Media Inequality Essay

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This essay explores the impact of Media on areas of inequality within our society. Particularly, how the media may perpetuate these social problems by either accurately (or inaccurately) portraying the issues as well as what this means for the initiation, continued existence, and potential solutions for all of these social problems. In order to accomplish this, the exploration organizes the discussion into four sections; one for each of the areas of inequality I 'll be discussing with regards to Racism, Economic Inequality, Gender Inequality and Heterosexism/Homophobia. With this in mind, each section correlates the subject with our course materials and concludes with a summarization of the essay.

Racial Inequality

The first social problem …show more content…

The media has us fooled that "anyone can make it in America", while the truth is that it 's virtually impossible to keep afloat. I ran out of money after 21 days. Unless there was an option to win the lottery in the game, I don 't believe anyone who plays "Spent" actually achieves "The American Dream". Speaking of that, there is a new series on Showtime called "Billions" which portrays a man who came from humble beginnings and struck it rich in the stock market. As with all rags to riches stories, the man is white, and in a respectable career (stock broker), as opposed to the earlier example I gave of the African American as a drug dealer. The media seems to be contributing to the complexity of understanding the problem, basically media does an excellent job "muddying the waters" so to speak. Media is supposed to be acting as "watchdog" however, with the financial interests in the works (only five sources controlling the media), "we the people" are suffering because we aren 't getting the high quality information we need in order to understand that we are in dire need of change. In summation, the media tends to downplay the negative impact the wealthy "1%" has on 99% of the population which leads to the lack of understanding by the majority of Americans that we have an issue with economic inequality in this country. Furthermore, many Americans are confused about how to resolve this issue because we are receiving differing views and data points from various

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