Xell101

I'm wondering, why does being black require proper representation of your blackness in the media? Or your asianness in the magazines? I don't get it, I think of it being as relevant as fairly representing the diverse interesting types of ties available on the market.

I view the 'necessity for diversity' as being quite silly.

lurkette

First, nobody "requires" proper representation of (insert ethnicity here) in the media.

A better question might be "why do various minorities believe that equal and non-stereotyped representation in the media is desirable?"

Diversity itself is not sufficient - it's also HOW minorities are portrayed.

For one thing, many people look to the media - consciously or unconsciously - as a significant source of information about the world and the people around them. If all you see are stereotypes, your view of that group of people becomes skewed because of it. Even though almost everyone knows that what you see on television isn't representative of reality, it's still a very powerful medium that has an ability to shape peoples' perceptions. I can't find the references right now but there were some cognitive studies done on peoples' perceptions of teenagers that found that, although most of the people interviewed thought their own teenagers or their kids' friends (in other words, all the teenagers they knew personally) were good, moral, obedient people, the interviewees' perceptions of teenagers were much closer to that shown in the media: slackers, rebellious, troubled, etc. In other words, the media portrayal actually TRUMPED their own personal experience. Most television news is very skewed - think about how many times you see a black person arrested or on trial on your local news - and has a profound impact on peoples' perceptions of the world.

So...one, minorities want to be fairly represented to white people so white people will have a more realistic and balanced perception of individuals of other races.

Second, minorities themselves are not immune to the effects of media portrayal. And it's just nice to see people like you, people you identify with, in the media. It makes you feel less marginalized, less invisible.

Also, ties don't have feelings or thoughts or lives. Interesting how you compare minorities to inanimate objects. Ironic?

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Darkblack

lurkette

I couldn't have said it better.

I wasn't going to reply at all to this post because I found it to be a bit offensive but you said what I wanted to say without getting banned

Thanks,

lurkette

Darkblack,

You're welcome sweetie. I do what I can.

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Bill O'Rights

Damn lurkette. Might as well just close this thread down as done. I think you've said just about all that could intelligently be said about the subject.

lurkette = smart + articulate + (cute x redhead)

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Xell101

Replacing the education system would solve that, unfortunetly public education is too frequently utilized in politics.

Sorry, I have very little sense as to what is offensive.

No I didn't. Unless read under the assumption I'm think they're inherently lesser.

lurkette

Yes, you did. You said representing the diversity of minorities was "as relevant as fairly representing the diverse interesting types of ties available on the market."

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"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

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Conclamo Ludus

It depends on what you mean by "it" Xell. Is "it" meaning minorities, or is "it" meaning the necessity for representing them in the media? Or does "it" mean something differently altogether?

And don't you dare even argue about the textbook definition of "it".

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Xell101

Instead of arguing to restore my negligable credibility some I'll just say:
- I should've done more to specify what was being referred to.
- I think the importance of diversity of humans in the media is comprabable to the importance of diversity of interesting ties in the media.
- Ironic, nah, twas a failed adventure in communication.

Ustwo

This is why its so easy to find movies with white guys as the bad guys and so hard to find them with other races. People are so sensitive on HOW they are portrayed that you can’t portray them in any light that’s not positive, or at least mitigated. If you have a black bad guy you better have a black hero, or at the very least have white bad guys with the black bad guy. Same goes for Arabs lately. If you only got your info from movies, you would swear the world was full of white Nazi like terrorists.

This is the reason they won’t tell you the race of a suspect on the news anymore. But you have to ask is this censorship good? Does trying to hide crimes committed by minorities to make people feel better about them justify censoring the news? Let me give you an example. In Philadelphia they printed the pictures of murder suspects at large in the city on the cover of the paper. Of them all were black except one, who was Hispanic. The paper took all kinds of heat and apologized for printing the pictures. Now think about this, these men were ALL wanted for MURDER. The paper tried to make it easier to find them, and they were called racists for it and had to say SORRY for showing the pictures of MURDERERS. From what I understand there were no white murderers on the run at the time.

