Media and Stereotypes 23 Tara Ross

Contents

Introduction ...... 398 Mainstream Media Representations of Racial and Ethnic Minorities ...... 400 News Media ...... 400 Popular Media ...... 403 Media Effects ...... 405 Ethnic Media, Representation, and Stereotypes ...... 406 Conclusion ...... 410 Cross-References ...... 411 References ...... 411

Abstract Mass media have huge reach in society and are a key ﬁlter through which people learn about each other, yet countless studies demonstrate that these media con- tinue to reproduce ethnic and racial stereotypes, with often harmful effects. In various mediums – news, drama, and gaming – ethnic minority groups are typically marginalized and overlooked. Very often, when they are represented, they are shown only in narrowly stereotyped roles, such as the model Asian migrant or the exotic Latina, or depicted negatively as the problematic “other,” disproportionately represented as violent or criminal, and “less than” dominant groups (i.e., less intelligent, less wealthy, less powerful). Ethnic minority media – that is, media produced by and for ethnic minority groups – generally offer more positive representations and a counter narrative to mainstream stereotypes but can also be prone to narrow typecasting and stereotype. The resulting pervasiveness of stereotyped representations across media formats and type is partly the out- come of complex media production processes, norms and values, commercial

T. Ross (*) University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected]

drivers, and a lack of ethnic minority media producers. Nonetheless, their impact, though hard to measure, is potentially signiﬁcant. Mass media play a role in shaping collective identities and intergroup attitudes and, by typecasting certain groups, distort the picture that audiences see of different groups. There is evidence to suggest these skewed media representations can not only promote public hostility toward other ethnic groups but also lower ethnic minority individuals’ self-esteem. As a result, research into ways to combat stereotypes and promote more positive representations in the media is critical.

Keywords Media · Ethnic media · News · Stereotype · Audiences

Introduction

When it comes to the representation of different groups and the reproduction of racial and ethnic stereotypes, the media matter – partly because they are a key filter through which groups learn about each other. It is impossible for us to interact with everyone directly and much of what we know or understand about one another is often mediated by news and popular media. Coupled with the massive reach of mass media that makes these media powerful social agents. Not surprisingly then, they are also the subject of close study. In terms of ethnicity and the media, a dominant line of research has concentrated on media content and representational problems in relation to the use of racialized stereotypes, systematic under- and misrepresentation of minority ethnic groups, and the marginalization of minority media producers. Media scholars have drawn on theorists such as Michel Foucault (1980), Stuart Hall (1980, 1996), and others to theorize the connections between these mediated constructions of difference and structures of power and/or structural inequalities (Jedlowski and Thomas 2017), essentially arguing that the media are, if not a source of dominant ideas about race and ethnicity, at least highly influential in structuring social ideas about race and ethnicity (van Sterkenburg et al. 2010). That is partly due to the media’s role in constructing and reaffirming stereotypes – McLaughlin et al (2018, p.4) note that the more a stereotype is repeated in media content, the more it becomes naturalized and can influence the ways individuals think about different groups. Much of the existing research tends to privilege the analysis of Western representations of “its” others, and research on non- Western societies’ representations, particularly of other non-Western societies, is much rarer (Jedlowski and Thomas 2017, p. 64). This chapter attempts to address some of that bias but is limited by the