based crime programs involve African
  American and Latino men in densely populated,
  urban areas (Anderson, 1994).

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Tabloid news shows

• Tabloid news shows tended to focus on stories
  involving upper-class criminals, particularly
  celebrities, whereas highbrow news programs
  were more likely to focus on stories involving
  working-class, unemployed criminals.
• Also tend to show rags to riches stories or the
  hollowness of wealth

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• Limited number of stories on poverty on national
  newscasts.
• 11 per network per year 1981 to 1986

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Two categories of stories(Entman, 1995)

• 239 stories
• 39 depicted poverty as a source of threat (e.g.,
  crime, drugs, and gangs)
• 61 portrayed poverty in terms of suffering (e.g.
  racial discrimination, poor health, and
  inadequate medical care)

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Two frames(Iyengar, 1990)

• Episodic frame
• Personal circumstances of a poor individual or
  family
• More common
• Thematic frame
• Abstract, impersonal approach that looks at
  general poverty trends and public assistance

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Framing effects

• Those exposed to episodic frames in an experiment
  were more likely to blame the poor for their own
  poverty and to perceive them as responsible for
  improving their socioeconomic status. Those
  exposed to thematic frames tended to make
  structural attributions for poverty and to regard
  the government as responsible for social change.

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Framing effects

• Those exposed to episodic frames in an experiment
  were more likely to blame the poor for their own
  poverty and to perceive them as responsible for
  improving their socioeconomic status. Those
  exposed to thematic frames tended to make
  structural attributions for poverty and to regard
  the government as responsible for social change.

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• Welfare recipients are among the . . . the most
  hated and stereotyped groups in contemporary
  society
• Only one among 17 stereotyped groups (feminists,
  housewives, retarded people, Blacks, migrant
  workers, etc.) that respondents both disliked and
  disrespected.
• Lacking both competence and warmth
• However, most common group of welfare recipients
  is poor children
• Media representations concentrate on their mothers

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Content analysis of Newsweek 1993-1995

• De Goede (1996) found that the language used in
  the articles reinforced strong ingroup-outgroup
  class-based distinctions, simultaneously
  extolling the moral superiority of the middle
  class while degrading the values and behaviors of
  the poor.
• Single African American mothers and teenage
  mothers often the focus of these negative articles