Soc. 3251W Race, Class, and Gender

Mantsios' criticism in his article on the media's unfair taint of society really should teach us to criticize his article. He came at us with a plain and simple thesis; the media gives a false outlook on today's class structure that Americans take without hardly any apprehension. Not that that isn't understandable as the level of impact is deep in the subconsciouss. As Mantsios points out, Americans spend a lot of time in front of the tube and that allows the television to really ingrain whatever it says as truth to it's audience. If every person walking around in downtown is seen getting shot by CEO's in limo drive-by shootings on TV, then many people are going to start to be scared of CEO's. I would attest that Mantsios had an implied premise within his article here. In telling us how wrong the media is in what it makes us believe, he is hinting that maybe we should be much more cautious with accepting what we see on television as fact.

With that premise in mind, he has successfully stripped credibility from his own article. It would be expected that in criticism of the medias' false hood, one would attempt to bring up facts in the contrary and support them in ways that the media does not. Mantsios skips the supporting step and hopes that his audience will accept what he says as true just because he says so (suspiciously similar to the way media does it). Sure it would be fun to believe what he is saying because cynicism is fun and makes us feel smarter than the big bad media-men, but that is no more intelligent of a step than accepting the media's brainwashing job. He looks to inspire criticism with an article that uses actual stats to support just a few points. Most of the time he just says, "this is wrong," and moves on to his next attack.

I don't mean to completely rip on his article, it does deliver a healthy reminder, as does Ehrenreich's article on her experience in trailer park life. The reminder is that, we all too often take a small bit of unfounded information from the media and many other societal forces such as parents, friends, etc., and we then place them in our memory as fact. We should and must be wary of all those things or we run the risk of being brainwashed. However, that waryness is just as applicable to Ehenreich and Mantsios' articles which also lack much of any sound foundation. Ehenreich is good in that she produces real hard facts, but it is a very limited amount of information. Meanwhile, Mantsios uses next to no support for his attack on the media. He may be right, but we musn't jump so quickly to side with the cynic without first applying some cynicism right back at them.

1. Did Mantios produce true and defendable data in support of his claims?

2. Is Ehrenreich's case enough to make the conclusion that living as an impoverished single woman with kids is enough to conclude that most all cases are like that?

3. How much evidence does it take in order for arguments like these to be deemed as rational and acceptable truths?