paucity of literature on ethnic groups and the media, particularly in relation to Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and the Indian subcontinent (Matsaganis et al. 2011, p. 265). To understand how and why stereotypical representations are reproduced, it is useful to look not just at theories of communication, but also at the characteristics of media industries, as their occupational routines and structures play a key part in shaping what we see and hear in media content. In terms of news media, for instance, 23 Media and Stereotypes 399 scholars have demonstrated how the use of news values to select and prioritize what is news, along with news routines and professional norms of objectivity, has tended to advance dominant views and values and marginalize ethnic minorities (Cottle 2000). News media play a key role in reaffirming unequal power relations in society by systematically over-accessing people in powerful and privileged institutional positions – officials, experts, politicians – often to the detriment of alternative viewpoints. Budget and resource constraints often mean little attention is devoted to searching for noninstitutional voices or viewpoints (ibid.), and some issues are overlooked. For example, the time constraints of deadline-driven newsrooms make it easier to focus on what happened rather than why, ruling out the deeper political and economic analysis that is needed to understand longstanding structural inequalities (Abel 2004). Commercial pressures – the drive to attract maximum audiences and thereby advertising revenue – mean stories tend to be centered on the middle ground of dominant (often White) opinion and interests, and the lack of diversity in many newsrooms means they tend to reflect the experiences and assumptions of a largely White, middle-class workforce (ibid.). Erigha’s(2015) overview of research on inequalities in Hollywood film and television production, for example, demonstrates how a lack of representation within the ranks of media producers has led to stereotypes and a lack of diversity in entertainment media content. She cites studies that show Hollywood to be a predominantly White sphere, where racial and ethnic minorities are highly underrepresented in various roles, including acting, writing, and directing: Black filmmakers directed only 7% of all theatrically released Hollywood films between 2000 and 2011; more than half of theatrical films had casts that were 10% or less minority; and writing occupations showed similar patterns of White over-representation and minority under-representation (ibid., p. 81). This matters, because the structural inequalities of media production play out in on-screen representations. Smith and Choueiti’s 2011 study of 100 top-grossing Hollywood films in 2008 (cited in Erigha 2015, p. 86) showed that an absence of ethnic minorities behind the scenes corresponded with fewer and less empowered characters on-screen, while greater diversity behind the scenes positively impacted the quality of on-screen images. And it is not just an issue of numerical under-representation. It is also an issue of representational quality, that is, the kinds of roles that people occupy. Typically, ethnic minorities are limited to narrow roles and genres: actors are typically cast in stereotyped and racialized roles, directors and writers are similarly typecast in ethnic genres, and ethnic minorities are less likely to belong to core talent agencies or major studios. (ibid., p. 82). Recent figures suggest the picture may be getting worse, with the Directors Guild of America (2018) annual study of US feature films finding ethnic diversity has dipped to a new low. In 2017, only 10% of the 651 films measured were led by directors of color – down 3% on the previous year, and the lowest figure since the guild began its reporting in 2013. Given our media-saturated lifestyles – and the potential for media to shape views on diverse groups – it is important, therefore, that we examine closely the media’s role in the production and reproduction of racial and ethnic stereotypes and the quality of their content (Mastro 2015,p.3). 400 T. Ross

