Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America (review)

During a period when substantial scholarship identifies excessive consumerism as a key threat to the middle and working classes, Dianna Kendall has written an interesting and compelling book that implicates the media as a key driver of this excessive and sometimes "hedonistic" consumerism. Kendall argues that the media constructs reality and this construction determines the meaning of class. Working from this assumption, Kendall examines how inequality is legitimated in the United States through newspaper articles and television programs that create and reify class-based stereotypes. Kendall's book is based on a frame analysis of entertainment shows and newspaper articles, most notably the New York Times dating back to 1850.

Kendall argues that the media rarely discuss class explicitly, but their portrayals of the classes generate perceptions that influence behavior. She illustrates this argument by identifying class-based frames (i.e., representations of the classes). The upper class is generally framed positively in the media: they are composed of everyday individuals who are generous and caring and should be emulated. Even when members of the upper class are framed in a negative light, the media illustrates that upper class criminals have remarkably good lives.

In contrast, the poor and working classes are largely ignored in the media. When present, the poor and homeless are often discussed in terms of abstract statistics, and when a human face is cast, the frame depends on the demographics of the poor. Welfare recipients and the homeless are frequently depicted as violating middle-class values, while the media are generally more sympathetic when the discussion revolves around children, the elderly and the ill. This finding corroborates previous research on media frames and reflects the well-established ideological images of the deserving versus undeserving poor that underlie the structure of governmental and charitable programs.

Like the poor, the working class and working poor are often ignored in the media. The working class' relative invisibility results because they are frequently mislabeled as part of the middle class. This impedes efforts to develop class awareness because members of the working class typically self-identify as middle class, and this misconception is reinforced in the media. When the working class is visible, diverse frames emerge. The final class discussed in the book is the middle class. Kendall argues that the middle class was historically framed in terms of values, but this frame has increasingly been replaced by negative representations where the middle class is losing its security and standard of living because it is victimized by multiple groups in society, including politicians and criminals.

Kendall argues that media depictions of the classes ignore societal and structural determinants of class positions, causes that are heavily emphasized in the sociological literature. For example, depictions of the upper class ignore economic inequities that generate upper class standing. Likewise, the media rarely consider macro-level causes of impoverishment, such as educational opportunity or underemployment due to economic shifts. This finding certainly points to a need for sociologists to better publicize their research results, making journalists and the public more aware of class-based inequities and structural determinants of these inequities.

Kendall's book is novel because it considers the entire class structure rather than segments of the class distribution, and it considers class-based frames over more than a century. However, it does not sufficiently consider how the invocation of frames is dependent on structural conditions of society. Kendall acknowledges structural conditions at different points in the book, but there is not a systematic examination of which frames are invoked under different socio-economic and political conditions. Kendall criticizes the media for neglecting structural determinants of the class structure, and I offer the same criticism. Media representations of the classes are structurally constrained. This has been found in content analysis of magazine articles, where representations of the poor are influenced by the state of the economy. In a strong economy, individualistic explanations abound. In a weak economy, economic downturns are often discussed as...