Society’s Misfortunes are the Corporation’s Opportunities: Thus the Rich get Richer
In our modern culture, every person is influenced and shaped by the television, newspapers, magazines, radio and all other forms of media that represent themselves, their products and services in a manner to appeal to the consumer’s emotions. An ideology is produced when the majority of the population accepts, believes and is bought by the representations portrayed by the media. The higher class uses their corporations to spread their ideology as common sense and common practice, resulting in hegemony, which is the control of the lower class who willingly consent to the proposed ideologies. Ideology creates representation, which gives meaning to every aspect of our lives, shaping reality from the news that we see to the newspapers that we read. Hurricane Katrina and other recent major news events, including September 11th and the ensuing war in Iraq, were used to produce the ideology of homeland insecurity by the way that the media represented these events, consequently creating fear and uncertainty among the American population. The acceptance of homeland insecurity allows hegemony, as the Bush administration gains justification to contract big corporations to make huge profits from these events, while ironically the lower class are provoked emotionally to feel sympathy and donate to the poor, affected communities.
As Hurricane Katrina was about to hit land, the news media immediately generated fear by representing it as “the third-most intense hurricane to ever hit the United States” (Rice), with wind speeds that made it a category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale. By the time it reached New Orleans, it had slowed to a category four and resulted in the death of about one thousand of its city’s inhabitants, but the initial news media reports overstated this number to ten thousand people (Tanner). This exaggeration along with other news articles, such as It was like a...