Page 463 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Representat ons of Class

cultural analyst Benjamin DeMott, the media perpetuate a political paradox, in
that the majority of people in the United States prefer to identify as middle class,
despite their unequal access to society’s material and educational resources.

sELLing ThE DrEam: CommErCiaLism
anD CLass rEPrEsEnTaTion
Commercialism is a powerful filter when it comes to class representation. Take
the case of television. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when TV was getting its
start, the major networks broadcast “urban, ethnic, working class family sitcoms”
as well as live anthology dramas that dealt with the everyday realities of working-
class life (Boddy 1992). By mid-decade, however, all of these programs had been
cancelled or drastically modified to meet the promotional demands of the con-
sumer economy of which television was an integral part. Sponsors preferred
stories about well-to-do suburban families; social realism, they claimed, didn’t
foster the “right” mood for selling products. By accommodating the advertising
system from which it profited, TV also constructed white, heterosexual, upper-
middle-class family life as an idealized cultural “norm.” Although we now have
many more broadcast and cable channels available to us, television’s class bias
hasn’t changed much. Indeed, many critics argue that the fragmentation of the
television landscape can never foster class diversity because the emphasis is still
on selling products to the “right” customers.

ChEaTs, rEDnECks, anD BuFFoons:
PaThoLogizing CLass inEquaLiTy
What sociologists call “class” stems from a combination of education, income,
and culture in capitalist societies: a person’s job, schooling, and family origins are
indicators of class position, and these factors in turn shape a person’s lifestyle
and “taste” in everything from beer to television programs (Bourdieu 1984).
Class differences are not inborn but are socially produced within unequal power
relations. The upper classes are not inherently more intelligent, ambitious, or
sophisticated than the majority of the population: they simply control more fi-
nancial, educational, and cultural resources and are able to pass these resources
from one generation to the next. Why then do people appear to accept relatively
stable class hierarchies? One reason is that the U.S. media soften the harsh in-
justices of the capitalist class system by perpetuating intersecting fantasies of
individual class mobility and “classlessness.”
Media representations of class promote the notion that anyone can transcend
the circumstances of their birth if they work hard enough. This logic is demo-
cratic in that it subverts efforts to regulate and maintain “fixed” class positions
common to aristocratic societies. However, it also has a troubling flipside in
that it assumes that wealth is something to be gained individually (rather than
shared socially) and that the identities, tastes, habits, and lifestyles of the upper-
middle class are inherently superior and thus universally desired. Moreover,
most individuals are not able to “overcome” class disadvantages and inequalities