The Washington Post offers readers a chance to watch impoverished children taunted with a cruel choice.
In America, as a rule, we shame the poor, ignore the poor, blame the poor for being poor, mock the poor and do little to nothing to protect the poor. Increasingly, however, a new trend has emerged: using the poor as props in shoddy “inspirational” viral content. One such effort was recently featured in the Washington Post (12/18/15), and is as bad as such things get:
These Low-Income Kids Were Given a Gift for Their Parents and for Themselves. But They Could Only Keep One.
This was in the “inspired life” section, presumably because this effort is supposed to be inspiring to the viewer who is expected to be surprised by the result:
These kids, who ranged from 6 to 11 years old, belong to the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Atlanta, where 83 percent are from poor families.
Some can’t afford to put up a Christmas tree at home. Their wishes for themselves ranged from a computer to an Xbox 360 to a Barbie house. When asked what they thought their parents would want, one little boy guessed a ring because “she’s never really had a ring.” Another said a television. The next said a watch.
Then the kids were given their dream gift. And the gift for their parents. With both gifts sitting in front of them, the kids were told they could only pick one.
In the end, they all chose to sacrifice what they wanted to make their parent happy.
Much like the popular “homeless guy does the right thing” viral “prank” videos, these PR stunts are fundamentally based on two flawed, rather vulgar premises: 1) that the poor are somehow expected to not be altruistic (otherwise, why not run this experiment at a private boarding school?) and 2) the cheap emotional pornography and shallow moralism these videos offer the average social media consumer outweighs the inherently cruel act of making poor children “choose” between obtaining material possessions they can’t normally have or stripping their parents of the same. The fact that the marketing firm behind the experiment ends up giving the child both gifts is supposed to make it OK, but it doesn’t. This last-minute paternalistic gesture doesn’t justify the voyeuristic act of watching a poor child suffer through such a task for no objectively worthwhile reason.
To make matters even more cynical, the effort—while in conjunction with the “marketing specialist” at the Atlanta Boys and Girls club—was designed to promote a schlocky, third-rate corporate network called UP TV. A media channel “dedicated to uplifting programming,” it’s owned by $1 billion private equity group, InterMedia Partners. Their senior vice president of marketing, Wendy McCoy, was “amazed” that the poors can be selfless:
Wendy McCoy, UP TV senior vice president of marketing, said the organizers were amazed at the children’s selflessness and “how touched they were to be able to make this choice.”
Poor children subverting the glib assumptions of UP TV’s marketing hacks are not particularly newsworthy, except for the fact that they expose the biases of the morally absent editors at the Washington Post—who somehow thought this cruel experiment merited an uncritical write-up. Indeed, it’s bad enough an overzealous marketing firm in Georgia made such a tone deaf “viral” video; it’s much worse that one of the biggest names in news decided to promote it.
The poor need food, housing, jobs and—not least of all—dignity. Billion-dollar companies playing their plight off the prejudices of the viral video–sharing masses isn’t just in bad taste, it’s a perfect microcosm of how the media covers poverty. Typically, the right-wing press addresses it in cruel fear-mongering or poor-shaming, while the nominally liberal media all too often reduces it to this type of “inspirational” claptrap. But the poor aren’t our props; they’re not the raw material of viral content who, if edited properly, will subvert our “prejudices” and play the role of noble savage. They’re individuals. Human beings. Complex and nuanced.
Indeed, had some of these children told the producers to fuck off, they were keeping the gifts they were promised—as I suspect some edited-out clips showed—all the better. Poverty isn’t a marketing gimmick, it’s a scourge, a cancer and a national shame. The media should be covering this decidedly uninspiring reality, not its exploitation by cynical marketing firms.
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
X rated Xmas exploitation
#OutrageBait
If we lived in a fair and just society, the term “poor” would apply only to the 1% of our population that has not the intelligence to earn a living wage, namely the permanent lifetime homeless. But, our society is neither fair nor just, not when the 51% most wealthy is the voting majority and design minimum wage as a tool to impose economical slavery upon the laboring-class lower half.
So, the war-hawk politicians that love to use our legalized killer military to terrorize poor and helpless populations abroad, they have a duel role, as they are also the poverty-hawk scumbags that love to use our legalize killer police to terrorize into submission our poor and helpless laboring-class at home.