Mainstream Media Representations of Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Whether you look at primetime television, newspapers, TV news, advertising, ﬁlm, sports, or videogames, Mastro (2015) says media representations have generally been unfavorable toward racial/ethnic minorities. In the United States, numerous scholars have documented problematic media depictions of Native Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic and Latino minorities (Schneeweis and Foss 2017, p. 1147). Elsewhere, scholars have documented problems with media depictions of immigration as a threat and the framing of ethnic relations in terms of problems or within discourses of “us” and “them” that reproduce the power of dominant groups. Though the media representation of ethnic minorities has tended largely to be negative, representations have differed across different mediums, such as news, drama, and video games. Depending on people’s media consumption, Mastro (2015, p. 3) says that can distort the picture people see of different racial/ethnic groups. For example, while the representation of Blacks in US primetime entertainment television has improved over time, print and television news continues to portray them as violent and criminal. Similarly, the portrayal of Latinos in dramas has improved, but their portrayal in sitcoms is still problematic (ibid.). As such, audiences who follow one form and not another will get a more or less distorted view. This is particularly important when it comes to the news format. How mainstream news media portray ethnic minorities deserves particular attention, because audiences’ belief in the news media’s supposed objective presentation of information means they are even more likely to view them as reliable sources of information about different ethnic groups. Yet media scholarship demonstrates repeated problems with the representation of ethnic minorities in news media.

News Media

International research shows that news reports routinely use criminalizing language when reporting on ethnic minorities and that ethnic and racial minorities are routinely over-represented as criminals or perpetrators compared to dominant racial groups (Dukes and Gaither 2017, p. 790; Ewart and Beard 2017, p. 169). In Australia, researchers have shown how news media have portrayed Lebanese Aus- tralians as violent and criminal or as terrorists; Chinese Australians as illegal immigrants; and Sudanese Australians as criminal, deviant and the perpetrators rather than victims of serious violent crimes. The most frequent categorization for stories involving an ethnic minority was crime (Ewart and Barnes 2017). Foster et al. (2011) tracked the ways in which the Australian press wrote about Arabs, Muslims, and Islam and demonstrated a reliance on xenoracist stereotypes and “them”/“us” dichotomies that essentialized and simpliﬁed what it meant to be Arab or Muslim. In New Zealand, mainstream news media have tended to depict Muslims as terrorists, Paciﬁc peoples as unmotivated, unhealthy and “criminal others,” and indigenous 23 Media and Stereotypes 401

