How Does the Media Really Portray the Poor?
For as long as there have been media, there have been incorrect portrayals of different subjects, for instance, what the perfect body image may look like, what beauty truly is, what happiness consists of, etc. But there is one not so popular subject that is constantly portrayed incorrectly by the media, and that subject is the lower or “working” class, more commonly known as “the poor.” The different medias that society is exposed to usually show poor people being lazy, dirty and homeless, having no morals or goals for themselves, are often uneducated, and are deadbeat drug addicts or alcoholics. The truth is, according to author, Bell Hooks, who wrote the article, Seeing and Making …show more content…

Craig Watkins presents readers with a challenge to contemplate the different distinctions between race and class in the online world, especially on the websites Facebook and MySpace. According to Watkins,
“Life online has always been intricately though never predictably connected to life offline. Social inequalities still matter in the physical world. And as we are learning, they also matter in the virtual world” (Watkins pg 506). By writing this, he is suggesting that preferences in race and social class are reflected in the different preferences people have in social networking sites. Watkins also notes that,
Users of Facebook tend to be white and come from a world of middle-class comfort…drawing from familiar social cliques such as the ‘preps’ and the
‘jocks…In contrast, users of MySpace come from the other side of the cultural divide…they are the “kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Latino, black, and youth from workingclass and immigrant households are more likely the users of MySpace (pg 506).
Users of Facebook tend to describe the website using words such as “clean,”
“trustworthy,” “educated,” and “authentic” while MySpace has been described by its users as “trashy,” “uneducated,” “creepy,” and “predator-prone.” A similarity can be seen between the adjectives used to describe these websites and the adjectives used to describe the different social classes. The media makes