Does media serve to represent society well?

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1. We have briefly discussed whether media reflects who we are or directs us to do what it says. Your reading gives insight into possibilities of how and who media can reflect? Do you see merit to any of those ideas? If so, which one is the most compelling? If not, why don’t you find any compelling?
2. Does media serve to represent society well? It may never be a perfect replica of society, but is it an accurate representation? Why or why not? What does it do well? What can it do better?
3. Think about the social inequalities in society (not in the media). How are those inequalities represented in media? Are they represented?

7 Social Inequality and Media Representation

Universal Television / Contributor / Getty Images

The examination of media content traditionally has been the most common type of media analysis, perhaps because of the easy accessibility of media products. The production process takes place in the relative remoteness of movie lots, recording studios, and editors’ offices. In contrast, media products surround us and are within easy reach of the researcher.

Whatever the reason, there is an enormous volume of research and commentary on the nature of media content. Rather than try to review this vast literature, we have organized this chapter on media content around the single theme of representation. We explore the question, “How do media representations of the social world compare to the external ‘real’ world?” As we will discuss, this is not the only possible line of investigation related to media content. However, given our sociological interest in the relationship between the media and the social world, it is a central one.

Furthermore, our discussion focuses on the issue of social inequality. We argue that the creators of media content often reproduce the inequalities that exist in society based on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This is not to say that the media have acted as a mirror, passively reflecting the inequalities of society. Rather, white middle- and upper-class men have historically controlled the media industry, and media content has largely reflected their perspectives on the world. Therefore, the inequalities in the social world have affected the organization of the media industry that produces media content.

In turn, activists have challenged the media to broaden their narrow perspectives. Some have developed alternative media and told their own stories through words and pictures. Over the years, progressive social change movements have succeeded in altering some facets of social inequality in society at large. This human agency has created changes in the social world, which in turn, have affected the organization of the media industry. Increasingly diverse contemporary media content reflects these changes to varying degrees.

Finally, changes in media technology have facilitated changes in content. With more media outlets, content has shifted from being scarce to being abundant. This abundance can accommodate more content diversity.

Comparing Media Content and the “Real” World

Content analyses of media products have repeatedly shown them to be quite different from key measurable characteristics of the social world. This gap between the “real” world and media representations of the social world is the subject of this chapter.

“How do media representations of the social world compare to the external ‘real’ world?” is an important question because we conventionally organize media according to how closely they represent reality. We talk, for example, about fiction versus nonfiction, news or public affairs versus entertainment, documentaries versus feature films, “reality” programs, and so on. The impact of media, as we will see in Part IV, can actually become more significant if media products diverge dramatically from the real world. We tend to become more concerned, for example, when media content lacks diversity or overemphasizes violence, sex, or other limited aspects of the real world.

The question of how media representations of the social world compare to the external “real” world also raises several issues. First, the literature in media and cultural studies reminds us that representations are not reality, even if media readers or audiences may sometimes be tempted to judge them as such (Hall, Evans, and Nixon 2013). Representations—even those that attempt to reproduce reality, such as the documentary film—are the result of processes of selection that invariably mean that certain aspects of reality are highlighted and others neglected. Even though we often use the “realness” of the images as a basis for evaluating whether we like or dislike particular representations, all representations re-present the social world in ways that are both incomplete and narrow.

Second, the media usually do not try to reflect the “real” world. Most of us would like news programs, history books, and documentary films to represent happenings in the social world as fairly and accurately as possible. (After examining the production process, we now know how difficult it is to achieve this, if only because of limited time and resources.) But by its very nature, a science-fiction film, for example, will diverge significantly from contemporary social life. Without that gap between reality and media image, the genre would cease to exist.

We cannot push this point too far, however, because even fantasy products such as science-fiction films hold the potential for teaching us something about our society. Often, this is the attraction of the genre. When Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek kissed on prime-time television in the 1960s, it was the first interracial kiss on a U.S. television series. This media content, although clearly embedded in a fantasy science fiction about the future, just as surely was making a statement about race relations in contemporary America. Social commentary continued in later Star Trek spin-offs when producers cast an African American as the commander of Deep Space Nine (1993), a woman as captain of Voyager (1995), and a gay couple on Star Trek: Discovery (2018). More recently, the growing genre of Afrofuturism (Womack 2013) goes a step further, depicting future or alternative worlds grounded in African culture rather than just a black character or story line in a predominantly white world. For example, a major 2018 Hollywood production, Black Panther, presented a combination superhero, political leader, and religious figure returning to a mythical African nation that has been shielded from colonialist exploitation, allowing it to use its resources to become the most technologically advanced country on Earth. All of these productions were science fiction, yet clearly they were commenting on social conditions at the time of their creation.

The point is that there is potential social significance in all media products—even those that are clearly make-believe fantasies. Creators of media products are often aware of this fact and use entertainment media to comment on the real social world. In turn, readers and audiences develop at least some sense of the social world through their exposure to both entertainment media and news media. It behooves us, therefore, to attend to what these media messages might be. That includes looking at media forms—including science fiction, soap operas, music videos, and romance novels—that clearly do not claim to accurately reflect society.

A third issue raised by the question of how media representations of the social world compare to the “real” world concerns the troublesome term real. In an age in which sociologists teach about the social construction of reality and postmodernists challenge the very existence of a knowable reality, the concept of a “real” world may seem like a quaint artifact from the past. We generally agree with the social constructionist perspective, which suggests that no representation of reality can ever be totally “true” or “real” because it must inevitably frame an issue and choose to include and exclude certain components of a multifaceted

reality. However, some social facts seem solid enough to be used as a measure of reality. To give a simple example, we have a pretty good idea of the age distribution in the United States, and in recent years about 23 percent of the U.S. population has been younger than age 18 (U.S. Census Bureau 2018). Imagine that television situation comedies became inundated with children who made up, say, half of all characters. We could then reliably state that, compared to the real world, such programs featured twice as many children. Such a claim is possible only because we have a reasonably accurate way of measuring age distribution in the population as a whole.