Fairly? Again they don’t want it realistic and balanced, they want it skewed in their favor (at least their vocal left wing leaders). More crimes are committed by whites then blacks in the US. That’s a fact, but as a % of population more crimes are committed by blacks then whites. If they wanted it realistic and balanced they wouldn’t be worried about truthful telling of the news. There is something wrong with a system that hides the race of a criminal. Of course for even saying these things, it makes me a racist in the eyes of the average liberal, which I am not, but I am a realist. Hiding a problem never fixs a problem.

Now this I agree with, though in Chicago they are going one step further where it is almost impossible to tell the race of some of the news people.

lurkette

Most of the studies I'm familiar with about representations of race in the media are television content analyses done 5-10 years ago, or more.

If you're really interested in getting a realistic perspective on how people of different races are portrayed, do your own content analysis of your local network channel. Watch the nightly news and a few hours of prime time, count the number of times people of various races are portrayed, and whether each portrayal is positive, negative, or neutral/mixed. I'd be interested to see if the types of portrayals have changed since I was a media studies student.

It's always possible to go overboard - as with not showing pictures of suspects (though, to be fair, they're still considered innocent till proven guilty). But to take an extreme case like that and argue that therefore fairness of portrayal shouldn't be considered in the media is a bit reactionary. Even though blacks may commit more crimes per capita than whites, they are shown as criminals, especially violent criminals, in disproportionate numbers in the media (or at least were last time I saw any studies done).

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Ustwo

I don't watch a lot of the local news anymore, I get most of the local stuff from the radio on my way to/from work.

On the radio at least they almost NEVER mention the race, I've heard them actually give a description of a subject without mentioning the race.

If anything is being underreported I would GUESS its black on black crime, since its rarely mentioned outside of the drive by shootings.

I'm not sure if this is racism or classism though. I'm sure a black on black crime in a middleclass suburb where such things are rare would make the news, while another shooting at a project would be ignored unless its a slow news day.

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hlprmnky

I see the statistic about more per-capita crimes committed by blacks trotted out a lot in discussions such as this. I wonder if anyone has bothered to look at violent crime statistics broken down by gender, income, education?

(annoying didactic mode - ON!)
I don't have any sources handy, but even so I feel pretty confident stating that the preponderance of violent crime in the USA is committed by men. However, if every time there was an armed robbery or a murder, the radio and TV reports just said 'Male suspect wanted in armed robbery case', if men were being pulled out of their cars and having I.D.s run because they matched the description of the suspect (male, average height, average weight), some of them might feel unduly put-upon. Yet, the statistics back it up - most violent crimes are perpetrated by men! Why, then, should men feel that they are being unfairly singled out? Obviously, there's a problem that needs to be solved, and hiding from it by saying 'person suspected' when we all know perfectly well how likely it is to be a man doesn't do any good at all...
(end annoying didactic mode)

I agree with you, Ustwo, that censorship is bad. But I hope that you would agree with me that it is possible to see putting a bunch of black faces on the front page of the newspaper under the headline 'murderers on the loose' might be seen as biased or at least inappropriate reporting. Unless, of course, the paper made a usual practice of printing a rogues' gallery on the front page every Wednesday, and this week all the wanted murderers happened to be black.

The point is that the media is not some perfect lens through which all things are viewed. Every media outlet presents a finite set of information about the world in which its consumers live. There does exist a responsibility to be aware of the political and social ramifications of those choices. This responsibility does go beyond simply ensuring that all the reporting in the paper has had fact-checking done and is free of direct editorial slant. It also means thinking about what is being said, and what is being shown, and what is being excluded, and being responsible to the community for those choices.

I bet that paper has never run a front-page article that stated "as fact" that the failure of rich suburban city councils to give money to help poor inner-city schools contributes to joblessness, lack of hope, and therefore to crime. Yet, I could easily imagine an article constructed out of nothing more than coldly-presented statistics and facts which seems to present this position as true, despite the fact that probably nobody reading this thread would agree that suburbanites are really directly to blame for urban poverty and crime.

Sparhawk

Is rush limbaugh lurking on this site?

Sorry if I offend, but your post read a little too much like limbaugh's harangue of black apologists. Just a little creepy...