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Framing Class
Second Edition
Diana Kendall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
Acknowledgments vii
Notes 231
Bibliography 265
Index 289
About the Author 301
I am solely responsible for the contents of this book; however, in the eight
years in which I have researched and written the first two editions of Fram-
ing Class, I have incurred many debts to people who have provided me with
encouragement and assistance. First of all, I wish to thank Jessica Farrar, a
former graduate student at Baylor University, who has worked untiringly,
helping me to update statistics and find newer and better examples of the
media framing approaches that I describe in this book. Second, I would like
to honor the memory of the late Alan D. McClare of Rowman & Littlefield,
with whom I had a wonderful friendship and a long working relationship as
editor-author before his untimely death in 2009. Alan helped me to bring
several books to fruition with Rowman & Littlefield, and he was a constant
encouragement on my other research and writing projects as well. Third, I
am extremely grateful to Sarah Stanton, my current acquisitions editor, for
the energy and enthusiasm that she has brought to the task of publishing the
second edition of Framing Class. Jin Yu, editorial assistant, has been most
helpful in working with the technical aspects of this manuscript, and the
copyeditor, Jennifer Kelland, and production editor, Janice Braunstein, have
helped to make this a far better book than it otherwise might have been.
vii
They live—and die—on a traffic island in the middle of a busy downtown street,
surviving by panhandling drivers or turning tricks. Everyone in their colony is
hooked on drugs or alcohol. They are the harsh face of the homeless in San
Francisco.
The traffic island where these homeless people live is a 40-by-75 foot triangle
chunk of concrete just west of San Francisco’s downtown. . . . The little concrete
divider wouldn’t get a second glance, or have a name—if not for the colony
that lives there in a jumble of shopping carts loaded with everything they own.
It’s called Homeless Island by the shopkeepers who work near it and the street
sweepers who clean it; to the homeless, it is just the Island. The inhabitants live
hand-to-mouth, sleep on the cement and abuse booze and drugs, mostly heroin.
There are at least 3,000 others like them in San Francisco, social workers say.
They are known as the “hard core,” the people most visible on the streets, the
most difficult to help. . . .
Every effort to help the Islanders—from family, probation officers, drug
counselors, homeless aid workers—has failed. They have been in and out of
hospitals or methadone programs and jails . . . so many times even they have
lost count. “We want to get off the street, but I got to tell you true,” [Tommy, a
homeless man, said], “Unless they take people like us and put us somewhere we
can’t keep f——ing up, we’re going to keep f——ing up.”1
How does this excerpt from a newspaper article make you feel about home-
less people? Based on this news account, most newspaper readers would have
a hard time feeling sympathy for the inhabitants of Homeless Island. To the
contrary, they typically react to the situation depicted above, as reported in a
San Francisco Chronicle series “Shame of the City,” with disgust, thinking,
“Yeah, that’s the sort of homeless people who are the problem”—bums who
sleep on the cement, abuse drugs and alcohol, and panhandle for the money
it takes to support their habit.
Compare that media-generated account of San Francisco’s homeless popu-
lation with this one, also from a newspaper article:
“He’s OK,” Michelle, 48, said of San Francisco Police Officer Matt Maciel one
afternoon after he gently told them to move their carts and then asked if they
had enough to eat. “He’s just doing his job.”
Michelle remembers when she might have been the one calling the cops on
people leaving needles outside her house. She was born . . . in Colorado . . . and
was sexually abused as a child. Her dad was shotgunned to death young, and
her mother was a drug addict gone to cancer. But before Michelle crash-landed
at the Island five years ago, she worked as a home health aide and wore smart,
pressed dresses.
She dreams of getting back to that life. “That cop might be the guy who helps
me, or maybe the jail people—it could be anybody,” she said, giving Maciel a
smile as he drove off. “I just need another chance.”2
Based on this article, readers might feel some degree of sympathy for the
homeless—especially for homeless people like Michelle. Surprisingly, both
of these depictions of the homeless were written by the same reporter and ran
in the same newspaper. Together, they show how media framing of a particu-
lar news story or television program often influences how we feel about the
people described, especially when the subject relates to wealth, poverty, or
the future of the middle class. The manner in which the media frame class has
a major impact on how people feel about class and inequality. For example,
most people in the United States are not really middle class (since that would
be statistically impossible); yet, most of us think that we belong in this cat-
egory—at least partly because the media define the middle class in such a
way that most of us can easily self-identify with it.
how the media frame stories about homeless people—those at the bottom of
the class hierarchy—the interest in class-based media research that led me to
write this book initially related to the upper and upper-middle classes. When
conducting research for The Power of Good Deeds: Privileged Women and
the Social Reproduction of the Upper Class,3 I became aware of how little
has been written about media representations of class, particularly the U.S.
upper or privileged class. Though some scholars have examined media con-
tent in relation to race and gender, class remains largely overlooked or deeply
enmeshed in the larger race/class/gender sociological paradigm in these stud-
ies. Framing Class specifically focuses on class to fill in the gap pertaining
to media representations of class; however, I am not suggesting that class
is more important than race or gender in studying inequality. Rather, this
volume reflects my belief that we must consider class as the media frame it,
especially in television entertainment programs and national newspapers, in
its own right as a form of reality construction and maintenance.