Although the original Black Panther comic book character pre-dates the 1960s civil rights group, its title character was the first African American protagonist in either the Marvel or DC universes. Superhero, political leader, and religious figure rolled into one, Black Panther reappeared in the 2018 Hollywood film of the same name. Part of the growing Afrofuturism genre, Black Panther is an example of how even fantasy and science fiction content can comment on the “real” world.

Marvel Studios, LLC

The legitimacy of the question becomes much more dubious, however, with other examples. Is media content more liberal than society at large, as some contend? That depends on how you go about defining liberal and how you attempt to measure it in both the media and the “real” world. Such a concept is much more ambiguous than age, and therefore, we have to be careful about claims of “bias” leveled at the media. In the end, we can make some useful comparisons between the content of media and society, but our limited ability to measure the social world necessarily limits such claims.

Finally, the question of how media representations of the social world compare to the “real” world seems to imply that the media should reflect society. This premise is not agreed on. For many people, media are an escape from the realities of daily life. Therefore, how “real” media products are is irrelevant to many people. However, it is not necessary to believe that the media should accurately reflect society to compare media representations with the social world. Gaps between media content and social reality raise interesting questions that warrant our attention.

The Significance of Content

Although this chapter focuses on the content of media, it is important to realize that many researchers study media content to make inferences about other social processes (Berelson 1952; Holsti 1969; Neuendorf 2017). In other words, they study media content to assess the significance of that content. There are at least five ways in which researchers can assess the significance of media content. They involve linking content (1) to producers, (2) to audience interests, (3) to society in general, (4) to audience effects, or (5) to content independent of context.

To illustrate, let’s return to our hypothetical example about children and situation comedies. If researchers found that child characters appeared on situation comedies twice as often as children do in the real world, then several lines of interpretation would be possible. Each of these different approaches tries to explain the source and significance of media content.

Content as Reflection of Producers.

First, it would be possible to infer that this child-centered content reflected the intent of the program writers and producers. This line of interpretation—linking content to producers—encourages us to investigate the social characteristics of situation-comedy writers and producers. We might find that such creative personnel are disproportionately 40-somethings with children of their own who draw on their own family lives for story inspiration. As a result, a disproportionate percentage of programs feature children. Or perhaps corporate advertisers have expressed strong interest in sponsoring child-related programs, influencing producers to create more such programs. Determining this connection would require research that moved beyond media content and studied media personnel—or in the case of user-generated content, users—and the production process more generally (exactly the kind of research we examined in Part II). Content analysis would alert us to this issue but by itself could not provide an adequate explanation for the heavy population of children on such programs.

Content as Reflection of Audience Preference.

Second, we might infer that perhaps the high number of child characters reflects the audience for situation comedies. This does not necessarily suggest that children constitute a large percentage of the audience. It may simply mean, for example, that many viewers are parents who enjoy watching the antics of young children on situation comedies. Here the implication is that media personnel are merely responding to the interests of their likely audience, not to their own interests or to the influence of the production process. This approach suggests that content is a reflection of audience preference. The idea that media producers are only “giving the people what they want” also implies that people want what they get. To test such claims, researchers must explore more than media content. They must move into the area of audience research.

Content as Reflection of Society in General.

Third, some researchers investigate media content as a gauge of social norms, values, and the interests of society in general—not just the audience. Some analysts might suggest that child-dominated situation comedies reflect a high level of social concern for children. They might reflect the fact that we live in a child-centered society where people value children highly. The difficulty in firmly making such sweeping assessments should be clear. To support such claims, research would need to extend well beyond the boundaries of media content.

Content as an Influence on Audiences.

Fourth, researchers sometimes examine media content for potential effects on audiences. Perhaps the preponderance of children on television will encourage couples to have children or to have more children—or to avoid having children! Here, too, the researcher would have to link content analysis with research on audience interpretations—a topic examined in Part IV. The influence of media is so diffuse, however, that a direct link is usually very difficult to establish. The emphasis in this case—in contrast to the first three—is not on content as a reflection of the production process, audiences, or society. Instead, it is on content as a social influence on audiences.

Content as Self-Enclosed Text.

Finally, a substantial body of work addresses media content on its own terms. That is, it makes no attempt to link content to producers, audiences, or society but instead examines media as a self-enclosed text whose meaning is to be “decoded.” For example, in the 2007 thriller The Brave One, Jodie Foster plays a New York City radio host whose fiancé is murdered while they are walking through Central Park. In response, Foster’s character takes the law into her own hands and kills several people who have committed crimes. One analysis of this film suggested it was a metaphor for the trauma faced by the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, concluding that the film

is constituted by and constitutive of cultural trauma. Its confrontation with personal trauma functions as a trope for not only recoding the vigilante film but also figuring the nation as posttraumatic. While [The Brave One] posits the damaging effects of traumatic loss, it does so in order to mitigate such harms; and, while this film insists that its female hero walk in a man’s shoes, it does so while carefully mapping the boundaries of gendered and national identity. (King 2010: 128)

This tradition has many variations associated more with the structuralism and semiology found in literary and film studies and linguistics than with the content analysis found in the social sciences. However, researchers sometimes combine this approach with studies of production and audience reception under the rubric of cultural studies. It is often difficult or impossible to assess the validity of the claims of such analyses because no standard methods exist in this field. Still, such work can be useful for those whose concerns lie with issues such as the relationship between elements of a text or the language, grammar, and vocabulary of image production.

