Media Images Of The Poor Essay

The article that I chose to do my paper on was an article by the authors from University of California and New York University, Heater E. Bullock, Karen Fraser Wyche and Wendy R. Williams. This article was published in the New York Times and it was called “Media Images of the Poor”. This paper contains research that has looked at the content of stereotypic media images of the poor. Research that examined televised images and print media. As well as classist, racist and sexist imagery is provided. The media portrays that people that are in poverty are likely to show up on shows where they end up being arrested for a “street crime”. People that are majority white and in the middle class and upper middle class are shown on television shows like Will & Grace

The people in poverty were majority African American and Latino men and women that brought in lower incomes. These people are likely to be on shows like Law & Order and Switched at Birth. Switched at Birth is a show on ABC Family that shows the sides of two families. A Latino family and a white family. The Latino mom is a single alcoholic mother that is poor and seems to always make the wrong decisions and end up in trouble. The white family contains both parents, they are rich and seem to never have any problems. I have also seen a movie classed Freedom Writers which was about a teacher that came into this predominantly African American and Latino High School to teach a class full of poor kids. The classroom was dirty with brown walls and they did not have books for students. When they showed a scene with another classroom that was filled with white students, the classroom had clean white walls and the class had books for everyone. Both of these type of shows and the movie make the poor look like a negative thing. Street crimes are paid more attention to because there are more lower class individuals that are involved with this which is