Post Class Pierre Bourdieu

In the essay, "Introduction: The Aristocracy of Culture," Bourdieu connects taste and culture. Consumers taste for daily products is constructed by their culture and their culture is constructed created by the products they consume. Taste is in relationship to position in class hierarchy. In order to reach as many people (middle class), Bourdieu says TV news "suits everybody because it confirms what they already know and above all leaves their mental structures intact"(254). He says taste for the middle class is framed by the upper class controlled news and "two bit spiritual guides" disseminating ideology in order keep a class hierarchy. Bourdieu says that these guides or "journalists want nothing so much as to be part of the intellectual crowd. No doubt, this structural inferiority goes a long way to explain their tendency toward anti-intellectualism" (255). Newscasters become revered as intellectual sources for the middle class and actual intellectuals become "too smart" to relate the to middle class. Anti-intellectualism is inherently dangerous when rejecting scientific consensus. For example, anti-vaccine parents are putting their children and other children at risk for easily-preventable diseases that have the potential to kill.