Having sketched out the different ways in which researchers assess the significance of media content, we now turn to the content itself. As you will note, it is impossible to examine content without touching on the role of producers, audiences, or larger social norms. However, we will focus primarily on media content per se. We will also limit our discussion to a few basic characteristics—race, class, gender, and sexual orientation—that are illustrative of a sociological approach to content analysis and that relate to our theme of inequality.

Race, Ethnicity, and Media Content: Inclusion, Roles, and Control

Sociologists and anthropologists recognize that race is a socially constructed concept whose meaning has evolved over time and varies across cultures (Smedley and Smedley 2012). There is no biologically valid difference in the genetic makeup of different races. In fact, different blood types might be more biologically significant than different racial classifications. However, racial distinctions have powerful social meaning with profound real-world consequences. Social scientists chart the development and implications of these socially constructed distinctions, especially as they influence discriminatory structures and practices. Ethnicity, which refers to shared cultural heritage that often derives from a common ancestry and homeland, is also a cultural creation.

Given their significance in social life, it is not surprising that there has been much interest in content analysis that examines how media messages address race and ethnicity (Dávila and Rivero 2014; Dines, Humez, Yousman, and Yousman 2018; Lind 2017; Luther, Lepre, Clark 2018; Rodman 2014; Squires 2009). Historically, mainstream U.S. media have taken “whites” to be the norm against which all other racial groups are measured. The taken-for-granted nature of “whiteness” means that it need not be explicitly identified. For example, we generally do not talk about “white culture,” “the white community,” “the white vote,” and so forth. We do, however, often hear reference to “black culture,” “the Latino community,” and so on. The absence of a racial signifier in this country usually signifies “whiteness.” The pervasiveness of white perspectives in media is perhaps its most powerful characteristic.

With whiteness as the unspoken backdrop, the study of race and ethnicity in the U.S. media tends to focus on the portrayal of minorities. To understand how racial difference is portrayed in the mass media, we must recall the earlier roots of racial stereotyping in American culture. Throughout much of U.S. mass media history, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and other racial and ethnic minorities have been, at best, of little consideration to the media industry. Because such minorities comprised a relatively small part of the population, mainstream media did not see them as an important segment of the mass audience (something that began to change in recent years). When it came to media content, racial minorities were either ignored or stereotyped in roles such as the Black Mammy, the Indian Maiden, the Latin Lover, or the sinister Asian Warlord. Such stereotypical images were the product of white media producers and bore little resemblance to the realities of the different racial and ethnic groups (Wilson, Gutierrez, and Chao 2013). In recent years, significant changes have occurred, but a more subtle range of stereotypes sometimes remains.

From 1968 to 1971, Diahann Carroll portrayed the title character on the sitcom Julia. A widowed single mother (her husband was killed in Vietnam), Julia was a nurse and lived a middle-class life. Criticized at the time for being apolitical and distant from the concerns of poor and working-class African Americans, Julia was also one of the earliest non-stereotypical roles for a black woman on network television.

When we consider how racial and ethnic differences have been portrayed in the media, three crucial issues emerge. First is the simple issue of inclusion. Do media producers include the images, voices, and cultures of different racial and ethnic groups in media content? The second issue of concern is the nature of media roles. When producers do include members of racial and ethnic minorities in media content, how do they portray them? Here the history of racial and ethnic stereotypes takes center stage. Finally, the control of production is crucial. Do people from different racial and ethnic groups have control over the creation and production of media images that feature different groups? This last issue is more about the production process and the nature of the media industry than about media content in itself. However, the history of media suggests that content very often reflects the views of those in control.

Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Media Content

A sample of some research findings on racial and ethnic inclusion in the modern media will help provide historical context and alert us to the changes that have occurred over time. In general, the inclusion of different racial and ethnic groups in the media has changed dramatically, with the media becoming much more diverse today than it was in the past. However, the progress has been uneven and incomplete.

Film.

In early Hollywood films of the 1920s and 1930s, blacks were largely absent or were relegated to two roles: entertainer or servant. Not until after World War II did more African Americans begin appearing on the screen, and even then, there were a limited number of available roles (Bogle 2016; Cripps 1993). Since then, the gradual trend has clearly been toward more racial diversity in films, and in recent years, black roles have been roughly proportional to the black population in the United States. For example, whereas blacks made up 13.3 percent of the U.S. population in 2016, African-American actors made up an almost identical percentage (13.6%) of speaking or named roles in the 100 top-grossing U.S. box office films of 2016. Asians were underrepresented, though, accounting for 3.1 percent of speaking roles compared to 5.7 percent of the population. The Latinx community (who can be of any race) was underrepresented significantly, holding just 3.4 percent of roles in 2016 films, even though they were 17.8 percent of the population. Collectively, minority racial/ethnic groups made up 38.7 percent of the population but only 29.2 percent of roles (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2017; U.S. Census Bureau 2018).

Television.

On television through the 1940s and 1950s, the presence of blacks was limited largely to their traditional, stereotypical roles as entertainers and comedians, with virtually no serious dramatic roles. Instead, comedies and variety shows were the only regular forum for black talent (Dates 1993). In the 1960s and 1970s, this began to change as television programs featured more blacks and, to a lesser extent, other racial and ethnic groups. By the 1969–1970 season, half of all dramatic television programs had a black character. Surveys conducted from this period through the early 1980s show that, whereas roughly 11 percent of the population was black at that time, 6 percent to 9 percent of all television characters were black (Seggar, Hafen, and Hannonen-Gladden 1981). During the 1990s, African-American representation on television increased and was nearly proportional to their presence in the population as a whole (Greenberg and Brand 1994). However, this period also reflected significant racial segregation on television; one study sampling television programs from 1997 to 2006 found many shows still had all-or nearly all-white casts (Signorielli 2009).

