Bias in the Media: Racism, Sexism and Homophobia

Prejudice is suppose to be a thing of the past. We live in a country that is noted for its freedom and open ways. The statue of liberty says; Give me your sick, your tired, your wretched, your hungry. However, we really don't mean it; we just want to look good and keep up our image. We live in a country of the free, however, all of us still are not equal. We will continue to be unequal if the media makes everyone think that it's OK.

The printed pages we read, and the broadcasts we tune in, are said to mirror society. But mass media also continue to shape our society--reinforcing certain attitudes and actions while discouraging others. If what appears in print had little impact on day-to-day lives, advertisers would not be so heavily in newspaper and magazine ads.
(Lee, Solomon, 1990)

For many women, media messages reflect the kind of attitudes that rudely confront them on a daily basis. For people who are black, Latino. Native American or of Asian ancestry, the largely white-world of the mass media resonates with many of the prejudices that they repeatedly encounter in a white-dominated country. And for those whose sexual orientation draws them to people of the same gender, the main news media commonly leave them out or put them down. (Lee, Solomon, 1990 p. 17)

A Male-Dominant Media

Between the lines and between the transmitters is an invisible shrug about the status of women in America. We are told that it's improving--but usually without reference to how bad the situation remains. The mass media, ill equipped to play a constructive role, are key contributors to the problems facing women. News media companies are bastions of male supremacy themselves. (Lee, Solomon, 1990, p. 229)

According to Lee, and Solomon (1990) in 1989 men held 94% of the top management positions in the U.S. news media. A study of the front pages of ten major newspapers found that only about one quarter - 27%- of the bylines were women's. On network television the results was alike; researchers found that on the nightly news 22.2% - of the the stories were on CBS were reported by women, 14.4% on NBC, and 10.5% on ABC. (Lee, Solomon, 1990)