Ultimately, lily-white prime-time lineups are only one symptom of a larger, more ominous trend. The real problem is that, when they watch television, blacks, whites, and Hispanics increasingly segregate themselves into racial and ethnic ghettos. Blacks' favorite 20 shows hardly overlap with whites'. Hollywood writers, producers, and executives talk unabashedly about "black programming," a quantity so distinct and well-defined that networks can deliberately vary it, adding and subtracting as if it were a recipe ingredient, to manipulate the color of their audiences. [...] Unlike old-fashioned segregation, the segmentation of TV viewing is voluntary, and it isn't hard to understand how it came to be [...] Instead of watching "what's on," viewers can tune in to what speaks directly to them--and, it turns out, the language that speaks most loudly is often racial or ethnic. Neither Hollywood nor Madison Avenue creates these preferences; they merely respond to them. Executives claim, echoing Jerry Springer, that the media's only responsibility is to give the people what they want. But just as television shapes viewers' attitudes about sex and violence, so it powerfully shapes their views on race. And, like the end of the draft or the decline of the common school, the demise of integrated TV viewing means Americans from different backgrounds share less and less.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!