MODULE 3

A lot of the reading that we focused on in this module was Poverty. Poverty is a huge issue that we face in America today, but I feel like we don’t pay much attention to it. We tend to pay attention to other things such as what the latest trend is, or what Kim Kardashian may be up to, instead of focusing on the bigger issues and doing something about it, in the Article Poverty’s Poor Show in the Media by Simon Kuper, he stated, “The media have probably always ignored the poor, but we continue to do so even as poverty becomes the most pressing problem in developed countries.” He also sated that, “we look away”, when we see the commercials of children asking for money, or to be sponsored we change it to look away from it so we don’t have to help. Often times when media, or we focus on people in poverty is when they commit crimes, Sternheimer stated that “Violence can be linked with a variety of issues, the most important one being poverty (Sternheimer, 108). Because people in poverty are unemployed, or can’t afford many things that they may want, they turn to violence or crimes, and when they do, that is what they are known for only in the media.

In the youtube video, The Child Poverty: In their own words was very touching to me, and grabbed my attention the most. A lot of the times I feel like when people are struggling they tend to try and hide it from their children, and try and protect them with it, but after watching this video it was children telling us their personal experiences and how they were living. How some people barely saw their moms because they were working too much, or how a mom only had fifty cents and her daughter noticed that other people were putting twenty dollars or more, as well as when Ayriq Sims said, “when your homeless, you don’t really have much to call your own,” and realizing that they had necessities and nota concern. This was very touching because like what we learned in the module about representation and attention and the way that media represents them, and we don’t pay attention to them in the media.

Another article that was very intriguing to me was the Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, Children under 18 Years, 2013, by Jiang, Ekono, and Skinner, I knew that we experience poverty dramatically, but I always thought that children would be taken care of by the government and taken into a home if they were seen out on the streets, this article stated that, “There are more than 72 million children under age 18 years in the United States.” A lot of the times people tend to judge other people for the amount of children they may have, and people say if you can’t afford to have children why are we bringing them into a world that is going to lead them to fall into poverty as well. People of color are often judged that they have more children so they can get more money from the government, but we still have millions of children are growing into poverty and many times it is hard for them to get out of poverty, Jiang, Ekono, and Skinner stated that, “Younger children are more likely to live in low-income and poor families than older children.”