Penny Lane- Bourdieu Late

Bourdieu constantly reiterates his concern with media responsibility. Our news coverage is limited and prevents exposure of larger unexplored problems in society. Programming is primarily concerned with inconsequential stories rather than the issues that actually impact viewers and the world on a global scale. He claims that “the farther a paper extends its circulation, the more it favors such topics that interest ‘everybody’ and don’t raise the problems. The object-news-is constructed in accordance with the perceptual categories of the receiver.” This excerpt brings to mind the coverage of both Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson. The media claims to give us ‘what we want’ and the consequence is a vicious cycle of shallow dramatic storytelling, prompting us to look at a spectacle rather than reality. Channels also try to one up each other with frivolous sensationalism, which only lengthens the amount of time and attention designated to the relatively insignificant subject matter. “TV networks have greater and greater recourse to the tried and true formulas of tabloid journalism…The focus is on those things which are apt to arouse curiosity but require no analysis, especially in the political sphere.” This distraction is intentional; we are blind to our own conditions of poverty, class struggle, internal corruption, and misconduct abroad. Marx would agree with Bourdieus conclusions because it is how our system prevents social reform. “Ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Ownership of ideology insure ownership of the mass perspective.