Few other racial or ethnic groups were regularly portrayed on early prime-time TV. In the 1970s, only two situation comedies, Chico and the Man and the short-lived Viva Valdez, centered on Latino characters. The 1980s saw a few major roles for Latino characters on programs such as Miami Vice and L.A. Law, but Latinx underrepresentation continued through the 1990s and beyond (Mastro and Behm-Morawtiz 2005). Asian characters, too, were few and far between. It was only in 1994 that an Asian family was used as the premise for a situation comedy, All-American Girl (Wilson et al. 2013).

Kenya Barris, creator of ABC’s sitcom black-ish, recalled that, when growing up, “I saw Friends and Seinfeld and thought, ‘What part of New York is this?’” (Bauder, Elber, and Moore 2015). Both long-standing hits were almost exclusively white. In recent years, though, racial and ethnic diversity has become a staple of many prime-time television programs, with barriers being regularly broken. In the 2010s, Fox’s sitcom The Mindy Project starred a South Asian American actress—a first for network TV; ABC’s political drama Scandal starred an African-American woman—the first black female lead in a network series in nearly 40 years. Barris’s black-ish, along with Empire, Fresh Off the Boat, and a host of other recent hits have continued the trend. Since the 2016–2017 season, African Americans and Asians have been represented at or above their rate in the U.S. population but Latinx characters remain significantly underrepresented (GLAAD 2018). (See Figure 7.1.) Although varied in methodology and precise results, other studies have also documented the growing diversity on television (Chin et al. 2017; Smith et al. 2016). As one watchdog group summarized in its annual diversity study, “It seems that the broadcast networks are finally making serious strides towards more racially diverse representations as most have steadily increased in the past few years after long periods of little variation” (GLAAD 2018: 14).

Advertising.

Early studies of advertising repeatedly found underrepresentation of people of color, but more recent research shows significantly increased diversity. For example, in the fashion field, one study of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue in the late 1980s found that only 2.4 percent of ads featured black women (Jackson and Ervin 1991). However, advertisements are now far more diverse. One study of models in a 2004 sample of major magazines found that 19.2 percent were black, 14.5 percent Hispanic, and 7.2 percent Asian (Peterson 2007). One industry review of nearly 800 fashion magazine covers across 49 international fashion publications found a steady and significant improvement in the inclusion of people of color on their covers: from 17.4 percent in 2014 to 32.5 percent in 2017 (Tai 2017).

Figure 7.1 ■ Racial and Ethnic Representation on Prime-Time Broadcast Networks by Season, 2005–2018

Source: GLAAD (2018).

Note: Latinx (Latino/a) can be of any race.

Video Games.

As video games became an increasingly large component of the media landscape, research on representations within gaming worlds emerged (Dill, Gentile, Richter, and Dill 2005; Nakamura 2009). One effort to describe the demographic landscape of the video game universe was a “virtual census” of all the characters in the 150 most popular games on Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo platforms in 2005 (Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory 2009). The “census” found some overrepresentation of whites (80.1% in games versus 75.1% in the U.S. population at the time) and Asian/Pacific Islanders (5% vs. 4%), along with underrepresentation of blacks (10.7% vs. 12.3%) and, especially, Hispanics (2.7% vs. 12.5%). Native Americans were accurately represented at just less than 1 percent. The racial and ethnic makeup of primary game characters was less diverse, though, with whites accounting for 85 percent of the primary roles, whereas blacks constituted fewer than 10 percent and Asians fewer than 2 percent. None of the games had Hispanics or Native Americans as a primary character; they were present solely as secondary characters (Williams et al. 2009). Increasingly, video games have enabled users to choose among several racial and ethnic categories when creating their avatars. The “South Park: The Fractured but Whole” game even provocatively turned such capabilities into a social commentary; the harder the difficulty level you choose for the game, the darker your character’s skin becomes (Yin-Poole 2017).

Growing Diversity and Abundance amid Audience Fragmentation

Not that long ago, any review of inclusiveness in media representation was relatively simple to write: It was dreadful. White men dominated across all media; underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities (and, as we will see, women) was considerable. Today, that story is more complicated. Although uneven and incomplete, media have become significantly more diverse, as our cursory overview suggests. Indeed, minority racial and ethnic groups are sometimes even overrepresented in some media content. Trends can change, but for the moment we seem poised for continued growing inclusiveness in media content. But why? We can better understand what is likely to be going on with these changes by taking a sociological approach that draws from our media model in Chapter 1.

First, most mainstream media are commercial ventures that pay close attention to user trends. Racial and ethnic diversity has increased in the population as a whole, and inclusive content is more likely to attract these diverse audiences to sell to advertisers. In this way, increased diversity is a moneymaking proposition. And it will only continue as the nation’s media users continue to diversify. By 2040, the U.S. population is projected to be about 72 percent white (51 percent white, non-Hispanic), 13 percent black, 8 percent Asian, and 6 percent multiracial, as well as 24 percent Hispanic (of any race) (U.S. Census Bureau 2014).

Second, activists from both inside and outside of the industry have worked tirelessly to change media practices. Watchdog groups have long advocated change. Various annual diversity reports on media content and personnel have become common (some of which we cite in this chapter). Individual and collective efforts to promote more diverse hiring in key positions have been undertaken within different media sectors. Symbolic protests targeting major awards programs, such as #OscarsSoWhite and #GrammysSoMale, call attention to continuing underrepresentation of women and people of color and invite users to express their support for more diverse representation. Lesser known groups, like “Blacks in Gaming” form online communities to network and share ideas to promote change.

