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Prime Time Whitewash

Popular television shows such as ABC’s “Two Guys and a Girl” too often have casts which lack meaningful diversity for children of color. Image from abc.com.

Lack of diversity on TV affects children’s perceptions

By Janet Ng

Parents often see their kids planted on the couch, blurry eyes and blank faces bathed in the white light of their television. It may look like they aren’t paying attention to the color images flashing across the screen. But according to a new report, children, in fact, are bombarded with indirect messages every time they turn on the TV.

Children Now, a child advocacy organization, which recently released Fall Colors: Prime Time Diversity Report 2000-01, draws attention to the lack of minorities in primetime television and its effect on youth.

“Television tells [children] who’s important and who’s not,” said Patti Miller, Children Now’s Director of the Children and Media Program. “Youth watch the most television, and they look for esteem, recognition, and respect.”

“When I watch [TV]…I want to be like them,” Sekope said, a 9-year-old at Plugged-In, a media center for kids in East Palo Alto, Calif.

According to Fall Colors, kids like Sekope, who watch television during prime time, are most likely to see “able-bodied, single, heterosexual, white, male characters under 40” and youth characters who are primarily thin, white females. It also found that at 8 p.m. — known as “family hour,” when kids are most likely to watch — programs are the least racially diverse in all of prime time.

“Both the absence and stereotypes of minorities affect youth’s perceptions about themselves,” Miller said. “[TV] tells kids race is important, and when they see people like themselves on television, they feel included and they look for role models.”

“[When you watch TV] you want to think ‘I could do that. I could be there. That could be me in five or six years.’ But you don’t see anything of yourself, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, well maybe I’ll just have to go do this,’” said an Asian teenage girl, one of the youth polled in the study.

Early last year, TV executives agreed to increase diversity in their management and creative teams to produce more representative programming for the 2000-01 season and beyond. According to Fall Colors, prime-time television networks, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, UPN and WB, still “don’t reflect the diversity that youth find in their everyday lives, or the diversity they will encounter as adults.”

TV programming isn’t just lacking in ethnic diversity. It is also deficient in depicting gender, sexual orientation, and disability. “Representations of diversity, tolerance, and cross-cultural learning in media have implications for children of all ages, for everyone,” said Miller, adding: “[The 2000-01 TV programming] sends skewed messages to children about the status and value of women and minorities.”

Fall Colors noted that characters were employed in a wide range of careers, but race and gender differences influenced which occupations they held. “Of the top five occupations shown for various racial groups, only people of color filled the domestic worker, homemaker, nurse/physician’s assistant and unskilled laborer positions.”

Children Now’s A Different World: Children’s Perception of Race and Class in the Media reports that kids are more likely to associate positive attributes with white characters and negative ones with minority characters. Four out of five children of color, including 79 percent of the Asian American kids polled nationwide, want to see their race depicted in television programs.

“Youth are growing up in an era of increasing racial and ethnic diversity. They don’t see the same diversity reflected in TV,” Miller remarked. “During their formative years, they internalize many of the values and attitudes presented on TV.”

According to the report, children of all races identify positive qualities such as being intelligent, doing well in school, and being a leader more often with white characters, and associate negative attributes such as breaking the law, being lazy, and acting goofy with minority characters.

Last week, a coalition of minority groups graded each network on its fulfillment to increase diversity in programming. ABC received the lowest grade of D-minus; other grades were a D-plus for CBS, C-minus for Fox, and a C for NBC.

The number of minority characters doesn’t reflect 2000 census figures. Still, there were improvements for some ethnic groups. Even though the number of Latino characters dropped to 2 percent from 3 percent last year, African American characters increased from 13 percent to 17 percent, and Asian American characters increased from 2 percent to 3 percent.

“When certain groups are privileged, others subjugated and still others altogether excluded, prime time sends skewed messages to viewers — especially young ones — that these groups are valued differently.”

Miller added: “This in turn affects the way viewers perceive themselves and interact with particular groups.”