Page 466 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Representat ons of Class |

corporate raiders or leisure-class prima donnas who we love to hate, these medi-
ated personifications of excess ambition and/or inherited privilege do little to
challenge the class bias perpetuated by U.S. media. The structural inequalities
that produce extreme wealth are deflected onto individual character flaws in
these cautionary tales of wanting too much or wandering too far from our place
in what DeMott calls the myth of the “imperial middle.” Ultimately, unflattering
representations of the rich encourage us to accept profound class inequalities,
not challenge them.
Representations of the “noble” poor complement this particular strand of
media discourse. Every so often, poor people are not stigmatized but are instead
validated for possessing better ethics, morals, and character than the rich. For
example, the poor hero of the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is far more
likeable than the spoiled rich children he encounters. Sometimes, as in Holly-
wood’s version of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, lower-income
characters achieve spectacular upward mobility, only to denounce the superfi-
cial riches—and people—they find populating the land of plenty. Other times,
they hold on to their “poor” values symbolically. In Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, for example, young Charlie ends up owning the factory, but prefers to
live in the same run-down house where he was born, and thus the dilapidated
house is moved into the gleaming factory. Either way, these stories deflect struc-
tural inequalities, discourage class envy, and confirm the idea that fixed class
positions are irrelevant in the “classless” society.

CLass anD iDEnTiTy PoLiTiCs
Media representations of class (particularly in the United States) have not
provoked as much criticism as representations of gender and race, for several
reasons. The myth of classlessness makes it difficult to think critically about class
inequality, despite its presence in our lives. Working-class people are encour-
aged to aspire to mobility dreams and transform themselves on an individual
basis instead of embracing their shared class status as a rallying point for broader
socioeconomic changes. There is no positive “identity politics” associated or
emerging from the working classes, partly because working-class life is deeply
stigmatized, and partly because the myth of the American dream encourages us
all to chase materialism and pursue self-betterment.
see also Communication and Knowledge Labor; Digital Divide; Global Com-
munity Media; Minority Media Ownership; National Public Radio; Public
Access Television; Public Broadcasting Service; Reality Television; Represen-
tations of Masculinity; Representations of Race; Representations of Women
Sensationalism, Fear Mongering, and Tabloid Media.
Further reading: Boddy, William. Fifties Television. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1992; Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984; Butsch, Richard. “Class and Gender in
Four Decades of Television Situation Comedies.” Critical Studies in Mass Communica-
tion (December 1992); DeMott, Benjamin. The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t
Think Straight About Class. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990; Ehrenreich,