I don't know if it's that poor people don't have Internet access, or if they can't read, or if they don't know what a newspaper is, but my rich colleagues seem pretty certain that it's safe to talk smack about poor people on public blogs and websites and national media outlets like they will never see it.
Poverty Fact #4: Poor people can only see light in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Stats do show that up to 100 million Americans have no Internet access at home, but most articles with those statistics seem to focus on things that are boring to rich people, like how this stops poor people from doing homework that increasingly requires online access or from applying for jobs when 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies (including Target and Walmart) accept online applications. Nobody wants to parse this out into useful conclusions, like how many poor people can see the bad things you write about them online.
Looking at the blow-up about Tom Corley's 20 Things the Rich Do Every Day post, I think it's fair to say, "some."
However, just like in real life, I think it's fair enough for us rich people to assume that poor people don't exist online either. So let's just go forward with that assumption. I will speak freely here, as if we were among friends at a golf club or political fundraising dinner.
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