Even a cursory look at the media reveals that class clearly permeates media
content.4 Regardless of whether journalists and scriptwriters or entertainment
writers consciously acknowledge the importance of framing class in their
analysis of everyday life, it continually imbues the millions of articles and
television shows written and produced each year.
Prior to writing this book, I had studied the media for a number of years,
and I must admit to being an avid reader and a frequent viewer of televi-
sion and films. Previously, I have focused on the ways in which the media
discuss social problems and how the political economy of media industries
contributes to media content. On a more personal level, my interest in the
upper classes and media emerged as I worked with the “high-society” media
in various cities, performing volunteer public relations work for several pres-
tigious nonprofit organizations. In that role, I provided “fact sheets” and other
information to columnists and television reporters about major charity fund-
raisers such as debutante presentations, society balls, designer show houses,
and other gala events. While observing a variety of society columnists who
wrote about social elites, I became aware of the complex relationship between
privileged people and the paid journalists who work on the political, business,
and philanthropy beats covering their activities. I noticed that for journalists
to maintain their “inner-circle” access, they must typically take care with
what and how they write about the wealthy and powerful members of their
communities.
Based on these observations, I began to compare information provided by
the media about the upper classes with media representations of the work-
ing class and the poor. It was evident that journalists and television writers
hold elites and their material possessions in greater awe—and encourage
How the media portray class in the United States is a crucial issue because the
typical individual spends so many of his or her waking hours with some form
of media. In the past the average American spent an estimated three hours a
day watching television, or the equivalent of forty-five days per year.6 When
overall electronic media—including television and radio programs, televised
sports events, movies, video and audio tapes, CDs and DVDs, video games,
and website materials—were added to the mix, the typical person spent over
three thousand hours per year consuming media products.7 However, these
figures do not take into account the rapid expansion of all forms of media
usage, including social media networking by people of all ages. American
children and teens spend almost eight hours a day watching TV, playing
video games, and surfing the Internet. This adds up to more than fifty-three
hours a week—more time than many adults spend at work.8 Nielson Com-
pany reports, for example, show that individuals of all ages spend more than
5.5 hours a day on social-networking sites. People continue to increase the
number of hours they spend in front of television sets and on computers, espe-
cially using such sites. A Pew study found that 72 percent of young adults and
teens between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine use social-networking
sites, and the number of adults over age thirty using these sites continues to
grow at a rate that will soon reach 50 percent of all respondents.9 As media
use continues to grow, so does the necessity and importance of systematically
studying media representations of wealth and poverty.
Understanding how the media portray the different social classes in our
society is important because studies have shown that how the media frame
certain issues may affect audiences’ attitudes and judgments.10 Although
some may argue that how media depict class does not matter because we can
each use our own experiences to balance any inaccurate portrayals that we
see on television or read in newspapers or magazines, this contention assumes
unrealistically that we can distinguish between the realities of the U.S. class
structure as it actually exists and the fictionalized version of a perceived class
reality as depicted by the mass media.
Framing is an important way in which the media emphasize some ideologi-
cal perspectives and manipulate salience by directing people’s attention to
certain ideas while ignoring others. As such, a frame constitutes a story line
or an unfolding narrative about an issue.11 These narratives organize experi-
ence and bring order to events. As such, they wield power because they influ-
ence how we make sense of the world.12 By the time readers and viewers such
as ourselves gain access to media products, they customarily have undergone
an extensive process of review and filtration. In the news industry, for ex-
ample, the joint efforts of reporters, writers, producers, camera operators,
photographers, and many others have framed the available information and
produced a construction of social reality that does not necessarily accurately
reflect the real conditions of social life. Words like “spin” describe the fram-
ing of stories based on organizational constraints, professional judgments,
and the targeted audience for the media product. Surveying print, television,
and Internet news, we find that lead stories and their coverage of particular
events are quite similar. The details are often interchangeable, and headlines
and leads use ready-made clichés. According to media scholar Gaye Tuch-
man, “The news frame organizes everyday reality and the news frame is part
and parcel of everyday reality. . . . [It] is an essential feature of news.”13 Both
conscious and unconscious motives on the part of media framers play into
how the news is framed.
As in the news industry, the story lines, or frames, in television entertain-
ment shows are standardized and frequently repetitive. Similar plots are
found across a variety of situation comedies, the primary differences being
the location and the characters who act out the various events. Each year
during the holiday season, for example, numerous sitcoms portray a lead
character who attempts to help poorer individuals by giving them a handout
or who performs some other act of kindness toward someone less fortunate.
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