Medias Role On Influences The Public

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How does the media portray the poor comparing to the wealthy? The poor are usually covered in a negative way as pointed by Gregory Mantsios in his essay "Making Magic: Making Class Invisible. He states that "the media provides us with sensational stories about welfare cheats, drug addicts, and greedy panhandlers"(Mansios 185). The media blames forty million poor people for frauds and scandals performed by very few people. The media has become the essential ingredient in segregating the rich and the poor and making the rich look like angels while making the poor look like lowlives. The media has made the poor faceless. When they do give us the information about them it's never enough. Each year there is a census bureau report on poverty. The media does tell us how many poor people there are but never the stories behind these people. Coverage like this desensitizes us to the poor by reducing poverty to a number. This method on covering the poor used by the media "ignores the human tragedy of poverty- the suffering, indignities and misery endured by millions of children and adult." This just ends up making the poor statistics rather then people. When the media does give faces to the numbers, it's never the pretty ones. The media will make the poor look as bad as possible. They mostly provide us stories about poor urban or black people that have cheated the welfare, that are drug addicts or greedy panhandlers (Mantsios 185). The media picks a handful of poor they will represent and it's never in a good way. This never helps the poor look like normal people because the society starts hating them. There are always stories covered about the poor which sometimes even trick me. (need some evidence...to be researched........) Sometimes the media makes the poor look really good. A great example is Ted Williams who was homeless, a drug addict and an alcoholic but had a

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