Tandlife. Com Literature Review

Tandlife.com offers a journal of broadcasting and media that goes into detail about how minorites are protrayed on television. The journal explains how the study is important as it will outline how the amount of time on TV has changed the results of the amount of minorities that have appeared. The study focused on Latino’s and African Americans. The study highlighted the change in stereotypes that were portrayed towards African Americans. In particular, African Americans were “seen in low-status positions on television where they appeared as lazy, untrustworthy and unintelligent; largely demeaning roles designed to entertain a White audience” (Atkin, 1992) in the 1960’s. Late on in the 1980’s most of these stereotypes disappeared. African American
Families were shown in a more intelligent way as shows such as “The Cosby Show” had normal lifestyles compared to the one’s portrayed years ago.

The study of the amount minorities on tv was done in 1996 over a six week period. The study looked into four large tv channels including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC. The study looked at physical characteristics, behavioral characteristics, appearance characteristics as well as conversation characteristics of the people that were being portrayed. The data revealed that “80 % percent of the of the main and minor characters were Caucasian (Mastro and Greenberg 7). The data also revealed how males had more roles at 64% compared to females.

African American males are slowly receiving more roles compared to other minorities. In 1996, native americans were portrayed with negative stereotypes compared to other races. African Americans continue to face negative at the time of the study as they were judged more compared to their counterparts.