As we learned in class, the broadcasters of most things we see on TV are basically middle-aged white guys. The world we see on TV is not the world we live in, it is the world the middle-aged white male has created, filled with their opinions, ideas, concepts and stereotypes. It is impossible for one group to portray another group as accurately as the other group could. We are shown certain groups of people from the wrong perspective. We see Arabs, Asians, Aboriginals and African-Americans from the perspective of Caucasians. We see women from the perspective of men. We see Christians, Jews, Catholics and Buddhists from the perspective of Atheists. Overall, we get the wrong idea of what these things really are. These broadcasters are not Arabic, how can they possible know how to properly portray one? These broadcasters are not Christian, they don't know what it really means, all they know is the stereotypes, what gives them the right to portray Christians with their own opinion? These broadcasters are not Asian or Aboriginal or African-American, nor are they Jewish or Catholic or Buddhist, yet they are the ones portraying these groups to the world. Sure, one could bring freedom of speech into the argument, but is this freedom of speech? Or racism?
Recently, in class, we investigated this subject. We researched statistics and did our own TV viewing to see for ourselves how and if certain groups are being portrayed. Here are some of my groups findings:
The top graph is the 2003 findings of prime time TV, the graph below is our findings.
It's shocking but the representation of "the other" has in fact shrunk over the course of six years. This is surprising because this issue was addressed back in 2003 and yet the broadcasters have done nothing about it, in fact they've done the complete opposite and made matters worse. Our TV is populated with so much white that the other ethnic groups are fading into the background.
Above are statistics of races represented and the role they play (ex: main character, supporting character etc.) Our graph clearly shows that the whites dominate the main character positions. There are few if not any main characters of any other race. In fact there are barely any other races shown in any role except for white. It appears that all the other races only get mere guest appearances or background roles, if they're lucky they just might get one or two supporting roles but that's it. There is clearly a problem here, why aren't all ethnic groups getting fair opportunities? Some cases I can understand, for example in the case of a family based sit-com in which the family is white of course all the main roles will be white. But what's wrong with having some supporting characters of other ethnic groups? I don't understand why this is so. Is it just chance that there is a shortage of acting ability in other races? Or is it just racism?
Above are occupational graphs, the top one representing race and the bottom representing gender. Fortunately we didn't encounter too many racial stereotypes in this study. It was nice to see that Black actually had a higher representation in professional positions instead of the common stereotype of being criminals. Once we reached the gender graph we enter a whole new realm of stereotypes. We see that men dominate all occupations except homemaker. This feeds the old belief that women belong at home while men should be out doing the work. We live in a country that has evolved from those days, today we have plenty of male homemakers and plenty of working females. Why isn't the real world depicted on TV?
Overall we see little to no improvements in depiction of the "other" groups in today's television. It appears to me that this problem can't be solved by keeping the setup the way it is. Like we learned in class, diversity can't occur in front of the camera if diversity isn't occurring behind the camera. I'm not pointing a finger to all broadcasters. I am very happy to say that the show Corner Gas (a Canadian show) has an aboriginal actor as one of the lead roles playing a police officer. Why can't we see this more often? He is an excellent actor and plays the role amazingly. I think everyone could learn a valuable lesson from shows like this.
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