How Fantasy Becomes Reality

Being Barack in an “As Seen on TV” World: Sideshow Versus Sanity in Political Coverage

Karen Dill, Ph.D. — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:08:45 +0000

We have just lived through a rather eventful couple of weeks in the evolution of how we deal with reform and with race in the United States, and mass media have played a noticeable role in that history.

First came the note in my 8-year-old son Jason's school backpack. The President was scheduled to address American schoolchildren via television. The note said that Jason's school was allowing teachers to decide whether or not their classes would watch the President's address. To my relief my son's teacher, the wonderful Mrs. Schmidt, did show the address. And Jason proudly came home from school telling the tale of how he met a challenge on the playground that day by using President Obama's advice. Score so far - media-supported paranoia: 0, Mrs. Schmidt: 1.

Next came the President's address to Congress on health care reform where a statement of policy was met by South Carolina representative Joe Wilson shouting, "you lie" at the President from the floor of Congress. I watched the President handle the situation as he always does - with admirable restraint and perseverance.

A few days later came Rush Limbaugh's commentary about a fight on a school bus between two teenaged boys - the puncher was Black and the punchee White. Limbaugh said that in "Obama's America" Black kids beat White kids up as Black kids watch and "chant ‘right on'." Limbaugh's ramblings brought to mind the overwrought townhaller who days before had cried and wondered where "my America," had gone as I wondered if her America was more about keeping her insurance company safe from reform or if it was about a certain portion of the population coming to terms with a Black president beneath a cloud of media fear mongering.

As the New Yorker's Hertzberg put it: "This sort of lunatic paranoia-touched with populism, nativism, racism and anti-intellectualism-has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism's hands and feet, but its heart-also, Heaven help us, its brain-is a ‘conservative' media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News." Hertzberg argues that in the weakened state of the Republican party, a certain portion of the movement listens not to its elected leaders, but to the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

For me, this period of fits and starts in mediated politics ended suitably with President Obama's appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. In an era where the "comedians" are infinitely more palatable and sane than some of the "journalists," Letterman asked Obama to comment on the possible role of racism in the opposition to reform, to which the President quipped that one has to recall that he was Black before the election. With those words, the President, in my mind, effectively called the fringe the fringe, reminding us that the images of the overwrought in the media don't represent the strong majority who elected him with a desire for change in mind - change both in the history of how we deal with race in America and change in politics. For me, the President's demeanor and Letterman's made a sharp and welcome contrast to the agitated and agitating media extremists. The drama queens may get our attention in the same way that we stare at a train wreck. And reminiscent of the old news adage, "if it bleeds it leads," sideshow journalism may garner ratings. But in the end, though the sideshow gets noticed in the media, it's the mainstream that won the election and the more balanced in the media who reflect the will of the majority.

Bibliography

Hertzberg, H. (2009, Sept. 21). Talk of the Town. Comment: Lies. The New Yorker. Retrieved September 22, 2009 from http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/09/21/090921taco_talk_...

Gates, Obama and Stories of Race and Class in the Media

Karen Dill, Ph.D. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:53:40 +0000

Yesterday on the Huffingtonpost.com, the Wall Street Journal's Thomas Frank published a piece called The Gates of Political Distraction (1). As has been much discussed this summer, African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by a White police officer after he and his African-American driver tried to get into Gates' own locked home upon the professor's return from a trip to China. In the article, Frank suggests two narratives are being reported about the incident. Liberals, Frank says, "plugged the event into their unfair-racial-profiling template." Conservatives "were following their own ‘narrative,' the one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding ‘liberal elite.'"

As a media psychologist, I'd like to dig more deeply into these mediated narratives, images and constructed ideas of race. Images of race have been one of my particular areas of study. For example, my colleagues and I (2) showed how African-American men are portrayed in top-selling video game magazines and on video game covers. We found that these portrayals tended towards being negative stereotypes of African-American men as aggressive and powerful street criminals ("gangstas" and "thugs") compared to men of other races. Studying hundreds of game covers and magazine pages, Black men were typically shown as physical and not intellectual beings. In an experiment, we saw that White college students associated Black, male video game characters with violence compared to White, male video game characters, regardless of whether the game itself was violent.

Here is an image from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that illustrates the kind of characterization of Black men uncovered by our study. And below is a youtube video showing a gangsta rap from the same video game, with the same type of young, Black male stereotype:

Melinda Burgess and I followed up on this research, wondering if evoking the stereotypical video game image of a violent Black man had ramifications for an unrelated black man (for a discussion, How Fantasy Becomes Reality (3), Chapter 7). We chose two disparate images of Black men in America - one was the negative image our research had revealed was a common video game character portrayal, the other was the positive image of Black, male leaders, including Barack Obama.

What we found was intriguing. Evoking the image of Barack Obama caused White participants to favor an unrelated Black, male political candidate over a White candidate with identical credentials. In a complete reversal, evoking the image of the violent Black thug, as documented in our earlier research, caused White participants to favor the White candidate over the Black candidate with the same credentials.