Māori as under-achievers involved in conflict, violence, or crime (Allen and Bruce 2017, p. 227). These representations can add up to a picture of crime and danger for whole neighborhoods or areas. Allen and Bruce’s study of news media coverage of the mostly ethnic Pacific community of South Auckland revealed it was depicted primarily as a place of violence and crime. More than a third of news articles focused on crime, amounting to a higher proportion of crime-related stories than the highest level reported in an international meta-analysis of crime reporting (Allen and Bruce 2017, p. 238). More significantly, research also shows that these skewed media representations can promote public hostility toward ethnic minority groups. Dukes and Gaither (2017) write that Blacks are less likely to be depicted as victims of crime than Whites, and when they are shown as victims they are often demonized and crimi- nalized. They cite Smiley and Fakunle’s 2016 content analysis of media coverage of the deaths of six unarmed Black men by law enforcement (ibid., p. 791). That study found news stories focused on the victims’ behavior as criminal, their physical stature and attire, and the location where they were killed or lived as crime-ridden and impoverished, and they included negative, stereotypical elements about the victims’ lifestyles (ibid.). In their own 2017 study, they found that the type of information reported about shooting victims significantly shaped not just people’s sympathy and empathy for victims but also how people attributed blame and recommended punishment. When negative Black stereotypical information was given about a shooting victim, they found that it significantly colored those victims as being more at fault for their own deaths. Most often, these representations are not deliberate – most journalists do not go to work aiming to slander an entire ethnic group. Instead, these stereotypes are often the result of unconscious bias and newsroom pressures. Within the demands of live, 24/7 real-time news production, journalists often have little time to review their work, which raises the risk that they might fall back on – and reinforce – widely circulating stereotypes. For example, in 2012 ESPN sacked a journalist (and suspended another) after he used the loaded headline “chink in the armor” in a mobile news story about the under-performance of rising Asian-American basketball star Jeremy Lin. Jason Fry (2012) says the reporter was working in the middle of the night, virtually alone (the mobile team operated without a copy editor and the only other journalist working alongside him was too busy to double-check his work) and at speed. Better practice would be to allow time to step back and deliberate over content, but as-live production allows little room for that. Indeed, various content analyses of live sport media commentary, which is similarly produced at speed and with fewer opportu- nities for considered reflection, reveal a pattern of crude stereotypes that might be different if content was produced in a less time-pressured way. For instance, one study found live football commentators gave White players more play-related praise and represented them in a more positive light than Black players, and depicted Black athletes as naturally gifted and strong compared with White athletes, who tended to be depicted as intelligent and hard-working (van Sterkenburg et al. 2010, p. 822). So, there are clearly problems with how news media portray ethnic minorities. There are problems, too, with how often they portray them. Ethnic minorities are 402 T. Ross often overlooked and even rendered invisible in mainstream news media, which limits the resources that members of these groups can draw on to build a secure sense of identity and community. Ewart and Beard’s(2017) overview of Australian literature found that the continuing marginalization of ethnic minorities was a significant feature of the Australian mediascape. They cited Phillips’ 2011 study of current affairs stories, which found that of 209 stories, 139 had no ethnic minority faces at all, not even incidentally in the background (cited in Ewart and Beard 2017, p. 173). ter Wal et al. (2005) noted similar patterns of erasure in European Union and Dutch domestic news media, where they found that, even in stories about ethnic minorities, majority ethnic subjects appeared more often as the main news actors than minorities themselves – and ethnic minorities were underrepresented in reports about politics and government and in the role of politicians and professionals, and overrepresented in crime news. Overall, news media representations of ethnic minorities have tended to be negative. However, they are also crosscut with other dominant constructions – about class, gender, sexuality, and so on – and as such there are differences in how different groups are portrayed, with some treated more negatively than others. van Doorn’s(2015) analysis of racial and ethnic patterns in the US newsweeklies’ pictorial coverage of poverty found the poor were disproportionately represented as Black. His study found that the composition of coverage was well out of step with the actual demographics of poverty: Blacks were overrepresented by more than a factor of two (and overrepresented in stories about welfare and stories that were unsympathetic to the poor), while Hispanics were underrepresented, making up less than 10% of newsweekly pictorial content but 21% of US welfare recipients. Elsewhere, Stamps (2017, p. 410) argues that the news media’s routine focus on poor African American families (despite the fact they make up less than 26% of welfare recipients in the USA) means many people understand welfare to be an African American issue. van Doorn’s analysis of pictorial coverage (2015) usefully highlights the importance of the visual, as opposed to just textual dimensions of media content. By analyzing a major US daily newspaper’s photographs for emotion, Rodgers et al. (2007) were able to pick up subtle differences in the way different ethnic groups have been framed. They found the average African American was visually portrayed as happy, excited, and submissive, while the average Latino and Asian American was seen as sad, calm, and submissive. The authors argued that these images reinforced to readers that this was what ethnic minorities should be like and, by framing them as emotionally calm or submissive, these messages helped readers to understand the operation of power in US society. Elsewhere, Harrison et al. (2016) have shown how the visual representation of Chinese in South Africa has both simplified and exag- gerated the stereotypes found in media texts. Interestingly, they also found evidence of the ways in which visual messages could subvert stereotypes – by humanizing, rather than labeling, ethnic minority actors. As with the intersection of ethnicity and class, the intersection of dominant ideologies about race/ethnicity and gender has generated different stereotypes. An analysis of gendered race representations in popular American magazines 23 Media and Stereotypes 403

