For this discussion:
Define citizenship as it is used in the readings and files below.
List the two main roles of women in our media environment as they are described in the readings and files below.
Explain whether those roles exhibit high or low levels of citizenship using your tool of Consequential Theory. In other words, what happens to women who perform those roles, or women who deviate from those roles? Are they happy or unhappy? Successful or failures? Admired or derided?
Based on your answers to A through C above, explain how our media environment defines femininity. What do “happy” women do?
As always, use the bold subheader/answer format. Failure to properly format the assignment will result in a loss of some or all points. Minimum 220 words.
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Citizenship
Cornerstone: Characters and casts are not one-dimensional. They can have an easily-observable deviation from the norm and still reflect and reinforce mainstream standards, practices, values and beliefs.
Citizenship
Citizenship is the idea that a character, cast of characters, or entire story can be measured in comparison to the basic values of a society. We can describe the level of citizenship that these characters or stories depict.
For our purposes here, citizenship will be defined as adherence to or deviation from mainstream standards, practices, values and beliefs. Something with a high level of citizenship will exhibit a strong adherence or similarity to mainstream values, standards, practices and beliefs.
Eating a hamburger for lunch in the U.S. is an act that we would describe as exhibiting a high level of citizenship; a hamburger is a very common mid-day meal in the U.S. Eating a vegetarian “burger” patty for lunch would be deviating from the mainstream eating habits, as it is not nearly as common a meal in the U.S,, and thus we would say that eating a vegetarian burger would be exhibiting a much lower level of citizenship.
It is important to note that temporary, highly visible deviations can be effective ways of gathering an audience. So in fictional texts (sitcoms, dramas, etc.) racial, national and ethnic subcultures are common, but – importantly – they typically are depicted as having high levels of citizenship.
In The Electronic Storyteller, Gerbner says: “The case of African Americans on American television is a very peculiar case. They are healthier, wealthier, they are more successful, they are more middle-class than characters in general. So, in drama and fiction they are presented as a fairly glowing image giving the impression that there is no problem, that problems have been solved, that they are very successful.”
This allows a story producer to create a text that looks different and thereby stands out from other movies, television shows, etc., but in reality this reinforces and reflects mainstream views. The overall level of citizenship is what matters. Therefore, any significant deviation from the mainstream can be balanced by strict adherence in other characteristics.
The creator of the television show Modern Family illustrated this concept in a news conference where he discussed the widespread acceptance of Cameron and Mitchell, the gay parents who are among the popular show’s lead characters. “When you make it personal and show the people have good hearts and are extremely committed, loving parents, it’s hard not to love them,” Steven Levitan said.
The sexual orientation of the parents is the deviation; same-sex couples are rare in the mass commercial media, and same-sex couples with children even more rare. This allows the text to stand out against other television programs.
The “good hearts,” commitment and love they demonstrate is the adherence; in these areas, they are the same as other parents on television. In this particular instance, the gay parents exhibit a high level of citizenship in everything except for their orientation.
They reflect the mainstream’s broader standards, practices and beliefs.
This tool of “citizenship” measurement allows for a more accurate analysis of the lessons embedded in a mass commercial media story that, on the surface, looks like a deviation.
The popular television show Will & Grace was praised for breaking new ground, as its two lead male characters were gay. But the show’s co-creator said the sexual orientation of the two main male characters was just a new paint scheme for the old romantic comedy vehicle, according to scholars Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Morrow in their essay Gay Characters in Conventional Spaces: Will and Grace and the Situation Comedy Genre.
One of the programs co-creators, David Kohan, is very open about the fact that Will & Grace is an attempt to reach a wide demographic and not to educate the American public about gay life: We never really set out to make a gay show . . . we were just trying to come up with something original, to mine a dynamic that hadnt already been mined on TV. And we came up with the idea of a gay man and his relationship with a straight woman. It was something we hadnt seen on TV before, a fresh approach to romantic comedy. … Visibility often comes with the price of having to conform to or be made sense of within dominant cultural discourses. As the case of Will and Grace suggests, the mere presence of gay characters on broadcast television, even in leading roles, does not necessarily represent a challenge to the dominant norms of U.S. culture.
It is important to realize that broadcast television, in particular, remains remarkably stable in terms of representations of deviation from the mainstream.
According to GLAAD’s Where We Are On TV study of the 2015- 2016 television season, the percentage of black characters as series regulars was within one percentage point in 2015-2016 of where it was in 2005-2006 (and the rise in 2015-2016 was largely due to the success of one show which features a predominantly black cast, and is set in the music business, a comfortably stereotypical setting for African- Americans in U.S. mass media). Black people now make up 22 percent of the prime time broadcast series regulars, due to a spike in the 2018-2019 season on the smaller, less popular networks The CW and Fox.
