Paste your essay in here…In today’s time, we the people depend on technology so much. The major things we rely on so much are our phones: it’s convenient in our everyday lives. Our phones are “smart”, we can now speak to it and find our needs in it. One of the major sources our phones gives us are our news and social life. Not much people watch news on television these days. The news media can create, mold, and shape how individuals see things. The media as we also know can be fake, biased and manipulating. When it comes to politics, it hard to tell what’s right from wrong. This is also a form of way for news anchors or anyone with a wide range of social media platform to give personal opinions of what one believes to push on to others who are viewing. But what’s worse is the way colored or black individuals are depicted onto news medias: biases, prejudices, stereotyping, discrimination and so on the non-whites. According to racist-stereotyes.com, “The media uses stereotypes as a shorthand method of defining characters in ways that are easy for people to identify and categorize. What these stereotypes all have in common is that they reduce to a one-sided, superficial and exaggerated depiction the real variety, depth and complexity of a people. The media today is more sensitive to issues of culture and gender than it once was, but the creation and perpetuation of common misconceptions about groups of people continues.” The news media can create an image in which people perceive to be many things.
Since way back then, shows, cartoons, film, theatre, propaganda, pop culture, etc. has portrayed blacks as nothing more than of something of low status something that isn’t believed to be “human”. These revealed blacks as origins of dehumanized beings. This takes me back to the documentary of Ethnic Notions: in which it shows anti-blacks’ prejudice and how they see “blackness”. The film showed blacks as “fools”, hug lips, big-eyed, loud, faithful nannies, even putting blacks as artifacts and in books. Even till now racist oppression from slavery is displayed till to this present day. People of color has always been undermined as whites still run almost all of the states in politics and business.
In today’s media, blacks are seen to be thieves, “gangsters” with bad intentions, violent and vicious, making black victims seem as if they are the suspect. According to Kirsten West Savali, from theroot.com, Sally Lehrman, former chairwoman of the diversity committee at the Society of Professional Journalists states that “Television newsrooms are nearly 80 percent white, according to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, while radio newsrooms are 92 percent white… The percentage of minority journalists has remained between 12 percent for more than a decade.” Although as times passes, the percent of non-whites will slowly increase, even if it ever becomes 50-50 ratio race in newsrooms, how long will that be when it’s been steady 12 percent for over a decade? Another hundred or more years? Right now, as we know these news medias are creating, are in a way classifying a race group to their perspectives. Aversive racism is everywhere, even if we don’t see it, as we speak about earlier in the semester about “unconscious prejudice”. Many whites who believes that aren’t prejudice even after watching a story about a colored individual on social media or on news, whom then interacts with colors in their daily lives have some prejudice in which they are not aware about. I believe news media gives these type of “vibes” and impressions of blacks out there. Locke a famous English philosopher who’s taught about today is taught in today’s schools, he believed that Africans are “beasts who have no houses, they are also people without heads, heaving their mouths and eyes in their breasts.” This shows his implicit racial bias against black people and many other non-whites who believed him.
The news media has power over colored people, mostly blacks. They negatively impact colored people’s relationship with the law and the system, but mostly how they are perceived in our society. Black men do not get off as easily as white men do even with the same convictions. According to Lisa Wade from thesocietypages.org, “Meanwhile, when people of color are arrested, they are more likely to be portrayed in ways that make them seem threatening than white people.” There are biases in how the media presents and portrays white compared to black suspects to the world: blacks would have mug shots as whites would have a photo shot in a tie, looking “decent” for the media. Not only are their mugs shots making them look bad, but also the media treats white suspects better than blacks according to Nick Wing from the huffingtonpost.com. In the media whites who does crimes usually have a positive headline like they were geniuses but have mental problems, or are “social misfits”. When it comes to a black suspects headline, it comes along like, suspect “was a drug-addict”, an “abuser” or had a “history” with law etc. According to Pearlie Strother-Adams, in the article “U.S. News Media: A textual Analysis and Media Case Study”, he states that “Corea concluded media promote the belief that white males are not prone to violence and are coerced to commit such acts only under extenuating circumstances, while African Americans have an “inherent tendency to mug, rape, and otherwise disrupt the normal orderly processes characteristic of white society…”” also mentioning that Corea’s findings are based on cases in one area against white women. “…white victim, is shown compassion in the press, while the African American offenders, who were accused of raping and beating their female, white victim are demonized.”
Many like Stephon Clark and Trayvon Martin has been racially profiled and wrongly accused, has had no real justice. There was no doubt, racial biases in criminal sentencing. Both Clark and Trayvon were wrongly accused and killed, their killers off the hook with sentences that should be worse for taking a life because of their racial stereotyping. Anita Chabria from the Sacramento Bee states, “Like Martin and Brown, young black men shot to death in race-related incidents, Clark is quickly entering the national consciousness as a symbol of racial bias in American policing…” She couldn’t have been more right, both weren’t given a chance but shot and killed without any proto call. The world saw their deaths and knew it was wrong. It’s no surprise that there is racism today, stereotypes made from what the media portrays or what whites’ white ancestors has passed down to them about blacks as the undermined race, as bad people. The “dangerous other” is the white media and whites who believe they are more superior than other races.
Work Cite
“History of Racial and Racist Stereotypes in Media.” Racial and Racist Stereotypes in Media, http://racist-stereotypes.com
Padgett, Kenneth. Racial and Racist Stereotypes in Media. Web. 11 Sept 2017. http://racist-stereotypes.com
Pages, The Society. “Racial Bias and Media Coverage of Violent Crime – Sociological Images.” Sociological Images Racializing the Abortion Debate Comments, https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/09/racial-bias-and-media-coverage-of-violent-crime/
Savali, Kirsten West. “Throw Away the Script: How Media Bias Is Killing Black America.” The Root, Www.theroot.com, 12 Jan. 2017, https://www.theroot.com/throw-away-the-script-how-media-bias-is-killing-black-1790860024
Strother-Adams, Pearlie. “U.S. News Media: A textual Analysis and Media Case Study.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ohWO67pqtUWkRyV1hXUHZBeTg/view
Wing, Nick. “When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Dec. 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/media-black-victims_n_5673291.html