Social Class and the media

1. Social Class and the media The powerful influence most denied in the United States

2. 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

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

4. 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)

5. 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

6. Yes—social 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

10. But things are getting better, right?

15. 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

16. Social class affects: • Media access/choice • Content preferences • Interpretation of media content • Representation within media content • Power over media

17. 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

18. Internet use by household income

19. 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

20. Source: Mediamark Research, Inc.

22. Content Preferences

23. Source: 2000 Porter Novelli Healthstyles Survey

24. Interpretation of content • Class-based worldview influences interpretations

25. 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.”

26. 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

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

28. What are lower-class women like? • Trashy • Oversexed • Unsophisticated • Domestic • Kids • Dependant/“Golddigger” • Focused on men

30. 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

32. 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” • Don’t have to face their own responsibility for poor conditions many live under • Exultation of self-interest • Mean World (for real)

33. 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

35. The Hatfiel Clan

36. Media use • Working-class families used television as background or filler—the TV was constantly on • Middle-class families turned the TV on and off, based on selective viewing of particular content

37. 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

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

39. 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

41. “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.”

42. 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

46. 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

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

49. 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”

50. “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