Reflection on Framing

Media has impacted our lives for a long time.  Most of the time we do not even realized how much the media impacts what we buy or how we think.  When you read the article by Kendall on Framing, you will start to wonder yourself, how much is the media influencing your thoughts?  Especially Kendall talks about how media frame social classes.

Kendall describes in her article how television shows depict social classes a certain way.  She states rather than providing a meaningful analysis of life in various social classes, the media either play class differences for laugh or sweeps issues under the run (pg. 448).  In her article she analyzes various TV shows that do this exact thing, from the very rich to the very poor.  In the way that media portrayed the different classes influenced how society constructed images of classes.   Since I do not watch a lot of TV I had not watched of any of the TV shows that she wrote about.  What this did remind me of was various TV shows that I grew up with.  Such as “Leaving it to Beaver”, which portrays the average American middle class family.  The father was a successful business man and the mother was a dutiful house wife.  The children were perfect, or tried to be.   At least was how I saw it, the problem was it was unrealistic.  However, many Americans thought that this was the typical middle class American family.

This is because our mental maps of what the various classes look like have been influenced by media.  For example in Harris and Carbado’s article they show two images of victims from Hurricane Katrina.  One image is a black man with a bag of trash wading through chest deep water.  The other image is of two white people wading through water with backpacks.  The media depicted the first picture as a man who was looting a grocery store.  The second picture the writer depicted the two white peoples with backpacks as finding food and supplies.  The way the writers of these two photos portrayed the photos influenced how people felt about what was happening in New Orleans after Katrina. 

I have to admit that thinking about these two articles and the article by Garland-Thomson about how disability is framed was troubling.  In Harris and Carbado’s article they discuss how society is “color blind” to racism.  In the article I read about disability last week this was basically the same message.   I have been writing about how I feel that racism is the United States is being wiped out but maybe that is just my “color blindness” to racism.   I feel sometimes that I cannot win no matter what I feel. 

We are a society that is completely influenced by the media.  From the cars we drive to the movies we watch, media is impacting our decisions.  I find this disturbing and wondering how I can help myself not be influenced by media.  How has my view of social class been influenced by the media and how am I going to change those frames?

Reading 45: Kendall, Diana – Framing Class: Media Representation of Wealth and Poverty in America

Reading 46: Harris, Cheryl. L, Carbado, Devon W – Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?

Reading 48: Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie – Disability and Representation