Bias in the Media: Racism, Sexism and Homophobia

Prejudice is suppose to be a thing of the past. We live in a country that is noted for its freedom and open ways. The statue of liberty says; Give me your sick, your tired, your wretched, your hungry. However, we really don't mean it; we just want to look good and keep up our image. We live in a country of the free, however, all of us still are not equal. We will continue to be unequal if the media makes everyone think that it's OK.

The printed pages we read, and the broadcasts we tune in, are said to mirror society. But mass media also continue to shape our society--reinforcing certain attitudes and actions while discouraging others. If what appears in print had little impact on day-to-day lives, advertisers would not be so heavily in newspaper and magazine ads.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990)

For many women, media messages reflect the kind of attitudes that rudely confront them on a daily basis. For people who are black, Latino. Native American or of Asian ancestry, the largely white-world of the mass media resonates with many of the prejudices that they repeatedly encounter in a white-dominated country. And for those whose sexual orientation draws them to people of the same gender, the main news media commonly leave them out or put them down. (Lee, Solomon, 1990 p. 17)

A Male-Dominant Media

Between the lines and between the transmitters is an invisible shrug about the status of women in America. We are told that it's improving--but usually without reference to how bad the situation remains. The mass media, ill equipped to play a constructive role, are key contributors to the problems facing women. News media companies are bastions of male supremacy themselves. (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 229)

According to Lee, and Solomon (1990) in 1989 men held 94% of the top management positions in the U.S. news media. A study of the front pages of ten major newspapers found that only about one quarter - 27%- of the bylines were women's. On network television the results was alike; researchers found that on the nightly news 22.2% - of the the stories were on CBS were reported by women, 14.4% on NBC, and 10.5% on ABC. (Lee, Solomon, 1990)

"There are fewer women on the air at the networks now then there were in 1975 when I went to work at the networks," Linda Ellerbee said. The situation farther up the hierarchy was even worse. " The reason you see us on TV is so you don't notice our absence in the room marked 'executive producer' or 'CEO' or 'network president'...You get to a certain place where you would reasonably expect to that the next executive producer job will be yours, for example. Then you see younger, less qualified men promoted over you. It's much harder for the women on the management side that it is on the air."
Ellerbee added that with "younger women coming into the business ... I hear them saying that they'd better not make waves or they won't get anywhere because That's the way corporations work." (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 230)

Domestic violence and rape are important issues when discussing the treatment of women in our media. In 1974, Ann Simonton was the model who appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue. But, she now says that type of media emphasis dehumanizes women, encouraging violence against them. In an interview. Simonton described the method this way: "The media indoctrinates the masses to view women as consumable products. Women, now viewed as 'things' are much easier to violate and to harm because the they aren't seen as human beings."
(Lee, Solomon, 1990)

The Time magazine cover story "Women face the '90's " included poll results showing that 88% of American women rated rape as an important issue. Yet nowhere else in the six-page spread did Time mention rape - or any other violence against women.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 233)

A former Brooklyn district attorney Elizabeth Holtzmen says, "Rape is only superficially a sexual act. It is foremost an act of violence, degradation and control...Sexual violence against women exists because attitudes that dehumanize women exist." And she adds, "Society should stop identifying sex with violence and with denigration of women, and that includes the images on television and in the other media."
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 234)

News reports of rape is selective. "Think of all the women," suggests essayist Katha Pollitt, "who have not entered the folklore of crime because their beating and/or rape and or/murders lacked the appropriate ingredients for full-dress media treatment--which includes, alas, being white, young, middle-class and attractive." These imbalances in coverage are magnified when sensationalized stories stress rape as a black-on-white crime. In fact, most rape is interracial. (Lee, Solomon, 1990 p. 234)

In Sentimental Journeys, author Joan Diddion (1992) talks about the brutal Central park rape that took place on April 20, 1989. The victim was a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white women who worked as an investment banker. She enjoyed jogging late at night after a long day at work. She was found at one-thirty in the morning with her clothes torn off, near death. She had lost 75% of her blood, her skull had been crushed and her left eyeball pushed back through its socket. Six black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with her assault and rape.

It would be recalled later that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black women in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black women in Brooklyn who was raped, and thrown down the air shaft of a building. This shows the folklore as Pollit described. These victims did not fit the profile therefore their stories were not considered important. (Diddion, 1992)

Until the media starts reporting rape for what it is--a vicious violent crime--society will fail to treat it that way. And until the media start defining the prevalence of rape in the U.S. as a crisis, the dominant public messages about rape will imply acceptance. (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 235)

Victims of a forced sex experience a variety of negative reactions that can interrupt their lives. They suffer emotionally, socially, and physically. By belittling the crime committed against them they begin to feel alienated from the rest of the world. The media portrays female rape victims in a negative way. In fact in many states it is legal for the victims sexual history to be admissible in court. Which means that this information can be in turn used in coverage of the story. Once again making the women the victim of her own fate. If a women is sexually active then she is portrayed as a whore or a slut. It's time the media stops dehumanizing the victim. The focus should be on the perpetrator of the crime.
Selling the straight life: Our homophobia press

