Ethnicity Representation in Media

Media creates interpretations about race and ethnicity, and plays an important role in shaping the way we understand race and ethnicity as part of our identity, our history, our social institutions, and our everyday lives. Often used interchangeably, race is a way of classifying individuals and groups on the basis of physical characteristics, particularly one’s skin color. Ethnicity delineates one’s place of origin or nationality, one’s cultural background or ancestry, one’s language and by extension, one’s belief system. Example of Mass Media are television, radio, newspaper and the most commonly used one which is the internet. Examples of media owners are Tim Davie who owns BBC and Jeff Zucker who owns CNN. These mass media creates negative stereotypes for some ethnic groups or race, such as news to people that middle eastern are all terrorists and sinister people. These consequences, firstly the stereotyping of certain races, in movies usually a person from a specific race is portrayed as certain characters with different characteristics only to its ethnicity, like a representation of African-American people as gangsters or drug dealer or as thieves or as criminals. And similarly to movies, news can also represent a certain race with prejudice. This is also the case of misrepresentation of media creates discrimination to a certain race, with people believing what media says, in America, discrimination against moslem are strong because of what media had represented about moslem and terrorism, and American people discrimination against all moslems, which some aren’t extremist for Islam people.Today, most Hollywood movies represent the white guy as the righteous ones and the black guys as the evil ones making us think that black guys are all sinister and have bad intentions towards us. And the portrayals of Arabians and Muslim people in the western media is "typically stereotypical and negative", according to a new study of perceptions of Islam. In print stereotypes are not so obvious, except in cartoon caricatures, but they still occur and anti-Muslim bias is more insidious. The terms Islamic or Muslim are linked to extremism, militant, jihads, as if they belonged together inextricably and naturally (Muslim extremist, Islamic terror, Islamic war, Muslim time bomb). Mexican people are also oftenly displayed as drug dealers, thugs, or terrorists. Moreover in 1990s television, there were commercials that tend to portray white men as powerful, white women as sex objects, African American men as aggressive, and African American women as inconsequential. And according to a study done in England, 4 out of 5 people believe that media coverage of ethnic minority Britons promote racism.

When 20 years ago or more than that, media represent ethnicity differently from they are now, many changes was factored by Changes in the power of purchasing of social groups, this was due to minority has changed, they have gained more equality from government and some from people and they weren’t discriminated as much as they were. More employment was also a factor of these change, the reason it happened was opening of jobs that hasn’t been filled yet, so that minorities jump the gun and take this opportunity. Campaign for minorities has run throughout the times, protesting governments in hopes to find equality. And with the media becoming more diverse, more representation is produced, and some may even run their own media if they aren’t satisfied with how they are represented. And Laws to increase the minority employment has been made.

These representations of media of the different ethnicities of people bring consequences to all, such that it may bring stereotypes for certain ethnicities, discrimination to a race, and conflicts caused by prejudiced thoughts.

I personally disliked the fact that media still show signs of discrimination, even though some doesn’t meant it but one may take it as a rude remark, I hope that media will change themselves so that they won’t misrepresent ethnicity again.