Media, Pop Culture, and Gatekeeping

While reading Mastro's article, "The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television", it made me think a lot about the programs I watch and the way minorities are represented in the media and pop culture.

Just thinking of some of the shows I watch regularly, like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Breaking Bad, and HBO's Girls, all of these shows have extremely little (if any) minority representation. I recently stumbled upon an article that had photos of all the casts of the popular sitcoms over the last twenty or so years, including Seinfeld, Sex and the City, Friends, Frasier, Will and Grace, Mad About You, and countless others. The article begged the question, "Are there any black people in New York City?" While I haven't seen all these shows, I am an avid Friends and Will and Grace fan and I can only think of one instance out of both of these shows that a black person had a supporting role (Taye Diggs on Will and Grace in 2006). It is reasons like this that people look at sitcoms with an all black cast and find it so strange that it has an audience. I think that people look at shows like My Wife and Kids and The George Lopez show and think that it's a niche market, and only attracts a certain audience. Why can't these shows simply be accepted into the genre of family sitcoms, why do they have to be categorized according to race or the fact that they are "minorities"? This is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Expanding on this point, I also tried to think of news anchors or journalists that I watch on local news channels that are of Latino or African American descent, and I could not think of any. It's basically white people telling dangerous or scary stories about something that happened in a Chicago neighborhood that involved these minority groups. This perpetuates these stereotypes almost in a painfully obvious way. If all people ever see is white people reporting the news on how violent and dangerous minority groups are, of course people are going to associate that with ALL black people or ALL latino people. It's really quite a simple concept that the media chooses to ignore.

Pop culture and the media serve as gatekeepers to information about minority groups. As Mastro states in her article, "Minimal representation, in conjunction with possible stereotyping, would accentuate the probable impact of television on racial perceptions." If the media and the news start incorporating more diversity into their programming, the public won't adhere to the stereotypes of minority groups.