(Schug et al. 2017) found that, relative to the proportions of Whites, Asians depicted in the magazines were more likely to be women and Blacks were more likely to be men. In this way, Asians were stereotyped as more feminine and Blacks as mascu- line, and those who did not ﬁt the prototype – Asian men and Black women – were rendered largely invisible (ibid., p229). The authors argued (ibid., p. 230) that the type of discrimination faced by people who were deemed prototypical and nonprototypical clearly differed, and where previous research suggested that individuals who matched their group prototypes face more discrimination (e.g., Black men), nonprototypical groups, such as those who did not match the gendered race stereotype, might also suffer from discrimination in the form of invisibility.

Popular Media

Many of the stereotypes we see depicted in news media are echoed in other entertainment media, such as popular film and television, comedy, reality television, and video games. Tyree’s study (Tyree 2011) of ten reality television shows airing in the USA between 2005 and 2008 found all ten shows had at least one stereotyped African American participant. More than half of the shows’ African American participants fit the characteristics of a stereotype, and African American participants were often catalysts in arguments, disagreements, and physical altercations with other Black and White participants. Tyree said that added up to a significant reinforcement of negative stereotypes by a genre that played a major role in shaping pop culture (ibid., p. 409). Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States (comprising about 16% of the population), yet account for less than 10% of prime-time television portrayals – and those portrayals are often limited to crime dramas and sitcoms, thereby typecasting a group in narrow ways (Martinez and Ramasubramanian 2015, p. 210). On a positive note, Guzman and Valdivia (2010) write that strong demand from US ethnic audiences for more inclusive programming had increased the production of more diverse film and television shows in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and class (though programming continued to include homogenizing discourses and problematic stereotypes, such as Latina/o tropes of tropicalism (bright colors, rhythmic music, and brown or olive skin) and sexual availability and exoticism). This kind of narrow typecasting and “othering” remains a problem in popular media, not just in the USA but also internationally. Jedlowski and Thomas’ (2017) study of Ethiopian popular films found Chinese characters were depicted often negatively as the “other” and in ways that reinforced closed definitions of what it meant to be African. Donovan (2017) found similar othering of Chinese migrants in Spanish film and media, where they were portrayed as both the racialized “other” and as a threat to the Spanish way of life. Elsewhere, Cabanes’ (2014) analysis of entertainment media in Manila found a racially hierarchical view of both Filipino subjects and other ethnic groups: Depictions of local Filipinos who were so-called Mestizo (light- and fair-skinned) were privileged over those who were brown- or 404 T. Ross dark-skinned, and depictions of the city’s Indians and Koreans (which tended to marginalize these groups) similarly valorized lighter-skinned Koreans over darker- skinned Indians. Racial and ethnic stereotyping is also evident in interactive, participatory media, such as video games, but in these forms media stereotyping is further complicated by the fuzzy line between what we understand to be real and/or virtual. Burgess et al.’s (2011) multipart study of race in video games found overt racial stereotyping was common. In their content analysis of top-selling video game magazines, they found that minority men were generally underrepresented when compared with US Census and gamer demographics but overrepresented as thugs using extreme guns, and also as athletes (compared with White males who were almost exclusively portrayed using technology). Their content analysis of video game covers found that minority men were again underrepresented, and when they were present, they were more likely than White males to be portrayed as athletes or as aggressive, and less likely to be depicted using technology or in military combat. This last point is an interesting one. The study’s authors noted that not a single minority was portrayed in a socially sanctioned (i.e., military) setting, and where 51% of aggressive minorities were depicted in fighting scenes, only 37.8% of Whites were, adding up to a picture where Blacks were more likely to be engaged in illicit rather than socially sanctioned aggression (ibid., p.297). The authors concluded (ibid., p. 303) that video games taught a number of stereotypes:

Blacks are athletes or unprovoked social menaces with extreme weapons; Asians are martial artists; Hispanics are in short supply. White men ﬁght in fantasy realms or defend their country in heroic war settings. Alien characters outnumber minority males. Women of color are invisible.