Third, this trend has been facilitated by the growth in media outlets—especially cable television and streaming services—and the resulting abundance of media content (see Figure 7.2). In the late 1980s, for example, the new Fox network created a significant number of programs aimed at black audiences because the other networks were largely ignoring this market niche; new competition led to creating new programs aimed at neglected audiences. Back then, broadcast media were still dealing with issues of scarcity (bandwidth, prime-time schedule slots, etc.), but more cable channels and streaming options—not subject to such limitations—have resulted in a major increase in television programming. More than 500 scripted television series were expected to be produced in 2018; this represents a 150% increase over just eight years earlier (Schneider 2018).

Figure 7.2 ■ Scripted Television Series, 2002–2017

Source: FX Research in Schneider (2018).

Although the growth in abundance likely facilitates growing diversity, ironically, it may undermine the impact of that diversity. With more choices, audiences are fragmenting, and many Americans are not seeing the growing diversity in media content. Instead, television programming can be quite segregated. For example, during the 2017 season, none of the top five most-popular scripted series among African-American viewers were among the top five of white viewers (Levin 2017b). (See Figure 7.3.)

As we will see later in the book, the segmentation of media audiences has stirred concern that the media are losing their role as a common socializing agent. Media companies compete for advertising dollars by developing products that are targeted at the narrow, demographically specific audiences advertisers want to reach. Television commercials for automobiles and other products, for example, are designed to appeal to segments of the audience based on the race and ethnicity of the people in them (Maheshwari 2017). As targeting becomes more sophisticated, audiences increasingly pay attention to media products that are designed specifically for their demographic, or lifestyle group, and ignore media designed for others. Turow (1997) warned two decades ago that this process “may accelerate an erosion of the tolerance and mutual dependence between diverse groups that enable a society to work” (p. 7).

Figure 7.3 ■ Top Prime-Time TV Programs among Racial/Ethnic Groups, 2017*

Source: Levin (2017b).

Race, Ethnicity, and Media Roles

Growth in the simple inclusion of people of color is an encouraging development. But what is the nature and quality of the roles being developed? For much of U.S. history, most white-produced images of other racial groups have been unambiguously racist. As early as the late 1700s, the “comic Negro” stereotype of “Sambo” appeared in novels and plays. On the stage, Dates and Barlow (1993) note, this racist character “was cast in a familiar mold: always singing nonsense songs and dancing around the stage. His dress was gaudy, his manners pretentious, his speech riddled with malapropisms, and he was played by white actors in blackface” (p. 6). Such images in popular culture are the precursor of racist stereotypes in later mass media.

Early Images of Race

Racist stereotypes were peppered throughout popular culture in the 19th century. In the novel The Spy, James Fenimore Cooper introduced the stereotypical image of the loyal, devoted, and content house slave who doubled as comic relief because of his superstitious beliefs and fear of ghosts. This image reappeared in many later books and films. Whites in blackface performed racist stage acts, portraying blacks as clownish buffoons. In the 1830s, a white actor named Thomas Dartmouth Rice copied a song-and-dance routine he saw performed on a street corner by a young slave boy. Rice used burnt cork to blacken his face, dressed in tattered clothes, and popularized the Jump Jim Crow routine. Early minstrel shows consisted of whites in blackface copying black music and dance traditions. Native Americans, too, were ridiculed in stage performances. One popular play was titled The Original, Aboriginal, Erratic, Operatic, Semi-Civilized and Demi-Savage Extravaganza of Pocahontas (Wilson et al. 2013). Popular songs, sung on the stage and printed in sheet music, also featured many racist stereotypes. Even well-intentioned works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, perpetuated a “positive” stereotype of blacks as gentle, suffering victims with childlike innocence.

The end of slavery brought different but equally racist images. The “contented slave was taken over by the faithful servant: the female side of this stereotype became the domestic mammy caricature, while the male side matured into elderly Uncle Toms” (Dates and Barlow 1993: 11). The folksy character of Uncle Remus, speaking in stereotypical black dialect, became the prototypical apologist for postbellum plantation life. Free black men began appearing as angry, brutal, and beast-like characters in novels. When D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation, featured similar characters, it was an indication that producers would fill the new film medium, as well, with racist images.

By 1920, the United States had fought in World War I “to make the world safe for democracy,” according to President Wilson. However, early U.S. films were routinely presenting racist images of white supremacy. Blacks were viciously attacked in films such as The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1905) and The Nigger (1915). The Mexican government banned films such as 1914’s The Greaser’s Revenge, which portrayed Mexicans as bandits, rapists, and murderers. Movies portrayed Asians as a threat to American values, as in the film The Yellow Menace (1916). Early films openly advocated white supremacy over American Indians, as in the 1916 film The Aryan (Wilson et al. 2013).

As the film industry matured and grew in the pre-World War II years, it continued to use stereotypically racist images, albeit in less crude forms. Clichéd portrayals of Native Americans filled the popular Western film genre. Movie directors transferred the faithful black servant image to the silver screen, leading to the first Oscar for a black actor when Hattie McDaniel won the award for her portrayal of “Mammy,” Scarlett O’Hara’s slave in Gone with the Wind. Hollywood responded to complaints—and to declining distribution sales in Mexico and Latin America—by largely replacing the earlier “greaser” image with the exotic “Latin lover” stereotype. Asians were either violent villains, in the mold of Dr. Fu Manchu, or funny and clever, as in the enormously popular Charlie Chan film series.

Early films often portrayed Asians as an exotic threat. Here the white actor Boris Karloff plays an Asian evil criminal menace, Dr. Fu Manchu, in the 1932 film, The Mask of Fu Manchu. Based on earlier novels and short stories, a series of Fu Manchu movies were made, all of which featured the title character as a diabolical killer bent on vengeful murder of whites. In AsianWeek, Fu Manchu was chosen as the “most infamous yellow face film performance” ever for representing “pure evil, the very embodiment of the ‘yellow peril’ menace” (Chung 2007).

Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo

Slow Change and “Modern” Racism

It is out of this long legacy of racist imagery that the modern media’s portrayals of racial minorities emerge. Media images have changed over the years. Since World War II, and especially since the 1960s, the trend has been toward more inclusiveness and growing sensitivity in media of all types. The civil rights struggle for racial equality influenced Hollywood, and discrimination against blacks became the theme of a number of prominent movies in the late 1950s and 1960s, including The Defiant Ones (1958), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Black Like Me (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. The more militant black power struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s were accompanied by the rise of “black exploitation” films with nearly all-black casts, such as Shaft (1971) and Foxy Brown (1974). The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the huge success of some black performers, and directors cast these stars in a wide variety of roles, from comic to dramatic. A milestone was reached in 2001 when the Academy Awards for Best Actress and Actor went to two African Americans: Halle Berry and Denzel Washington. Still, when all 20 Oscar-nominated actors in the best leading and supporting actors category were white in 2016—for the second year in a row—an #OscarsSoWhite protest and boycott brought attention to the issue and calls for diversifying the industry (Kirst 2016). The nominees were much more diverse in the two years immediately following.

Meanwhile, white reassessment of the domination of Native-American Indians surfaced in a series of movies. The 1970 film Little Big Man suggested that, as General Custer had engaged in years of atrocities against American Indians, he got what he deserved at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Films in the 1990s began to create a different stereotype: the idealized Indian. Dances with Wolves (1990) and Geronimo (1993), for example, extended the theme of white guilt and Indian dignity. Film portrayals of other racial groups followed this general trend toward a new set of roles for people of color (Wilson et al. 2013).

Although mainstream media have generally grown more sensitive to stereotypes, controversial racial and ethnic images continue to emerge. In recent decades, even before the 2001 9/11 attacks, stereotypes of Arabs have taken center stage. For example, The Siege, a 1998 film depicting an epidemic of Arab terrorism in New York City, and Rules of Engagement, a 2000 film about the killing of demonstrators outside the U.S. embassy in Yemen, sparked protests from Arab-American groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who believed both films perpetuated stereotypes of violent, fanatical Arabs. (Ironically, both films starred African-American actors, Denzel Washington in the first and Samuel L. Jackson in the second.) In fact, the media’s stereotypical depictions of Arabs and Arab Americans have long been the subject of scrutiny (Fuller 1995; Lind and Danowski 1998). In the wake of 9/11, even more attention was brought to the negative coverage of Arab Americans in the news (Nacos and Torres-Reyna 2007) and the stereotypical images of Arabs and Arab Americans that populate entertainment media such as Hollywood films (Shaheen 2008, 2014). For more than 35 years, Jack Shaheen studied images of Arabs in Hollywood movies. He found that film stereotypes of Arabs got worse, not better, noting that, compared to the past,

today’s reel Arabs are much more bombastic, brutal, and belligerent, much more rich, ruthless, and raunchy. They are portrayed as the civilized world’s enemy, fanatic demons threatening people across the planet. Oily sheikhs finance nuclear wars; Islamic radicals kill innocent civilians; bearded, scruffy “terrorists,” men and women, toss their American captives inside caves and filthy, dark rooms and torture them. (Shaheen 2014: 4)

However, the responses of other underrepresented groups to media stereotypes gave Shaheen (2014) some hope of improving the situation for Arab Americans. “For decades many racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, and others suffered from the sting of reel prejudicial portraits,” he writes. But eventually, “people worked together, until finally they managed to become filmmakers themselves, producing, directing, and appearing in courageous movies that elevated their humanity” (p. 5).

Increasingly, stereotypical imagery has been challenged by organizations that monitor and respond to such content (see Figure 7.4). Asian-American organizations, for example, have decried the relative absence of Asian-American characters on television. This was especially visible on programs such as Party of Five or Suddenly Susan, which were set in San Francisco—a city where more than one-third of the population is Asian American—but which rarely or never featured Asian-American characters. A study of television programs during the 2015–2016 season concluded that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were still “Tokens on the Small Screen” (Chin et al. 2017). The study included first-run prime-time broadcast, basic cable, and premium-cable scripted programs as well as original scripted programs from streaming services. AAPI characters were underrepresented (4.3% on TV vs. 5.9% in the U.S. population). Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the programs had no regular AAPI characters at all, and more than two-thirds (68%) of the programs that had an AAPI character featured only one—the epitome of a “token.” Even with shows set in cities with high AAPI populations, underrepresentation was common: 70 percent of shows set in New York City (13% AAPI population) had no AAPI regulars, as did 53 percent of shows set in Los Angeles County (14% AAPI population). When they did appear, AAPI characters were less likely than others to be fully drawn out with familial or romantic relationships and common stereotypes such as “forever foreigner, yellow peril, model minority, emasculated men, exoticized women, sidekicks to White characters” (p. 2) continue. However, some shows were singled out for exemplary and multifaceted representations of AAPI characters, including The Night Of (HBO), The Walking Dead (AMC), Master of None (Netflix), and Fresh Off the Boat (ABC).

Blatantly racist images of people of color are now rare in the mainstream U.S. media. Certainly, it is still possible, without much effort, to find examples of stereotypical racial images in film, television, novels, and other media, but the clear trend has been away from such unabashed stereotyping. However, the legacy of racism may well manifest itself in more subtle but perhaps equally powerful ways, including what researchers refer to as “modern racism” (McConahay 1986) or “color-blind racism” (Bonilla-Silva 2014).