Along with portrayals of women, media outlooks towards gay people have been slow to change. Some media continue to identify open homosexuality as a symbol of modern ills. While progress has been evident during the past two decades prejudices continue deeply influence the publicized images of lesbians and gay males in America. While generally avoiding blatant put-downs of people because gender or the color of their skin, many journalists imply that gay people may have already gained more than their fair share of human rights. (Lee, Solomon, 1990)

Underneath a thin layer of tolerance media are routinely indifferent to day to day realities. Attacks unleashed on lesbians and gay men get little censure in the mainstream press. Newspapers publicized a report by the National Gay and Lesbian task force documenting 7,248 acts of violence that targeted homosexuals in 1988--but mass media neither dwelled on the pattern nor defined it as a serious human rights problem. The links with other types of bigotry were clear to researchers, even though the press seemed declined to give the connections a second glance. "There has been an increase in homophobic behavior and it is not just within the general population," warned Janet Caldwell of the center for Democratic Renewal. "It is also and outgrowth of the activities of organized hate groups, including the Klan and neo-Nazis."
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 236)

The media tends to sell the straight life. Sometimes media aversion to gays takes the form of a not-so-soft sell for the superiority of the straight life. A Christian Science monitor front page article headlined "Finding the Pathways out of Homosexuality" chronicled the efforts of "ex-gays" to give others "an opportunity to change." The story which was slanted toward a view of homosexuality as an affliction did not mention that the newspaper itself refused to knowingly employ any homosexuals.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 237)

Contributing to American Homophobia are nationally televised news accounts like a 1989 story by Fox TV's Reporters about a male pedophile. The show linked homosexuality with sexual abuse of boys. In reaction to this the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLADD) asked, "Would a segment on Ted Bundy or Charles Manson describe them as killers, rapists, and heterosexuals?" As GLADD pointed out, "Statistically the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases involve heterosexual men who abuse girls (Usually family members, or friends), although the media's coverage has disproportionately focused on men who abuse boys." That imbalance of coverage serves to extend the popular myth that all molesters are gay and all gays are molesters. (Lee, Solomon, 1990)

While homosexuals often face media negativity, prejudice also manifests in omissions; gays are frequently excluded from consideration as a legitimate minority group. After a New York City redistricting hearing in 1989, for example, the New York Times reported calls for fair representation of the black, Hispanic, and Asian-American communities without mentioning that gay and lesbian community activists had testified with similar concerns. Protests of the exclusion seemed to have little effect on the Times. In a follow-up article on redistricting, written, by the same reporter, the Times again failed to give any ink to the views of gay and lesbians. (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 238)

While instances of sensitive reporting about lesbians and gay males have been on the rise, serious defects persist. The media's discussion of gay rights in the abstract ignore the personal dimensions of daily life impinged upon by anti-gay bigotry. If American journalism were going a better, it would discover reasons to pay attention to voices like that of writer Jacqui Tully: "When I don't hold hands with my lover in the grocery store, the issue isn't how much I can display affection publicly. It's freedom. My freedom I don't have as much as heterosexuals do." ( Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 238)

Homosexuals are prosecuted by the public because they are different from the rest of society. They go against what the public sees as normal therefore they are discriminated against in many ways that the public would not stand for if the minority was different than homosexuals.

They are not allowed to get married, file for taxes together, get medical benefits, and it seems they are invisible to our press. The only time you hear about homosexuals is when something negative happens to them. Such as hate crimes committed against them or the ever so popular AIDS. epidemic that was started by gays in San Fransico. The stories about all people should be told in the media to show how truly diverse our world is. Gay or Straight shouldn't be an issue.

Racism in the media

Public images of racial minorities are still largely controlled by whites in America mass media. Newsrooms regularly foster unbalanced reporting about people of color. The patterns may go unnoticed because they're so routine.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 244)

The news media through the language and emphasis, often give the impression that some races are not welcome in the United States. For Hispanic people living here, much of the media focus is on law enforcement actions against undocumented workers, who are often listed as contributors to the nation's woes. (Lee, Solomon, 1990)

Likely to evoke sci-fi images at least unconsciously, the phrase "illegal aliens"--standard in the news-- is dehumanizing. Linda Mitchell spokeswomen for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, calls for that catch-phrase "an inflammatory way to categorize a group of people. It's a polarizing term. An Alien is someone who's not human, so the message is we don't need to care about how they're being treated. The use of these words in the media ends up justifying how people are looked at: 'Illegal aliens' don't have rights because they're criminals and it's as if they're from another planet." (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 245)