Given their interactive and participatory nature, video games pose extra questions for researchers interested in questions of representational bias, because the traditional distinctions that have been drawn between the real and virtual are problematic in this space. Cover (2016) argues that the way we think about film or television – where racial and ethnic difference is seen to be either grounded in the “real” and represented on-screen as “virtual” or represented in the media sphere and then enacted in reality – does not fit interactive gaming. Because gaming involves bodies on-screen or as game-players “who are neither disembodied nor radically separated from those on-screen representations,” Cover says we need new ways of understanding issues of race and ethnicity that can account for the performativity of gameplay (ibid., p. 5). Many of these studies focus on overtly negative stereotypes, but some scholars have drawn attention to the “othering” effect of what might seem on the surface to be “positive” stereotypes. In an analysis of Asian American stereotypes in popular film, Kawai (2005) argues that the stereotype of the “model minority” (i.e., the good migrant) should be considered as simply the benign flipside of the negative “yellow peril” stereotype and, thereby, understood as being just as implicated in racial hostilities and violence toward Asian Americans. Schneeweis and Foss’ (2017) 23 Media and Stereotypes 405 analysis of the portrayal of Roma communities in 60 years of US fictional and reality television programs found similar parallels between overtly negative, age-old stereotypes (the ethnic “other,” the swindler, the fortune teller) and the contemporary, more politically correct construction of the “misunderstood” Gypsy. In all cases, they were characterized as outsiders, “sometimes feared, sometimes pitied, but always separate from mainstream culture” (ibid., p. 1151). Thus, though there might be differences in character and tone, media stereotypes generally still tend to portray ethnic minorities in ways that are othering and one-dimensional.

Media Effects

The picture, then, is not pretty, but so what? Do these distorted and negative representations have any consequence? That is difﬁcult to answer. Put simply, the processes of representation are complex and do not end with publication. To understand the media’s role in stereotyping, we need to also understand audiences and what they do with media, and that is not so easy. Audiencing is a messy concept and, when it comes to ethnic minority audiences, there are relatively few studies to draw on. Early traditions of media effects research focused narrowly on what media did to audiences, painting a picture of media as an all-powerful institution that “injected” a message into a passive audience with direct effects. Theoretical approaches to audiences have moved on since then and alternative approaches have adopted a view of audiences as more active and complex in their uses and interpretation of media. Research into the meaning-making practices of audiences (based on Hall’s(1980) suggestion that the meanings embedded in media texts are not necessarily taken up by audiences) has shown that audiences are active producers of meaning. We cannot assume that the meaning intended by media producers – or the unintended meaning buried in their content – is the meaning that will be interpreted by their audiences. Furthermore, audience members’ everyday practices are messy and cannot be neatly categorized. The mere fact of having a television switched on does not indicate audience-hood; people interact with television in complex and different ways and their degree of attention, type of watching, and empathy with a program varies (Morley 1990 in Toynbee 2006, p. 123). In fact, audiences are not discrete, homogeneous groups that use media in isolation from everything else in their lives. Cordoning people off by their use of a particular medium or genre – or by categories of “racial” or ethnic grouping – is problematic (Bird 2003), as is isolating their media practice from their everyday practice and context. People slot in and out of a range of media, use multiple forms simultaneously, and interpret meaning based on their familiarity with different media and different socio-cultural contexts. Cultural meanings, including stereotypes, are generated from within the complex messiness of people’s lived experience, of which media are just one part. Notwithstanding these caveats, there is evidence to suggest that mass media play some role, at least, in shaping collective identities and intergroup attitudes. Tyree (2011, p. 399) says television audiences tend to believe that what they watch is a true 406 T. Ross representation of cultures and people, particularly when they have little or no direct experience with those cultures and people. For example, Schneeweis and Foss (2017, p.1148) cite studies that have found Caucasian people who learn about Latinos from television are much more likely to believe negative stereotypes than those who have personal interaction with Latinos; that heavy viewers of television are more likely to believe ethnic stereotypes than those who watch fewer hours of television; and that fans of television news tend to hold more negative attitudes toward African Americans than light news viewers. Interestingly, in a US national survey measuring participants’ exposure to Latina TV characters, McLaughlin et al. (2018) found that exposure was related to more favorable feelings toward Latinas (which they ascribed to the positive portrayal of reoccurring Latina characters) and to higher levels of stereotyped views of Latinas as sexualized and melodramatic (because portrayals, though positive, were frequently one-dimensional and relied on old stereotypes of the emotional, hypersexual Latina). The authors argued (ibid., p.1521) that we need to develop theoretical models that can “account for the complicated manner in which media portrayals produce both positive and negative societal effects”–and do so simultaneously. As well as playing some role in shaping people’s attitudes about others, the media also play some role in shaping beliefs about oneself and one’s own group – often negatively. Various studies have shown that exposure to mainstream media stereotypes can lead to lower self-esteem and negative self-concepts (Ramasubramanian et al. 2017; Tukachinsky et al. 2017). In a national US study of the effect of prime-time ethnic stereotypes on Latino and Black Americans, Tukachinsky et al. (2017) analyzed two decades of the most viewed television shows and examined their relationship with Latinos and Blacks’ feelings about their own ingroup. They found that negative representations reduced Latinos’ and Blacks’ warm feelings towards their ingroup, while favorable characterizations contributed to feelings of warmth (ibid., p551). The study’s authors concluded that negative media representations might pose a tangible identity threat to ethnic minorities – and they highlighted the critical importance of promoting positive media representations and limiting negative media depictions (ibid.). Other authors have suggested that the media can also shape support for social policy. Sue Abel (2017) says that news media representations of indigenous Māori, which have tended to focus on violence, crime and Māori as a threat to “the nation,” have contributed negatively to policy- making in New Zealand. She argues that governments need the goodwill of the majority non-Māori population to put in place policies that might redress the historic wrongs of colonization, but negative attitudes toward Māori, fostered in part by mainstream media, have impeded such legislation.

