We are all consumers. Just like how we need to know who produces the food we eat or the products we buy, we owe it to ourselves and our community to know who is producing the media we consume. Without diversity in media, everyone loses out.
This year, The Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at USC Annenberg, a school for communication and journalism, released a comprehensive report on diversity in entertainment based on over a year’s worth of data collection and analysis on media inclusion and diversity in a multitude of media platforms. This includes major companies such as 21st Century Fox, CBS, NBC, Time Warner, Netflix, and Hulu. Disturbing statistics were given as the lack of diversity both in front of and behind the camera was exposed.
Roughly 87 percent of directors in film and live action television are white and 84 percent are male. Across 6,421 film, broadcast, cable, and streaming media screenwriters, only 28 percent are female. But 87 percent of the population isn’t white and 84 percent isn’t male. We simply lose out on so many concealed stories that need to be told because of the lack of diverse storytellers behind the camera.
With the amount of media we take in on a daily basis, it is imperative that it accurately represents the population it is depicting, which it is currently failing to do. We are watching and hearing a whitewashed, male-dominated narrative and because of that we start to believe that it’s the only narrative worth listening to. Diversity in our media creates opportunities of empowerment that minorities are all too frequently losing out on. If underrepresented communities start to see themselves as more than one story, or one misrepresentation, then it allows them to create their own greater impact on the communities around them. How can we expect low income, struggling communities to make a change for themselves if we are constantly perpetuating the same story of them and allowing no authentic response to be heard? Minority children are growing up believing that the stories they see in the media are the most important. When their stories don’t compare it’s only natural that they continue to feel like a minority and even lose self esteem. The media should be about telling stories, not taking them away.
Change needs to be made in these major media companies that are failing to integrate stories and faces of all races, genders, and backgrounds. These are the places we go for media and entertainment and this is what they are producing for us.
However, we can extend the fault of this problem even further than the major media distributors themselves. We as viewers are trapped in a systemic bubble of comfort. When a majority of what we see is something that is similar to us, we often fail to look for anything different, but it’s the differences in our country that make us who we are. We cannot just avoid a portion of the stories in our communities. If we continue to allow ourselves to see only the same stories that the same people tell, then we are perpetuating a false premise that the popular story is the only story worth paying attention to. If those are the stories people continue to approve, then it only makes sense that the major media distributors would follow the money and keep producing similarly, conforming narratives.
In order to really make an effort at solving this epidemic, there needs to be a change in how we engage in our media. The companies will follow the consumers if more consumers are willing to see a more diverse, and representative world. And seeing as it’s 2016, I think it’s about time. A tokenistic approach will not be enough to truly make a difference, we need accurate representation in order to make our world of media a world of reality.
Sam Miner can be reached at mine0034@stthomas.edu