¶ … Television on Society
Television has helped to create and perpetuate perceptions of gender and race.
Television and Perceptions of Gender
How children form ideas about gender
Perpetuating gender myths through entertainment programming
Gender portrayals on prime time news
Racial Stereotypes on Television
Television in shaping the perception of black people
Television and stereotyping Asian-Americans as the model minority
Television played a great role in colonial domination of American Indians.
Conclusion and change - where to now?
In his famous dictum of the medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan illustrated how mass media, as an extension of human capabilities, has tremendous personal and social consequences (McLuhan: 23).
Television is in a particularly strong position to initiate such consequences. After all, the great majority of American homes have at least one television set, putting the medium in an unparalleled position to affect American society.
Television also has a power to shape an individual's perceptions of social reality. This paper examines how television affects people's perceptions of gender and racial inequity. In the last part, the paper explores how the same medium that limits our perceptions of gender and race can also provide a platform to challenge these stereotypes.
Gender Portrayals in Television
According to data from the Nielsen Media Research, children aged 16 and younger have, on average, spent more time watching television than going to school. Preschoolers spend an average of nearly 30 hours a week watching television. Communications scholar Susan Witt suggests that children spend more time watching television than they spend on anything else except sleeping (Witt). Given that figure, it should be no surprise that most children will form their first durable ideas about gender roles based on images from television.
In a 1974 study of Saturday morning cartoons, researchers found that female characters were often depicted in secondary roles to male leads. The female characters were also shown as less active and confined primarily to the home (Streicher, 1974, cited in Witt).
These findings are consistent with the strictures governing gender roles in the early days of television. Later studies, however, indicate that trend continues, even with children's shows on the Public Broadcasting System (Zerbinos, 1995, cited in Witt).
Studies have already shown correlations between behavior as adolescents and young adults and exposure to television. For example, college students who engage in "high-sensation" activities like extreme sports were also more likely to have been exposed to violent television (Krcmar and Zuckerman).
It is therefore reasonable to infer that children internalize the gender portrayals to which they are exposed. A child who constantly sees women as helpless princesses or damsels in distress will grow to equate being a woman with weakness.
This skewed portrayal of the sexes continues through the youth-oriented television programming at MTV. Music videos frequently portray women as "sensual and exotic" while the females in the general audience are typically slender (Comstock and Scharrer, 32).
This emphasis on a young woman's attractiveness remains a constant throughout entertainment programming for all ages. The National Institute for Mental Health found that in male characters were presented as "rational, ambitious, smart, competitive, powerful, stable, violent and tolerant." Women, on the other hand, were "sensitive, romantic, attractive, happy, warm, sociable, peaceful, fair, submissive and timid." Television portrayals place a premium of a man's strengths and skills. Women, however, are valued for their physical attractiveness (National Institute of Mental Health as cited in Witt).
This gender subtext extends beyond gender entertainment to network news programming. One study of newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC found that when broadcast journalists aired interviews with women sources, the news stories centered on how they were affected by crime or disasters or to tell about instances of victimization (Rakow and Cranich, cited in Comstock and Scharrer, 123). Male sources were more often shown in professional settings. Additionally, stories aired on the major networks and CNN showed that a mere 16% of political sources for stories about the president and public policy were female (Liebler and Smith, cited in Comstock and Scharrer, 123).
The unintentional effect of such portrayals reinforces women's secondary role. Male sources are usually professionals who get asked about their analysis of an event or who use their expertise and titles to suggest courses of action. Women, on the other hand, are usually featured in sidebar stories, talking about how an event affects them. The other common portrayal is a female victim, recounting an attack or a crime.
In summary, a gendered subtext underlies most of television programming, from children's cartoons to...
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