Media Are Means To Improve LGBT Image Analysis

Drawing a relationship between the perception of the LGBT community in the public eye and media portrayal, the author, in his paper “Media Are Means to Improve LGBT Image” highlights instances and contributors to the community’s marginalization. However, the author ultimately comes short on relevance to the issue, as well as the depth and breadth of its analysis, despite attempts to emphasize significance through examples of their sidelining.
The author makes this attempt by showing the situation as a matter of life or death in some instances, with the LGBT community’s need to uplift itself as something more than a deviance from the social norm.
But even this attempt in itself is messy, with seemingly irrelevant cases of violence mentioned
The perpetrator, Omar Mateen, was an Islamic fundamentalist, self-radicalized through the internet (Shabad). The internet is a medium that can influence public image, through faulty information displayed in Google’s top results (Lewis), or even unscreened sources like Wikipedia (Hill). Although this is an instance of how media can form anti-LGBT radicals, the author’s piece moves in a direction that focuses more on how individuals influence individuals, over how individuals influence themselves, as how Mateen resorted to committing such an atrocity.
Expanding from the internet as a medium, the author fails to branch out to other forms of media, such as television, radio, and print and how existing social norms and institutions in the context of nations and their respective culture affect the LGBT community’s representation. Commentary from anchors, hosts, and editors, provide discourse on the status of the LGBT community (Kovacevic). More often than not, audiences take these analyses as legitimate, reinforcing preexisting societal
The audience is immediately aware of the product they are buying. The audience is made aware of the rom-com that so easily coddles the archetypical gay. While the author attempted to briefly reference the aforementioned, a second layer of analysis should have been applied. Why should the audience be aware of the archetypical gay?
The support for stereotypes are too great to be let go of. Behind the producers are mass-media empires and behind the audience are markets. In Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, mass-media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”. Behind the media is money, and a lot of the times, money means upholding the status quo. But what about instances of media countering status quo?
In the paper, Lady Gaga is the only mentioned figure known for positively influencing the LGBT image. Harking back to Chomsky’s analysis, Lady Gaga’s success is largely dependent on the existence of a liberal or LGBT-supportive audience. Thus, the majority of Lady Gaga’s appeal is limited to a niche