I looked up UPtv. It has, of course, a website. At first glance, it seemed to be a Christian-oriented channel but wasn’t sure. So I thought I’d check wikipedia–the source of all knowledge. Yep, UPtv was formerly GMC, the Gospel Music Channel, which was founded by the son of a televangelist. It still is a Christian-oriented channel with “inspiring” TV shows like “Touched by an Angel.” Does that make them bad people? Not necessarily. But this TV show suggests they are out of touch with reality. Like the overseers of the orphanage, I guess members of UPtv’s board of managers would be shocked, shocked if Oliver Twist asked for more. Which brings me to a secondary point. Do you writers of this article really want to call this practice Dickensian? Dickens stood for everything but this sort of practice.
Dispicable to use children for this type of survey I can’t believe people
are so cruel to even come up with this kind of crap. Get a life really try
helping if you can come up with something intelligent and helpful instead
of hurtful!!!
Poverty, extreme poverty, and extreme wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, is a direct product of barely controlled, and unregulated economic system Capitalism. For those who wish to see a metaphor of Capitalism, read the first chapter of LOOKING BACKWARD by Bellami, 19 Century Bostonian.
I could just bet that had these been rich kids, they would have taken the gift for themselves. Perhaps such a comparison study should be done? I recently heard that a dozen US cities are waging war against the homeless. And gee, how are these poor unfortunates supposed to counter attack? They can’t. We have a lot of money but apparently we choose to spend it on the military and make the rich richer rather than help the poor in this country. Many cities have seen rents increase a whopping 1800% in recent years. It’s been widely reported that in order to afford a decent two-bedroom apartment a person needs to earn at least $19.00 per hour today and that’s pretty much nationwide give or take a little depending on the city you live in, but you get the idea. Couple that disparity with the millions who’ve had their homes stolen from them and you have a recipe for homelessness in this country. But many cities and States rather than actually doing something about it, would rather criminalize it. In FL you can actually go to jail for feeding a hungry person and these are supposed to be Christians? I think not. This country is imploding just as it was always predicted. No one has to attack us from without to destroy it we’ll do it all by ourselves because of greed, hate and fear.
Our country can’t solve the poverty problem, without first deducing the CAUSES of poverty. In all problem solving, the very first step is to DEFINE the problem. Second, find the root cause of the problem, the next, find the best solution that will prevent the same problem in the future.
One of the perennial obstacles to the problem of poverty is total disagreement as to what is a fair wage for any human activity we define as WORK.
My definition of a fair wage would encompass the fulfillment of the Basic Human Rights; food and shelter, medical, higher education, right to a job, free speech, and the right to life. Of these 6 rights, we, in the U.S. have only one, free speech. Lacking these Basic rights, one is Dehumanized, or dies needlessly.
The rich and the powerful have all these Rights, we the not rich, have to FIGHT for them, if we want to have them. LBJ declared War on poverty in the mid 60’s and poverty WON, is anybody surprised? The last time our country was on to of the world in average per capita income was in 1972-3. Since then (adjusting for inflation) we have been going down steadily.
“Do you writers of this article really want to call this practice Dickensian? Dickens stood for everything but this sort of practice.”
It’s not saying this is what Dickens would have liked, this is saying this what Dickens wrote about, much the same way as we call double-think “Orwellian”. Orwell was not promoting double-think, but he did write about it and most folks know it from his novel, 1984. Dickens wrote about the social inequality and general ‘unchristian’ attitude of the Victorian era to bring it to the attention of the people, in hopes of changing the practice. So calling it Dickensian is just saying this is the type of behavior that was written about in his books.
It is a folly to expect those responsible for the astronomical difference in wealth in the U.S. to feel guilty enough to change the system that created this inequality, extreme wealth next to extreme poverty. Our Government makes the Laws that regulate all commerce, and those in the Government are not on the bread line, or homeless. Our Government had paid leading universities to conduct the studies that would point out at what minimum welfare payments/benefits the destitute will not rise and have a revolution. We are still exporting our jobs to other countries, even the service jobs are going to other countries, Disney World had imported workers and laid-off Americans, all legally, for whose benefit? The PTT will cause also untold number of jobs lost, and in addition, will put the pressure on the wages here to approximate those in the under developed countries.
We tend to look for responsible people WHO, rather than WHAT, causes extreme poverty. We need to examine the SYSTEM that operates on profits, greed and inequalities. Why is it that there are no homeless Germans in Germany? We do not have a Labor Party in the U.S., nobody really represents our labor, or the poor. We have to ask ourselves, how can we put adequate pressure on those who make the Laws, to change these Laws/regulations that create, and maintain the astronomical differences in wealth. Both Parties Democrats, and especially Republicans avoid even mentioning the labor unions, why?
Sanders is the only one who actually has some proposals that could affect the improve the conditions for the poor.