Whether talking about television, movies, books, or the local and national news, media in all its forms has the power and potential to shape ideas as well as drive conversation and trends in society. Representation – how people are portrayed – is, therefore, a critical concept. It’s particularly critical when the portrayals are distorted. According to the organization Common Sense Media, the media communicates strong messages through the information and images it presents and those messages influence whether adults view people and groups of people as “normal, good, different, and bad.” Media representation, Common Sense Media asserts, is even more critical for kids who are just beginning to understand themselves and the racial-ethnic groups that surround them.
How the media represents people can leave individuals and groups feeling mischaracterized, underappreciated, and at times, attacked. Consider that when people of color are represented in the media, they are often stereotyped as violent, poor, from fractured families, and routinely engaged in criminal activity. Forty-four percent of black people believe that representation of diversity in media is “critical,” while forty percent of Latinos believe the same, and thirty-six percent of Asians believe the same. However, only 29% of whites agreed that representation of diversity in news is vital.
Just as representation in entertainment media can sway how people are viewed and how they view themselves, representation in the news media can do the same. Unfortunately, research suggests that the news media often distorts stories about noteworthy events to feature black people and other minorities in an unfavorable light. Forty-five percent of crimes reported in the news where a black person was involved included a mugshot. On the other hand, only 8% of crimes involving white people included mugshots. The media also reports news that depicts people of color committing crimes far more than they post news about them doing good, or reaching significant goals. Implicit racial bias is also extremely common in media coverage, and has been found to infect twenty different topics, including language, imagery use, and the framing of the victim and perpetrator. Furthermore, news media overrepresents black people as criminals by 11 percentage points, while underrepresenting whites as criminals by a whopping 37 percentage points. White people make up 77% of people arrested for criminal activity, yet the news and opinion media would have you believe that black people are arrested more for criminality than whites, despite only making up 26% of those arrested for criminal activity.
This negative representation of black people and minorities in the media can have serious, detrimental effects on individuals and communities, and even more so on young people. After increased exposure to television, researchers have reported that young black boys and girls collectively experience a decrease in self-esteem, but conversely leads to an increase in self esteem for white boys. This is due to the characterization of white men as heroes, and diminishing other groups by labelling them as villains, sexual objects, and sidekicks.
For decades, significant time and attention has been devoted to teaching people – children and adults – how to assess the validity of facts and information they find online. This focus on media literacy is essential. Because negative stereotypical portrayals of historically oppressed groups in the media are so influential, I would argue that equal attention ought to be paid to teaching people how to recognize racist ideas, tropes, and implicit biases in the shows and movies they watch, in the books they read, and in the news they consume. Entertainment and news consumers should be consistently encouraged to be wary when they see, hear and read things that reinforce and advance common stereotypes. Moreover, they should be taught how to question the intentions of those who write, report, and produce the news, particularly because most of those people are white rather than people of color. According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of newsroom workers (photographers, videographers, writers, etc.) are non-hispanic whites.
News outlets and organizations must also bear responsibility for and take action to eradicate racial stereotypes from distorting the news. Those that claim to be unbiased need to do a much better job of objectively and accurately reporting news. They need to be more careful about the ways in which they portray people of color, and need to include only the information that is important in a way that is as unbiased as is humanly possible. Similarly, corporations that claim to support people of color need to be more selective and unaccepting of news, entertainment, and advertisement media that mischaracterizes and stereotypes people of color. “Supportive” organizations could, for example, pull ads from FoxNews. This could have huge effects, like changing the beliefs that fuel the racist dialogue of many Americans, but just as importantly, the ones that ethnic communities have with themselves and their young ones.
Journalism 2.0 