Despite periodic flaps about racists statements by public figures, the mass media seem willing to accept racism in high places. The political career of Ronald Regan is a case in point. During the battle for "open housing" in California, when blacks sought the right to live in neighborhoods of their choice, then Governor Regan maintained that the blacks were "just making trouble" and really had no intention of moving in. When poor blacks gathered in Oakland to receive free groceries paid as ransom in the 1974 kidnaping of Patty Hearst, Regan quipped that he hoped for an "out break of botulism" among the food recipients. Media did not make an issue of these statements when Regan ran for the presidency. (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 246)

The media tends to blame the victims of poverty instead of the society that allows it to exist. Almost half of all black children in the United States are living below the poverty line. Morton Kondracke of the New Republic typified the media spin when he wrote, "it is universally accepted that black poverty is heavily the results of family breakdown." Such an assertion was akin to saying the absence of food is heavily the result of malnutrition. (Lee, Solomon, 1990)

In 1986, in the midst of a decade if sharply accelerated inner-city poverty, CBS broadcast a two-hour documentary by Bill Moyers, "The Vanishing Black Family: Crisis in Black America," that was widely praised by mass media. Newsweek proclaimed that "Bill Moyers and CBS News look unflinchingly into the void: It's no longer only racism or an unsympathetic government that is destroying black America. The problem now lies in the black community itself, and in it's failure to pass on moral values to the next generation. (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 250)

The black family scapegoat has been invoked by politicians and news media time and again to declare limits on public responsibility for improving the oppressive circumstances that afflict millions of Americans. The news media fails to leave out many of the reasons the black family has broken down. Here are a some startling facts: "There are almost as many young black men in prison as in college."
" For the first time in American history the life expectancy for blacks is declining."
"Murder and suicide are the two leading causes of death. A young black man...stands a one in 21 chance of being murdered before he's 44; for a white man, it's one in 133.
"Even though black men make up only 6% of the population, half of all the men behind bars are black.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 251)

Prejudices in the media are a very damaging threat to minorities in our society. The press is suppose to be a mirror of our world. How can Americans accept that racism, sexism, and homophobia are all right. The media is not doing a good job portraying the underdogs of our society. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Until the American public stand up for what is right. The plights of these minorities will not be heard, and they will not be considered equal as they should be.

Bias in the media is an ongoing problem that may never be completely solved. We are each individuals with our own opinions and beliefs. The people in the media are no different. A hint of their personnel beliefs will slip into their work. The media is suppose to be about facts, simply the truth. We know that this is unrealistic.

We can be an educated public and decide not to believe that everything we read is the truth. Search for answers to question that you are not sure of. Take a stand for the prejudices that the media is being allowed to get away with. Don't believe something just because it's said to be proven through research.

If the media is the mirror through which our society is viewed do you like what it's showing you? Perhaps we need to simply accept that maybe it's more like a fun house mirror it shows us the picture but sometimes it's a little distorted. Other times it's distorted beyond recognition.
"There are almost as many young black men in prison as in college."
" For the first time in American history the life expectancy for blacks is declining."
"Murder and suicide are the two leading causes of death. A young black man...stands a one in 21 chance of being murdered before he's 44; for a white man, it's one in 133.
"Even though black men make up only 6% of the population, half of all the men behind bars are black.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 251)

Prejudices in the media are a very damaging threat to minorities in our society. The press is suppose to be a mirror of our world. How can Americans accept that racism, sexism, and homophobia are Al right. The media is not doing a good job portraying the underdogs of our society. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Until the American public stand up for what is right. The plights of these minorities will not be heard, and they will not be considered equal as they should be.

Bias in the media is an ongoing problem that may never be completely solved. We are each individuals with our own opinions and beliefs. The people in the media are no different. A hint of their personnel beliefs will slip into their work. The media is suppose to be about facts, simply the truth. We know that this is unrealistic.

We can be an educated public and decide not to believe that everything we read is the truth. Search for answers to question that you are not sure of. Take a stand for the prejudices that the media is being allowed to get away with. Don't believe something just because it's said to be proven through research.

If the media is the mirror through which our society is viewed do you like what it's showing you? Perhaps we need to simply accept that maybe it's more like a fun house mirror it shows us the picture but sometimes it's a little distorted. Other times it's distorted beyond recognition.

Sources

Bozell, L. Brent, III, and Brent H. Baker. And That's the Way it Isn't . First ed. Alexandria: Media Research Center, 1990.

Crossen, Cynthia. Tainted Truth. First ed. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1994.

Didion, Joan Ways of Reading:An Anthology for Writers. Fourth Ed. "Sentimental Journeys.: Bostin: Bedford Books of St Martins Press, 1996.

Fallows, James. Breaking the News. First Edition New York, 1996

Lee, Martin A, and Norman Solomon Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Bias in the Media. First Edition. New York: Carol Publishing Company, 1990.