The percentage of Latinx characters was 9 percent in 2019-2020; it was 6 percent a decade ago. In other words, surface deviations from the mainstream norm (race, sexual orientation) remain stable over long periods of time.
This makes sense in the context of Key Idea Four: That the function of mass commercial media texts is to gather an audience and deliver it to advertisers.
Deviating from the ideas that make sense to the mainstream, that tell the mainstream that its values and life choices are correct, runs the risk of losing audience share. Audience members react poorly to being told that their values and beliefs are wrong. It is especially risky for a mass media company to broadcast stories that reflect a challenge to the mainstream. If those audience members can find another story with the push of a button or a mouse click that tells them that their values and beliefs are right and good, they will.
So regardless of what the stories look like on the surface, they tend to reflect the ideas, values and beliefs of the mainstream.
Overrepresentation Of Blacks As Criminals On Television News: A Brief 2014 Update
By Santa Monica College Associate Professor Michael Gougis and Researcher Doshiniq Green, September, 2014
Interreality comparisons of lawbreakers (television news vs. crime reports from the California Department of Justice) revealed that blacks are overrepresented as lawbreakers
– Travis L. Dixon and Daniel Linz, Overrepresentation and Underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as Lawbreakers on Television News.
Dixon and Linz study, published in the Spring 2000 issue of the Journal of Communication, was a content study designed to determine whether television news inaccurately portrayed black and Hispanic people in terms of their criminal behavior.
The study looked at the percentage of those arrested in Southern California that consisted of black and Hispanic people. Then it compared that information to the percentage of those shown on local television news as criminals that consisted of black and Hispanic people.
The study demonstrated that black people are overrepresented on local television news as criminals, compared to their arrest rates. It also found that Hispanic people are underrepresented on local television news as criminals, compared to their arrest rates.
In teaching Media 10 Journalism, Gender and Race, I am frequently asked by my students something along the lines of, Is this stuff were reading still true? It is a legitimate question, and constant research is the only way to prevent outmoded, obsolete and inaccurate beliefs from distorting our view of reality.
Therefore, researcher and Santa Monica College student Doshiniq Green reviewed a local Los Angeles television stations representation of crime and race. Her data was compared to the data analyzed by Dixon and Linz a decade and a half earlier.
The short answer to the question, Is this stuff were reading still true? is, to a large extent, yes. In our day-to-day news media, black people remain over-represented as criminals, far more so than any other ethnicity.
Prior Findings
In their above-cited study published in 2000, Dixon and Linz cited 1995 and 1996 arrest records from the California Department of Justice that showed that in Los Angeles and Orange counties, black people made up 21 percent of those arrested, white people made up 28 percent, Latino people made up 47 percent and people from other ethnic groups made up 4 percent.
In comparison, in television news stories on crime, 37 percent of the criminals portrayed were black, 21 percent were white and 29 percent were Latino, the researchers found.
Simply put, black people represented the smallest percentage of those arrested (excluding the small number of others) in the real world and represented the largest percentage of criminals on the television screen. And white people were under-represented in terms of the percentage of their actual arrests to their representation as criminals on television.
The Update
According to the California Department of Justice statistics from 2012, in descending order of percentage, Hispanic people made up
47.6 percent of all arrests, white people made up 25.5 percent, black people made up 20.7 percent and all other ethnicities made up 6.1 percent.
In descending order of percentage, Hispanic people made up
48.4 of all felony arrests, white people made up 23.6 percent, black people made up 22.5 percent and all other ethnicities made up 5.3 percent.
It must be remembered that arrest records are exactly that – records of those who are arrested. Arrest records do not necessarily reflect the amount of criminal behavior a group of people engage in. Studies on race and incarceration suggest that people of color – particularly Hispanic people at the arrest level – face a “cumulative disadvantage” in arrests, prosecution and sentencing (“Misdemeanor Sentencing Decisions: The Cumulative Disadvantage Effect of ‘Gringo Justice'”, Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, August 1998).
However, this is the data set from which broadcasters choose the crime stories that they select.
Do the crime stories reflect the racial data set of those arrested?
Green reviewed news stories broadcast on KCAL (Channel 9) in the 10 p.m. time slot from Wednesday, June 11, 2014 to Monday, June 16, 2014. In total, the station broadcast 25 crime stories. Of those stories, 11 featured suspects or convicts who were race- identifiable.
Of those 11 race-identifiable suspects or convicts, four were white, four were black, one was Hispanic, one was Asian and one was bi- or poly-racial. In percentage terms, white people and black people each made up 36.3 percent of the suspects or convicts, Hispanic people made up 9.0 percent, and other ethnicities (Asian and bi- or poly-racial) made up 18 percent.
