Becoming a Media Psychic

It is time for the 5 o’clock news. First story on the screen is a crime committed at the local grocery store. Someone has assaulted a man in the parking lot and taken his money. Can you predict who did it? That’s right! A white male who has been on probation since he was released from prison 3 months ago. That was your guess right? Come now, surely you didn’t give in to the stereotype of assuming it was a black man, did you? I guess I could understand if you did, seeing how black men are two times more likely to be shown as criminals on TV than white men (Dixon: 2013). [That’s probably why no one invited a black man to be in the CLUE party game. It would be too easy to know who did it, and it is too fancy of a party anyway. Let’s see how long it takes for them to guess which rich white person actually killed somebody!] The only way we can invite a black man into our home, is as a criminal  on our TV screen. We shouldn’t look at crime reports where black men are arrested 21% of the time, versus the 37% shown on the news (Dixon: 2013). If we did, we would have to start considering the facts outside of the little glass box we depend on so much. We might actually have to start being aware of the racist and stereotyped assumptions and fears that are being fed to us. No, we mustn’t do that; for it is shown that putting this into our consciousness can actually help defer fears and assumptions (Devine: 1989; Livingston & Brewer: 2002). This reflective thinking means we would have to start monitoring what we watch and being careful to analyze it with a critical view. No, no, no. That is too much work. We like it the way it is. A world where white men rule the high graces of our dominant discourse of oppression; a world where women and minorities are stamped with negativity to keep them down; a world where we try to pitch everyone against each other in chaos to distract us from what we could do to band together and make the world a better place. It just makes it that much easier to be a media psychic, right?

Sources Cited

Devine, P.G. Stereotypes and Predjudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1989. P. 56, 5-18

            Dixon, Travis L. “He Was a Black Guy”: How the News Continues to Create Dear of Black. Lind, Rebecca Ann. Race/ Gender/ Class/ Media 3.0, Considering Diversity across Audiences, Content, and Producers, 3rd Ed. Pearson Education Inc, 2013. P. 24-29

            Livingston, R.W.; Brewer, M. B. What are We Really Priming? Cue-based versus Category-based Processing of Facial Stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2002. P.82(1), 5-18