The lack of diversity in news and advertising content

 Anna Birk

ab383718@ohio.edu

During our first week in this course, I recall one particular statistic standing out to me in our readings: a Pew Research Center study written about the decline in trust and confidence, of the news media. "Americans See Skepticism of News Media as Healthy, Say Public Trust in the Institution Can Improve," a study conducted by three researchers found that 68% of Black Americans seek out news sources that cover people similar to themselves. Similarly, researchers also found that representation of minorities is a necessity to stay informed. 

Flash forward to our readings this week and the topic at hand is the harsh reality that minority groups are rarely discussed in the news media without a misleading headline, stereotypical narrative or straight-up racist story. An appalling statistic from the NiemanReports article was that the Pew Research Center found that in 2011, there was a two-month time period where, "73 percent of broadcast stories featuring Black men were about sports or crime." This is a common theme among news organizations: when a minority person is featured in a story, it often follows only one of a few narratives, which helps to perpetuate the stereotypical views that some may hold towards minorities. 

Breaking news coverage can alienate minority groups and push misleading stories to the public as well. In a 2017 Poynter article, President of the Native American Journalists Association and Cherokee, Bryan Pollard, asked the news media to avoid hyperbolic language. In instances like the Las Vegas massacre, the media used the term "worst ever" to describe the event. Pollard told Poynter, "Don't describe this as the worst ever; there are plenty of things in our history that were worse." He then went on to say, "The reality is that there have been much worse atrocities ... committed against Native peoples going back to the beginnings of our country's history." 

                             Image taken from The New York Times shows 2017 Dove advertisement.

This misplaced, and often lack of, inclusivity is not limited to the news media industry. The advertising industry is at extreme fault for the harmful narratives of minorities that have been created in years past. In a 2017 Dove beauty advertisement, a Black woman taking off her shirt to reveal a white woman went viral. The message behind the advertisement was never clearly stated, but the fact that this ad made it through several rounds of editing before it was released to the public shows how biased the industry can be. Regardless, Dove's message isn't the first from that company, or others in the advertising industry, to display blatant racism in their products. 

As journalists, we need to be aware of these biases within our writing and rhetoric, so that harmful stereotypes are no longer perpetuated within media and society.