Blog 1

In a country where we’re all supposed to be treated equally, the media has done more to separate society into classes and races than to treat everyone fairly. They treat the rich better than the poor by giving them more airtime and portray African Americans as belligerent criminals who are out to get anyone.

            Although the media has put more emphasis on stereotyping certain minorities, what would happen if they didn’t target minorities and only discussed what whites are doing? If they didn’t resort to targeting the minority, I believe that it would create more problems. The minority would be upset because they didn’t get their airtime and begin to wonder if the media only cared about reporting on the white society, inevitably leading those groups to have an even stronger disliking towards people who are white.

            Honestly, I believe that if they didn’t target certain groups and give people something to think about, someone would have a problem with it. No one is going to be 100% happy with what the media has to say about anyone or anything, for that matter. People have the choice whether to watch the news or turn it off, no one’s shoving it down anyone’s throat.

            The media has been around for over 100 years and they haven’t done much to change their slogan: reporting on what’s important to Americans. Yet, how are they to determine what is and isn’t important? For what may be important to one group of people, may not even come across a certain group of people’s minds.

            We’re set to believe what we see and what we hear. We have been given a set of guidelines from our parents and the media of what to think about certain groups of people: stereotyping. People have began to have such a negative outlook on certain minorities because the media has represented them to be terrible people, so whites think that every Mexican in this country is probably here illegally stealing our jobs to thinking that if a black man is walking down the street, he will probably draw a gun and steal their precious possessions. We think all of these things because the media has placed such a negative set of guidelines into societies minds.

            Is the media really giving us something to think about or are they putting ideas in our head to continue the racism that this country started with?