For example, in a classic study of local Chicago news coverage of blacks and whites, Robert Entman (1992) distinguished between two forms of racism. Traditional racism involves open bigotry usually based on beliefs about the biological inferiority of blacks. Modern racism is much more complex, eschewing old-fashioned racist images. As a result, according to Entman, “stereotypes are now more subtle, and stereotyped thinking is reinforced at levels likely to remain below conscious awareness” (p. 345).

Entman documented how news media contribute to modern racism in his study. He found that the local news prominently covered the activities of politically active African Americans. We could easily see the exclusion of such activities as racially problematic, but here, Entman (1992) said that the form of their inclusion is what makes it racist. Entman found that “black activists often appeared pleading the interests of the black community, while white leaders were much more frequently depicted as representing the entire community” (p. 355). Thus, Entman argued, viewers may get the impression that blacks are pursuing a politics of “special interests” rather than one of public interest. The cycle of racial stereotypes is difficult to break. Political marginalization, as a result of years of racism, may spur black leaders to agitate on behalf of the “black community.” The news media duly cover this activism. Such coverage unintentionally conveys a message that blacks are seeking special treatment, thus fostering white resentment and perpetuating the political marginalization of African Americans. (Interestingly, a similar dynamic played out online in recent years. The #BlackLivesMatter effort, protesting police violence toward black people and systemic racism, was interpreted by many white people as somehow seeking special status for black people, resulting in a counter effort, #AllLivesMatter, that downplayed the unique circumstances faced by African Americans [Carney 2016].)

Figure 7.4 ■ Fighting Media Stereotypes

Source: Adapted from Media Action Network for Asian Americans (2018), http://www.manaa.org/asian_stereotypes.html.

Entman (1992) also criticized the regular use of black newscasters, who are generally “unemotional, friendly but businesslike” (p. 357), as a coanchor with a white newscaster. Although this practice may be seen as a positive development, Entman suggests that “[s]howing attractive, articulate Blacks in such a prestigious public role implies that Blacks are not inherently inferior or socially undesirable—and that racism is no longer a serious impediment to black progress” (p. 358). Entman’s analysis suggests that we have to understand race and the media in a holistic fashion. Racially diverse news anchors really do not indicate much progress if, at the same time, the content of news remains racially skewed. Real change will come when all aspects of the media—including media content—more accurately reflect the racial diversity of society. To achieve this, Entman (1992) suggests that we must pay closer attention to how the process of media production influences the content of the media. Entman believes that the production norms of news are linked with the perpetuation of stereotypical images. To create dramatic stories, for example, reporters will often choose sound bites from black leaders that are emotional and suggestive of conflict. Such dramatic quotes, although sometimes misleading, follow media conventions for “good television.” The unintended result is that such norms and practices contribute to stereotypical images of African Americans.

These stereotypical images are often subtle, as Entman and Rojecki (2000) found in their survey of various forms of media. On local television news, for example, crime stories tended to overrepresent both black perpetrators and white victims. Compared to whites, blacks were more likely to be shown in mug shots and were twice as likely to be shown under the physical custody of police. Thus, the authors contend, blacks tend to be portrayed in ways that make them more threatening and less sympathetic than whites.

Much of the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 took a similar approach. By depicting African Americans as either helpless victims or looters, in contrast to depictions of whites as rescuers and protectors, news media undermined their compassionate tone by reinforcing negative stereotypes. One study of new photographs in Katrina coverage in the most widely circulating daily newspapers in the United States concludes that photojournalism of events in New Orleans built upon and reproduced the kind of modern racism that Entman and others have described: “The overwhelming representation of White military and social service personnel ‘saving’ the African-American ‘refugees’ may be one of the most significant themes in images of people in the coverage” (Kahle, Yu, and Whiteside 2007: 86). A variety of more recent work has suggested some improvement in the nature of local news coverage but has also documented that many of the dynamics found in earlier work continue (Campbell, LeDuff, Jenkins, and Brown 2012; Dixon 2015).

Finally, a small but growing body of research on racial representation in online media tends to find that such an environment is not substantially different in other media (Josey et al. 2009; Melican and Dixon 2008; Lind 2017; Noble and Tynes 2016). Perhaps not surprisingly, given that they are created by the same industry, research shows online content from traditional media companies, such as those at news sites, tends to closely mirror earlier findings regarding television and print news. As we will see in Chapter 8, user-generated content, too, can contribute to stereotypical imagery online, as with the circulation of viral videos with racist overtones (Gray 2015).

Race and Class

Entman’s (1992) study hints at—but does not explore—the intervening issue of class in the portrayal of African Americans. He is, in effect, contrasting black anchors who exude upper-middle-class manners and confidence with the poor and working-class blacks featured in many news accounts. To understand contemporary media images of different racial and ethnic groups, therefore, it is important to consider their class (and, as we will see, their gender). There is no longer any single image of African Americans in the mainstream media.

The intervention of class in the portrayal of blacks on television has resulted in a bifurcated set of images (Gray 1989, 2004). On one hand, middle-class blacks have long been mainstream in prime-time entertainment programs. Epitomized by The Cosby Show of the 1980s and seen in more recent programs such as black-ish, these programs portray African-American families who have succeeded in attaining a piece of the traditional American Dream. On the other hand, news coverage and documentaries about blacks tend to focus on poor African Americans in the so-called underclass, mired in drugs, crime, and violence. One implicit message in these contrasting images may be that, because some blacks have clearly succeeded, the failure of other blacks is their own fault.

In their conclusion to a sweeping review of black images in television, radio, music, films, advertising, and PR, Dates and Barlow (1993) suggest that the tension between white-produced images of blacks and black cultural resistance “has become increasingly entangled in more complex social conflicts and concerns. In effect, the primacy of the ‘color line’ is being challenged by generational, gender, and class differences” (p. 527). We have moved well beyond the point where we can say that a single set of media images represents African Americans—or any other racial or ethnic group.

