Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the...
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Class
Manufacturing the News
Class against class
It’s exploitation that causes workers’ problems. On an ultra-simplistic level we could say that capitalism in the persona of capitalists uses capital (in its basic form, money) to make a profit. By utilising capital in the form of property, equipment, machinery, investment or speculation the capitalist needs to employ members of the working class...
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Not So Socially Mobile
“poverty status at birth is linked to worse adult outcomes” An estimated 14.1 million Americans under age 18 are poor. The longer a child is poor, the worse his or her adult outcomes. Childhood poverty rates, according to the U.S. Census Bureau says the report, have ranged between 15 and 23% over the past...
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Life is sweet for the rich
From MarketWatch.com Tiffany & Co says sales at its flagship New York store jumped 26% in the first quarter. International luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy whose brands range from Fendi to Givenchy to Moet & Chandon Champagne, plus, of course, Vuitton bags says U.S. sales boomed 20% in the first quarter, including...
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Suffer, little children
One thing I am certain of is that I would give my life for my children, such is the power of my feelings for them. I did not take to the nappy changing or the enforced insomnia and as they grew older I resigned myself to the fact that during their teens I was...
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Growing inequality in the US
We have previously reported on the fantasy and myth of the American Dream , most recently here , and again we find ourselves reading another article , this time from the Economist , highlighting the increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility in the United States. The American dream was simple: work hard and move...
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On Becoming Rich
“The problem with IQ is that it’s just not very important in determining who’s rich and who’s poor.” Samuel Bowles head of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute has said.“Being willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign...
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It’s about all of us
In an article Peter Rachleff a professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul reminds us of some statistics concerning the USA . Between 1979 and 2005, the mean after-tax income of the top 1 percent of income earners rose 176 percent while that of the lower half rose less than 10 percent....
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Poverty on course to continue
Halving global poverty by 2015 is one of United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals . “Even before the onset of the current global financial and economic crisis, the world had not been on track to meet MDG 1 by 2015…Now the crisis is making attainment of that goal even more elusive,” said a UN...
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1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line
An interesting article in the Santa Fe Reader. From a liberal “radical” on the consequences of income disparity… Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says. In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of...
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