When it comes to media, we can tell a story different ways. Whether it is with imagery, with narrative, with specific phrases, like calling Henry Louis Gates an elitist or a victim of racial profiling, we are telling a story. Even the use of terms like liberal and conservative involves spinning a narrative. Research shows (4) that when you paint a picture of an elitist African-American man, the emotions you evoke in many people are anger, envy and resentment. Emotions such as these are much more likely to form the basis of opinions than are reasoned facts. Furthermore, anger can lead to aggression in the form of discrimination.

The stories we digest through the media make a difference in how we feel and how we think about and act towards others. Unfortunately, the people who deliver media messages are well versed in these ideas, while the American public largely is not. That makes the average citizen vulnerable to the agenda of those who write and produce media. We can work on this problem by advocating for media literacy training (media education) in our schools. When the average American child spends more than 40 hours a week exposed to media, school is a good place to start to create more informed citizens. With technology exploding, we all would benefit from understanding more those who are telling our stories and thus helping write our history.

Bibliography
1 Frank, T. (July 29, 2009) The Gates of Political Distraction. Retreived 7/29/09 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-frank/the-gates-of-political...
2Burgess, M. C. R., Dill, K. E., Stermer, P., Burgess, S., & Brown, B. P. (2009). Playing
with Prejudice: The Prevalence and Consequences of Racial Stereotypes in
Videogames. Under revision at Media Psychology.
3Dill, K. (2009). How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence, New York: Oxford University Press.
4 Cuddy, Amy J. C., Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick. "The Bias Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 4 (2007): 631-48.

Mass Media and Parenting With a Sense of Humor

Karen Dill, Ph.D. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:26:28 +0000

Last night my husband Jay and I were laying in bed chatting about the day and playing another round of that previously untitled game we’ve been playing all throughout our relationship: “I can make you laugh.”

For my part, I tried to make Jay laugh by singing lyrics from the Grammy-award winning comedy team Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, otherwise known as the “Flight of the Conchords.” My chosen song of the evening was their homage to rap music called “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros.” One of my all-time favorite lyrics from that song is, “Some say my lyrics are sexist, but you lovely bitches and hoes should know I’m trying to correct this.”

Hilarious as those lyrics are all on their own, I imagine they’re particularly potent to my brain because I have done research on the way women (especially African American women) are demeaned by rappers and how young people feel about these characterizations. For example, I co-authored an article titled, “You’re My Bitch: Crude and Degrading Treatment of Women In Hardcore Rap Through the Eyes of the Predominantly White Target Audience.”

You might wonder how someone like me could laugh at a lyric that calls women “you lovely bitches and hoes.” Surely a feminist psychologist must curl her lips in disgust at the very thought of it. Actually, I particularly love that line because it shows the general understanding that women are often misrepresented in the genre. The songwriters’ use of the word “lovely,” their innocent, nerdy demeanor, and their irreverence combine to convey an astute understanding of the genres they parody. The end result is a subtle mockery of a social injustice married with a spot-on sense of humor that is irresistible and smart.

This all reminds me that in our current media-saturated culture, there are media delights to be found as well as troublesome content. When children are exposed regularly to images of young women in rap videos and lyrics that show a limited and unhealthy view, they are affected by what they see. When another media outlet, like the lyric from the Conchords, mocks that approach, kids also digest that information. We adults do too.

I went to school with a little boy named Patrick. I have an image of Patrick in my mind’s eye from when we were in about the second grade. Pat always brought his Star Wars action figures to class in a Tupperware container and played with them, making up imaginary battles and funny scenes. Recently, Pat and I found each other on Facebook. One of the first things we did was trade lyrics from the Flight of the Conchords. He and I had all the same favorites.

Now Pat and I both have sons of our own who are of the ages we were when we became friends. Our little boys are now playing with their own Star Wars action figures, imagining new scenes and scenarios. But our kids live in a different world than we did when it comes to media exposure. Back in the 1970s, we had five TV channels and they signed off at midnight. We didn’t have cell phones, the Internet, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter or any of the rest of the things our sons have at their disposal. We also weren’t plugged into mass media 45 hours a week like the average American child is today. The messages we received were mostly not as diverse, as readily available or as edgy as what our sons can access. We as adults are likewise exposed to different media than our parents were.

Parenting – and just living -- in today’s media rich environment demands that we acquire greater skills and knowledge about how media influence us. There are both challenges and opportunities in the realm of mass media both for us and for our kids. I focus on some of these issues in Chapter 2 of my book How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence. I will write more about these in the upcoming weeks on this blog as well.

My bottom line for now is that some really cool media exist for both parents and kids, but there are new rules for what it takes to be a media savvy citizen. Stay tuned for more. For all these things, a sense of humor is not absolutely required, but it sure does help.

Bibliography:

Burgess, M. C. R., Dill, K. E., & Wright, B. A. (2009). You’re my bitch: Crude and degrading treatment of women in hardcore rap through the eyes of the predominantly White target audience, Journal of Current Issues in Media and Telecommunications, 1, 3/4, available from: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_...

Dill, K. E. (in press). When Fantasy Becomes Reality: The Social Psychology of the Mass Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Available from oup.com and from http://tinyurl.com/kdfantasyreality