Controlling Media Images of Race

The absence or stereotyping of different racial groups in the media highlights a fact often taken for granted: Affluent white men have historically controlled the mainstream mass media, often perpetuating racist stereotypes in the content they produced. For example, in their overview of U.S. press history Gonzalez and Torres (2011: 2) contend that white-controlled “newspapers, radio, and television played a pivotal role in perpetuating racists’ views among the general population. They did so by routinely portraying non-white minorities as threats to a white society and by reinforcing racial ignorance, group hatred, and discriminatory government policies.” They note

Using the conventions of the thriller/horror genre, Get Out (2017) writer and director Jordan Peele offered a sophisticated commentary on contemporary race relations by taking aim at liberals who are inadvertently racist. The popular film was an example of increasingly nuanced representations of race, even in mainstream Hollywood movies.

Blumhoise Productions, Monkeypaw Productions, QC Entertainment; distributed by Universal Pictures

Those stereotypes that achieved the most currency [in the general population] tended to mirror the worldview of media owners and editors and their top writers. Exploiting racial fears became not only a reliable way to increase newspaper sales and broadcast ratings, but also served as a tool by which powerful groups in society could stir up public support for projects of territorial and imperial expansion, or by which to weaken opposition among the lower classes to unpopular government policies. (p. 4)

But although whites have often propagated racist images, historically, African Americans and other minorities have responded by producing a culture of resistance. From the slave chronicles of Frederick Douglass to the poetry of Langston Hughes, from the blues of Bessie Smith to the progressive hip-hop of Kendrick Lamar, from the diverse work of Paul Robeson to the social commentary of actor/writer/director Jordan Peele—to name just a few of the better-known personalities—black activists and artists have worked both inside and outside of the mainstream to advance a counterculture that opposes the racist stereotypes being propagated in white-owned media and culture. Freedom’s Journal was the first African-American newspaper in the United States. Its editors wrote in the first 1827 edition, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations” (in Rhodes 1993: 186).

These sentiments also underlie efforts by other racial groups to create alternatives to mainstream media. In journalism, for example, the first Latino paper, El Misisipi, was published in 1808 (by a white publisher) in New Orleans. The first Native-American newspaper, Cherokee Phoenix, was published in 1828. What was probably the first Asian-American newspaper, The Golden Hills’ News, first appeared in San Francisco around 1851. All three publications were bilingual, and ever since, bilingual publications have served Latino, Asian, and Native-American communities in many areas (Wilson et al. 2013).

People of color, as well as women and people promoting the interests of the working class and poor, have had to confront a basic dilemma: They have had to choose between developing alternative media and struggling to change mainstream media from within. (As we will see in Chapter 8, social media can offer another option, enabling networked users within a like-minded community to critically comment on mainstream content.) The first strategy—developing alternative media—has the advantages of being feasible with more limited financial resources and of promising control for the producers. The internet has enabled the creation of a vast array of websites that provide news, entertainment, and political discussion specifically aimed at different racial and ethnic groups. However, this approach usually means sacrificing the chance of reaching a mass and broad audience in favor of a smaller, narrower one, in part because media operations working on a shoestring budget cannot hope to match the slick, seductive production quality and staffing levels of the mainstream media.

The second strategy—changing the mainstream media from within—offers an opposite set of advantages and challenges. Mainstream success can result in access to major financial resources that allow a product to reach millions of people. However, Oprah and Russel Simmons notwithstanding, ownership and control of mainstream media are still predominantly in the hands of wealthy white men. Although some people of color and some women have worked their way into positions of authority and influence, they are still vastly underrepresented.

The example of newspapers illustrates this limited influence. In 1978, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) pledged to create newsrooms that reflected the nation’s diversity by the year 2000. When they failed, they reaffirmed the goal but set a new deadline of 2025 (Ho 2017). They still have a long way to go. The 2017 ASNE Newsroom Diversity Survey examined 661 news organizations and found that, in a country with about 39 percent minorities, the overall workforce in newsrooms was only 16.5 percent minorities, including 5.6 percent black, 5.6 percent Hispanic, and 4.5 percent Asian or Pacific Islander. Leadership positions were even less diverse, with only 13.4 percent minority. The 63 online-only news sites in the survey were more diverse (24.3%) than the 598 newspapers (16.3%). Although falling short of equal representation, these numbers are a significant improvement over just a few years ago. The percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in the ASNE’s surveys was only 4.2 percent in 1978 and just 12.4 percent as recently as 2012 (ASNE 2017). One way minority journalists have worked for change in their field is by organizing a variety of associations that often collaborate on efforts to promote diversity in the newsroom. These include the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Native American Journalists Association.

Minority underrepresentation exists in other media fields as well. For the top 100 movies each year from 2007 to 2017, only 5.2 percent of the directors were black, whereas 3.2 percent were Asian (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2018a). The 2016 Hollywood Writers Report found that minorities were just 7 percent of film writers and 13 percent of television writers (Hunt 2016). People of color were overrepresented in some parts of popular music, though. Of the 600 songs appearing on the Billboard Hot 100 end of year charts from 2012 through 2017, 42 percent of the artists were from racial or ethnic minorities; this reached 51.9 percent by 2017 (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper (2018b).

Gender and Media Content

In some ways, the media’s history of portraying women parallels its history of portraying people of color. Women were often marginalized in all types of media. Simple, blatantly stereotypical images dominated the earlier years of mass media. As media audiences and the media industry felt the influence of movements struggling for women’s rights, these stereotypical images gave way to a wider diversity of images and roles for women. Here too, then, we see a history of injustice, inequality, and change.

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