Ethnic Media, Representation, and Stereotypes

Much of the literature on ethnicity and stereotypes has been focused on ethnic minorities’ under- and misrepresentation in mainstream media, but there is a smaller literature on ethnic minority media (i.e., media produced by and for 23 Media and Stereotypes 407 ethnic minorities) that reveals different insights into the relationship between media and stereotypes. There are gaps in that literature – studies of ethnic minority audiences, in particular, are relatively rare, and very few studies have much to say about how people use ethnic media – but various works attempting to pin down the role of ethnic minority media suggest they serve several functions, including combating negative stereotypes and providing a counter-narrative to mainstream media reporting, as well as providing self-representation, that is, “telling one’s own story and celebrating one’s own culture in one’s own way” (Browne 2005,p.31). Ethnic media have largely been equated with providing an alternative or counter- narrative to mainstream news. Matsaganis et al. (2011) describe various examples of the ways in which ethnic media have emerged from a community’s frustration with its representation in mainstream media and/or served as platforms for an ethnic community’s campaigns for voice, social equality and other social and political demands (e.g., South Africa’s “homeland” radio stations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Black and Native American newspapers in the United States, Ger- man-Turkish media in Berlin, Aboriginal newspapers in Australia, and Greek media in London). In her work on New Zealand’s indigenous TV channel, Māori Televi- sion, Smith (2016) says the station’s programming has enhanced individual and collective wellbeing by routinely broadcasting strength-based representations of Māori people and things Māori. Ramasubramanian et al. (2017, p. 1890) write that where the representation of minority members in mainstream media is largely negative, ethnic media have provided minority members with an alternative and relatively more positive source of information about their ethnic identity, “which subsequently make minority members feel more positive and secure about their ethnic identity by increasing their ethnic pride and ethnic performance.” However, they note that ethnic media, as with mainstream media, have also marginalized certain groups, for example, lighter- skinned compared with darker skinned members of a group or indigenous voices. Just as in mainstream media, the impact of intersecting identities can lead to the privileging of some identities over others in ethnic minority media. Some scholars have suggested that ethnic media can also tend to freeze communities in relation to each other and to majority ethnic groups, by enacting representations of ethnicity that are too narrow. A study of New Zealand’s Pacific media representations (Ross 2014, 2017) demonstrates the risks of over-simplifying identity in this way. By celebrating and foregrounding certain identities within a group (usually traditional, “authentic” prototypes), ethnic media can reify some identities and marginalize others. A thematic analysis of Pacific ethnic media content revealed that New Zealand’s Pacific media tended to privilege migrant identities over hyphenated or New Zealand-born identities, so that what counted as authentically “Pacific” was tightly tied to traditional island “homelands” and villages, and not the urban landscape of New Zealand-born Pacific youth. Many Pacific media producers are aware of this risk and some have taken steps to respond (Ross 2017): A television show was attempting to include Pacific identities that were less rigidly rooted in notions of “home” or tradition; a magazine had embraced a Polynesian identity that 408 T. Ross was more inclusive of Pacific peoples who also identified as Māori; and a Tongan news website had adopted English language as well as Tongan content to address a diverse audience – and included a dedicated section dubbed “Diasporic Pacific Islanders” for news about Tongans in New Zealand, the United States, Australia, and Tonga, to speak to an emergent, younger Pacific transnational identity. Notwithstanding these efforts, Pacific media were not free of weaknesses. Key media tended to represent Pacific peoples as athletes (often within the dominant racialized discourse of physical flair versus leadership or strategic ability), performing artists, and church-goers, but not business owners, scientists, or IT professionals (Ross 2014). Interviews with Pacific media producers (Ross 2017) revealed producers aimed to tell “brown” stories in “brown” ways to differentiate from and fill the gaps in mainstream media coverage, but that often set limits on how “Pacificness” could be legitimately performed. So, for instance, a belief in Pacific identity’s roots in an ancestral homeland ruled in scripts and representations of grass skirts, sand, and palm trees and ruled out those of the urban Pacific Rim. Indeed, by emphasizing ethnic minority identity in certain ways, the study suggested that ethnic media risked falling back on well-established versions of identity, including racialized versions, thereby paradoxically reproducing the dominant stereotypes found in mainstream media. Several scholars have raised questions about the extent to which ethnic minority media actually offer an alternative voice to mainstream media by demonstrating that they can be, in fact, a copy of such media. Daniels’ (2006) case study of Native American media revealed that, far from producing their own “ethnic” content, some ethnic media republished mainstream content in large quantities – up to 95% of their product. Browne (2005) and Riggins (1992) have similarly noted heavy use of mainstream media content, production values, and styles by ethnic media. Moran’s (2006) content analysis of mainstream and Spanish-language television news channels revealed Spanish media followed the conventions of mainstream media, just in a different language. They had similar story types, corporate structures, news values, presentation, focus on profits and even their journalists shared largely the same training. In their book on ethnic media, Matsaganis et al. (2011) noted that mainstream media had even acquired key ethnic media, leading some to suggest that, by losing control over their production practices, those ethnic media would become no different from the mainstream (p. 244). What this demonstrates is that it is too simplistic to assume that ethnic media producers will produce only progressive representations of their in-group. As already outlined, media content is shaped by many complex factors and the ethnicity of the media producer is only one factor. Perhaps controversially, bell hooks (1996) argues that because they must appeal to mass (White) audiences and/or they have internalized white aesthetics, Black filmmakers’ representation of blackness often replicates dominant stereotypes.

Until both colonizer and colonized decolonize their minds, audiences in white supremacist cultures will have difﬁculty ‘seeing’ and understanding the images of blackness that do not conform to the stereotype. (1996, p. 72) 23 Media and Stereotypes 409

