Comments | essyllus: A World of Hits

essyllus

A World of Hits

Aug 02, 2010 20:14

With remap's help, I have finally found the article I was looking for! Lately people have been seeing a trend of less diversity in mass media, and it immediately reminded me of this particular article that discusses how mainstream media is becoming more tasteless mainstream. While the article doesn't touch upon race or stereotypes in the media, I think ( Read more... )

tl;dr, lj: kat, avatar: the last airbender, economics

Comments 5

skudge August 3 2010, 05:01:15 UTC

That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read "The Lost Symbol", by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.Oh, so that's why I hate bestsellers so much ( ... )

essyllus August 3 2010, 06:36:48 UTC

I was basing that conclusion from connecting with the data from this article I linked earlier before the Economist's article: http://www.backstage.com/bso/news-and-features-news/undercovers-and-under-scrutiny-1004106565.story (I just realized that my link goes to a locked entry -- sorry about that!)

You do have a point that diverse media is out there, its distribution made easily accessible by the Internet. But if you think about how to market market mass media to a mass audience... most of the time, I would imagine that people are making casting/program decisions based on the audience's demographic, most of whom are Caucasian. To a point, I think that's fair. What I find kind of disturbing, however, is that networks will have less incentive to produce smaller shows featuring people of color because they/we make up a numerical minority in the US. I hope this makes better sense about where I'm coming from.

skudge August 3 2010, 06:45:05 UTC

Ohh, I got it, I think I misunderstood. Now after reading that one I get what you were saying about how the Economist article would suggest less diversity, when you combine it with the other article. I totally agree with you. It sucks how even though it feels like since we're like moving forward and supposedly getting away from like racism or the all-white kind of view, but rather than shows and movies having more and more people of different races in them, it seems like they're staying the same or even becoming even more dominated by Caucasians. Whenever I watch TV I'm like, "Man, this doesn't feel real at all," because out of the entire cast there's maybe one person who's not white, whereas (at least everywhere I've ever been) there have been a significant number of Asians and Hispanics and African-Americans; even though the majority of people are still white, it's pretty impossible in real life to have this group of like twenty to thirty people and all but one of them are Caucasian. I wish TV and movies would reflect that.

mrsatterthwaite August 4 2010, 13:33:10 UTC

I haven't read all of it yet, but I am going through the first link and just wanted to put the idea out there before I forgot: what do you think about shows that used to be on UPN (do you remember that channel?). Pretty much, a lot of shows were obviously targeted at African-american audiences bc the shows/sitcoms had casts that were majority African American. UPN was bought out by WB, but do you think that there was a loss of diversity in media because of that?

Of course, on the flip side, it's pretty amazing to see how diverse the Disney Channel is, especially since obviously it is the channel that influences the future the most :) I'll probably leave another comment once I finish the articles !

essyllus August 5 2010, 05:50:06 UTC

Yeah, I remember UPN! I don't know enough about the industry/business to answer that question, but that is a good question. What I do know is that networks are more sensitive to catering to a black audience than catering to an Asian audience because they see that Asian audiences are more indifferent to seeing Caucasians in mass media all the time. When Alice Wu (who directed Saving Face which is an AWESOME movie and works in Hollywood) told this to me... I suddenly realized that it's so true. And it's only now that I find it kind of infuriating that networks maintain this status quo while we're forced to settle ( ... )