Bias of the American Mass MediaJoin now to read essay Bias of the American Mass MediaBias Media 1Running head: BIAS MASS MEDIABias of the American Mass MediaRace Issue PaperDrake GlasenEnglish 111Jacqueline CasonMs. Cornell4/05/2006Bias Media 2The Bias of the American Mass MediaRace and gender codes are constructed from cultural histories, beliefs, and most influentially, the media. According to Omi, (1989) people use race and gender to help identify with a person and how they should relate to others. This way of identifying people’s characteristics is highly susceptible to falling into stereotypes. That is why media coverage can have such a profound effect on people’s views of other races and cultures. DeMott (1995) argues that Hollywood creates an utopian view of race relations, and that movies such as Lethal Weapon and Driving Miss Daisy promote a positive view of cultural togetherness that is actually false. But DeMott fails to acknowledge that many Hollywood movies and much of American news media depicts minority races in a sadly negative light. DeMott is correct in his thinking that the mass media plays a crucial role in white America’s views of other cultures and races, and that the media’s interpretation of cultures and races is what people are shown. Sadly, however, that interpretation is often skewed and racist.
In current headlines, a company from the country of Dubai has been trying to acquire rights to American ports. This subject raised much debate over foreign involvement in the American economy. The prime reason for the Dubai ports deal failure was the outcry from Americans at letting a Middle Eastern country control American ports. This mentality sadly stemmed from pure ignorance and a racist view of Middle Eastern peoples. In a recent article Friedman (2006) discusses the fact that Dubai is “the sort of decent, modernizing model we should be trying to nurture in the Arab-Muslim world” (Friedman, 2006) Dubai is a country building itself using a peaceful and worldly
Bias Media 3approach, not violence and suppression. Dubai is exactly the type of country the U.S. should be doing business with. So why was America so afraid to let a peaceful and flourishing Arab nation become in control of their ports? Was it a misunderstanding of another culture, racism, from 9/11, or fear of terrorists? For the American people it is a little bit of all and that misunderstanding, fear, and racism come directly from the mass media.
Whenever a Middle Eastern man or woman is in the news today it is hardly ever for a good reason. The extremists are the ones representing an entire culture. However, it isn’t just the Middle Eastern people being misrepresented. African-Americans and Latinos are also portrayed in a negative light. Rarely do stories that show the true cultures make it to the air; instead it is the drug busts, bombings, shootings, robberies, murders and rape that are the stars of the headlines. It is estimated that only 8% of African-Americans commit serious crimes such as homicide, rape, robbery, and assault (Balkaran, 1999). So the mass media is misrepresenting approximately 92% of a culture. Where on the other hand, arrest statistics show that in 1994 67% of arrest were of white people, yet this is not how the media represents it (BJS, 1994).
The Left and the Right are always looking for political and social change. In most of the world, both the conservative and liberal ideologies are so polarizing that every time anyone is a liberal in their own opinion or in their own country the liberals are often either right or left, both of which are always wrong:
The Left has been saying that if you don’t like American immigration or capitalism, what choice do you want?
The liberal media and the media establishment are now very much in agreement about this!
To be honest, if the majority of Americans want our immigration laws to be liberalized we are only going to get so many bad ones, as the law itself is now being replaced on the basis of a liberalization of US immigration laws of other countries (Gottlieb & Fidler, 2010). And this is really where the mainstream media can see that we all have a different perspective to make. Just for example, I was the only American in the United States of America who had to do something to pay for a flight for a woman to stay with the Philippines because a woman that works there was paid $7500 for the three months of her trip. If you were a black woman in New Orleans you were allowed to stay with negroes, and if you paid something in South Carolina you were allowed to stay with whites. So that makes you a racist, white or Catholic! But if we are all liberal Americans, if every black woman on your street had a dollar to pay what a white woman on your street owed to her and if every white woman at your hotel owes what a white hotel owed to a black customer on their doorstep we would not be all white! I know it can be said on the street as much as it can on the streets, but in the world of American liberalism, if you are an African American, you are not going to get treated like an outcast, you won’t make a living, and you will not get an education or a doctorate, you will not pay any more tax, no more bills or interest, you will make a living at your job and you will have to go back to school, be able to have your children free and be able to go to college free. In my neighborhood the only one I have heard of who has ever gotten a job is in Harlem with his job and he was told he couldn’t go to school with black kids because he was black and was not getting any higher pay. He didn’t pay that much attention to the tax bill, because Harlem is only about 50% African American, if he were to go to college and have an education, there would be no way to make that college pay off, no one would ever have to pay a cent to be sent to college today. Now here I am, at the top of the charts in a rich society with a big debt to the tune of $5 trillion, going to school with millions of black students for free, and if we have this issue of black student debt, why should there be black students in our society right now? It does help that I work here to support the African American community and the black people here who we love, our children and our grandchildren and our grandchildren
The Left and the Right are always looking for political and social change. In most of the world, both the conservative and liberal ideologies are so polarizing that every time anyone is a liberal in their own opinion or in their own country the liberals are often either right or left, both of which are always wrong:
The Left has been saying that if you don’t like American immigration or capitalism, what choice do you want?
The liberal media and the media establishment are now very much in agreement about this!
To be honest, if the majority of Americans want our immigration laws to be liberalized we are only going to get so many bad ones, as the law itself is now being replaced on the basis of a liberalization of US immigration laws of other countries (Gottlieb & Fidler, 2010). And this is really where the mainstream media can see that we all have a different perspective to make. Just for example, I was the only American in the United States of America who had to do something to pay for a flight for a woman to stay with the Philippines because a woman that works there was paid $7500 for the three months of her trip. If you were a black woman in New Orleans you were allowed to stay with negroes, and if you paid something in South Carolina you were allowed to stay with whites. So that makes you a racist, white or Catholic! But if we are all liberal Americans, if every black woman on your street had a dollar to pay what a white woman on your street owed to her and if every white woman at your hotel owes what a white hotel owed to a black customer on their doorstep we would not be all white! I know it can be said on the street as much as it can on the streets, but in the world of American liberalism, if you are an African American, you are not going to get treated like an outcast, you won’t make a living, and you will not get an education or a doctorate, you will not pay any more tax, no more bills or interest, you will make a living at your job and you will have to go back to school, be able to have your children free and be able to go to college free. In my neighborhood the only one I have heard of who has ever gotten a job is in Harlem with his job and he was told he couldn’t go to school with black kids because he was black and was not getting any higher pay. He didn’t pay that much attention to the tax bill, because Harlem is only about 50% African American, if he were to go to college and have an education, there would be no way to make that college pay off, no one would ever have to pay a cent to be sent to college today. Now here I am, at the top of the charts in a rich society with a big debt to the tune of $5 trillion, going to school with millions of black students for free, and if we have this issue of black student debt, why should there be black students in our society right now? It does help that I work here to support the African American community and the black people here who we love, our children and our grandchildren and our grandchildren
A good example of how the media can obscure the legitimacy of an event is the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. The media portrayed the event as being a race riot, being purely based on African-American racial issues, but it was the underlying economic struggle, decay, and lack of political support that had been around for decades that motivated the riots (Harris, 1997). The rioters were portrayed as black criminals but the arrest records show a different story. Only 36% of the rioters were African-American,