Interestingly, her critique suggests that ethnic audiences also play a part in shaping stereotypical representations. By pushing for more positive images of their group, audiences create a straitjacket for producers’ work. hooks contends that in all areas of cultural production in the USA, the work of Black artists, especially filmmakers, has been subject to heavy policing by consumers around whether or not the work is authentic or positive and so on – and that has actually restricted producers’ ability to subvert dominant stereotypes. The role of the audience in co-creating stereotypes is woefully under-studied and an area for further research. In the contemporary Web 2.0 and social media landscape, audiences not only consume media but also create and interact with it, leading some to ask where the boundary can be drawn between audience member and media producer. Strong and Ossei-Owusu (2014) traverse some of these questions in their examination of the YouTube videos (and comment threads) of the Naija Boyz, two Nigerian-born, US-based brothers who became a YouTube hit for their “African Remix” genre of hip hop video parodies. Strong and Ossei-Owusu (ibid., p.194) argue that, on one hand, the Naija Boyz’ success demonstrates how the proliferation of new media channels, especially user-generated media like YouTube, has given ethnic minority artists and audiences “unprecedented levels of agency in their production, consumption, and social interaction.” However, on the other hand, they suggest that the independence of that media production, which sits outside the traditional institutions of mainstream and ethnic media, has not guaranteed the absence of stereotype. In fact, the brothers’ videos and comment threads contain xenophobic discourses and problematic tropes of Africa and black America (e.g., the “true African” vs. the Black American “swagger jacker” or charlatan) that are viewed by some as caricatures (ibid., p. 197). Clearly, neither the ethnicity of media producers nor their independence from traditional media institutions is guar- antee against stereotypical representation. Matsaganis et al. (2011) suggest some ethnic minority media have adopted too narrow a view of their audience – and thereby limited the identities they portray – particularly in relation to language (Smith [2006] offers a similar warning in relation to Māori Television’s ‘staging’ of cultural identity in a way that privileges language fluency). Publishing or broadcasting in an ethnic minority language is seen by many scholars as an important function of cultural maintenance and revival, but it can also act as a threshold – and stereotype – of authenticity that rules in those who “really” belong and those who do not. The authors give the example of the Japanese- American community in the USA, which has low rates of language proficiency, particularly among second- and third-generation Japanese Americans, yet most Japanese-American newspapers are still written primarily in Japanese rather than English, and their circulations have declined as a result. Johnson (2010) and Mora and Kang (2016) draw on social identity and self- categorization theories to argue that ethnic media play an important role in generat- ing and reinforcing socio-cultural categories. They hypothesize that individuals form and adopt collective or social identities based on processes that accentuate in-group prototypes. In their study of social identity and English-language Latino programs, Mora and Kang (2016, p. 32) found a positive association between the programs’ 410 T. Ross hyphenated and pan-ethnic social identities and the self-worth and ethnic solidarity of their respondents, who were mostly second-plus generation Latina or Latino. Conversely, respondents’ self-worth declined when program characters’ Latino social identity was identified through an arguably too-narrow, specific ethnic label such as Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. These various studies suggest that the range of representations available in ethnic media – and their fit with different ethnic communities’ everyday realities – is important. A broad and inclusive range of identities is crucial to how well media representations resonate with ethnic audiences and effectively combat stereotypes. Ramasubramanian et al. (2017, p. 1892) found that ethnic media exposure could mitigate the negative effects of mainstream media stereotypes for ethnic minorities. As such, they argued that as well as addressing negative portrayals of ethnic groups in mainstream media, it was important to nurture alternative spaces where ethnic communities could create, consume, and share their own media: “These alternative mediated spaces can help improve group vitality, boost collective ethnic pride, and increase willingness to engage in ethnic performance for minority groups” (ibid.).

Conclusion

In summary, the media scholarship demonstrates both the vexing pervasiveness of ethnic and racial stereotyping in the media and the critical importance of promoting positive media representations and combating negative representations (Tukachinsky et al. 2017). What it is less clear about is how to challenge and change such stereotypical representations. Some have argued that new digital media might provide an effective challenge by enabling spaces for alternative, grass-roots story- telling and a democratization of content from a more diverse range of producers. For example, Guins (2008, cited in Erigha 2015, p. 87) found that artistic practices online offered more racial and gender diversity than traditional media studios, while Erigha (2015) describes evidence that suggests millennials, regardless of race, are more likely than members of previous generations to watch and seek out media by or about people from racial/ethnic groups different from their own. These tendencies may strengthen, she says, as more people drift to the Internet and alternate channels for media content (YouTube, social media, etc.) – and, potentially, compel decision-makers in traditional and dominant media to include more diverse cultural creators and content to compete for audience attention (ibid., p. 88). Scharrer and Ramasubramanian (2015) argue that the media can either promote or call into question racial and ethnic stereotypes, and there is potential for media to use their inﬂuence positively to mitigate the effect of social stereotypes. They cite research that shows exposure to counter-stereotyping exemplars in the media can increase positive attitudes and have a positive effect on intergroup relations. The pair suggest that media literacy efforts, especially with young people, could help to address prejudice and racial bias, promote appreciation for diversity, and foster more nuanced understandings of identity and social groups. Clearly, more research 23 Media and Stereotypes 411 into ways to combat stereotypes and promote more positive representations in the media is critical.

Cross-References

▶ Japanese Representation in Philippine Media ▶ Rewriting the World: Paciﬁc People, Media, and Cultural Resistance

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