The American mainstream media, if defined to include books, movies, television shows, documentaries and news broadcasts has a limited number of options as to how the working classes are portrayed. The bottom line is audience share and advertising income. The national audiences will only tolerate certain portrayals of the working classes that agree with their opinions, experiences and preconceptions. But the American mainstream media no longer controls what it is that diverse peoples read, watch, listen to or see. With VH1 and BET, the Hispanic networks and cable packages for every region of the world, it is anyone’s game when it comes to portraying the working classes.
Working class can be defined by income, by ethnicity and by behavior. They are also described as “labor” and people that produce goods and services. Which in most cases of the upper classes makes them much less interesting than those who consume them. The Kids from “New Jersey Shores”, the Bridezillas, the alligator wrestlers, grossly obese car repossessing crews, and storage vault auction kings are easily classified as working class. All that is needed are cameras and a way to broadcast whatever gets recorded. But the New Jersey kids are now quite wealthy. Their behavior, however, confines them to the working class of American standards. While the “Housewives” begin with variations in large income and social standing, some are low class in their upbringings, tastes, behavior and actions while others have gone to the lower class as the result of financial problems and bankruptcies.
In the news, they decide which story is important in ways that drive the rare glimpses that we see of the working classes. They are depicted as “faces in the crowd on television shows.” There are runaway teens, drug users, the homeless, new immigrants, struggling business people, farmers, illegal immigrants, societal dropouts, and migrating farm workers. The mainstream media will generally push the idea that a “hero”...