The data demonstrates that the gap between the arrest rate of black people and the prevalence of black people as criminals on television news remains substantial, and is larger than for white people. The trend identified by Dixon and Linz continues – in fact, the data shows that the difference between the percentage of arrests of black people and their prevalence as criminals on television news is almost exactly the same as it was nearly 20 years ago.
Analysis
It is in correlating the types of crimes by race – and thus, the characteristics associated with the ethnic groups – that the message of news, race and criminality emerges.
Of the white suspects, only one was charged with a deliberately violent offense, which ended with no harm to the victim. Indeed, half of the white people depicted as criminals engaged in activity that was likely chosen for its humor and/or human interest value.
The mayor of the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of San Marino was charged with flinging feces on another resident’s property. A white woman who was an adult entertainer was accused of drugging wealthy men and then abusing their credit cards.
Of the other two televised white suspects/convicts, a male was accused of briefly kidnapping a female on the U.C. Riverside campus and then releasing her unharmed. The victim talked her captor into releasing her, news reports indicated.
The closest a white suspect/convict was accused of hit-and-run second-degree murder. He was a petty criminal with a history of minor charges and a DUI. The second-degree charge is important, as the crime is defined at findlaw.com as “1) an intentional killing that is not premeditated or planned, nor committed in a reasonable “heat of passion”; or 2) a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender’s obvious lack of concern for human life.”
How does this compare to the depiction of black people as criminals?
Of the black suspects/convicts, a truck driver was accused of death by auto in a crash that killed entertainer James McNair and injured actor Tracy Morgan. One man was accused of a murder in Fresno, one man was sentenced to death for a double-homicide, and a teen was accused of murder in Pasadena.
In every story involving a black suspect/convict, that person is linked to a death and in three of the four cases – 75 percent – the suspect/convict is accused of (or has been convicted of) an intentional murder. This is in the context of state records that show that statewide, black perpetrators made up only 25.9 percent of all homicide arrests in 2012, or roughly one-third of their prevalence in Green’s data as murderers. White people made up 20.5 percent of those arrested in California on homicide charges, or slightly less than their prevalence on TV news in connection with murder, including the accidental ones.
A comparison of the crimes linked by the KCAL television news reports to white suspects/convicts and black suspects/convicts leads to a clear difference in the way the two races are portrayed.
White people are portrayed as petty criminals, women who use sex to swindle men or kidnappers who can be reasoned with – and amusingly disturbed wealthy people involved in a neighborhood dispute.
Overall, the threat posed by white people is low.
Black people, in comparison, are lethally dangerous, according to the distorted image presented by television news.
The threat posed by black people is high, TV news teaches us.
Conclusion
The data set is remarkably small, and that is deliberate. This was intended to spot-check a brief moment of television news in 2014 to determine if there were any indications of deviation from previous patterns of racialized crime portrayals.
Yet there was no significant deviance from the patterns identified by Dixon and Linz nearly 20 years ago.
It could be that this 2014 research, purely by coincidence, happened to stumble across a week on a particular channel where the news directors accidentally replicated almost perfectly the pattern of depiction identified by Dixon and Linz.
However, it is more likely a reflection of the concept expressed by Stuart Hall and colleagues in their 1978 publication Policing The Crisis. News is not created in a vacuum, but “social identification, classification and contextualisation of news events takes place within the “maps of meaning which already form the basis of our cultural knowledge. An event only “makes sense” if it can be located within a range of known social and cultural identifications, they suggest.
In other words, KCAL’s news reports were chosen because they fit in with our existing stereotypes of race and crime.
“While the news station is manufacturing these stories, they are also making sure that it is something that will be understood by the audience. The news must be formatted to fit the culture it will be exposed to; if it is not then viewers would be confused,” Hall and colleagues conclude.
And confused viewers are more likely to do the one thing that a television station cannot allow them to do.
Change the channel.
(Author’s note: If the representation of race and crime remained that stable for that long, the odds are that it has changed very little since. However, if anyone wants to volunteer to watch TV news and provide to me a count of crime stories and racial representations, email me, and we’ll do another update. And you will get credit as researcher.)
Appendix 1:
According to California Department of Justice statistics, the number of arrests in Los Angeles and Orange Counties in 2012 totaled 403,197. Of those, 138,695 were on felony charges and 264,502 were on misdemeanor charges.
Black people made up 83,606 of those arrests, with 31,317 arrests on felony charges and 52,289 arrests on misdemeanor charges.
White people made up 102,925 of those arrests, with 32,779 arrests on felony charges and 70,146 arrests on misdemeanor charges
Hispanic people made up 192,026 of those arrests, with 67,214 arrests on felony charges and 124,812 arrests on misdemeanor charges.
People of all other ethnicities made up 24,640 of those arrests, with 7,385 arrests on felony charges and 17,255 arrests on misdemeanor charges.
