With the success of recent television shows like ABC’s “How to Get Away with Murder” and “Black-ish,” many in the industry are starting to reevaluate their positions on race in television. The “old guard” of television often said that the American people wouldn’t watch a television show that heavily featured characters who weren’t white — often relegating anyone who doesn’t fit into that box to a life of being the sidekick, or worse yet, losing all sense of identity and being whitewashed.

Characters on television shows need to be interesting, developed, and sympathetic. The diversity of a character does not only fall in ethnic background, but it is certainly a way to give that character a deeper history. Still — as someone who regularly watches television it is clear that on-screen diversity on screen is growing, especially when you consider shows like “Scandal”, “Glee”, “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “Orange is the New Black”. It is pretty much expected now for a show to have one character who doesn’t fall into the cis-gendered straight white category.

And we are noticing — think back to all of the press and negative coverage that “Girls” received (and still receives) because of its lack of ethnic diversity. But “Girls” is just one in a long line of history.

Still, one must consider some of the most popular television shows in the last two decades. These shows, the ones that get the push from the individual stations and the media, are still white. “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Will & Grace,” “How I Met Your Mother,” and “Sex and the City” were all the most popular shows when they were airing, and they all featured white friends in New York City.

But why is this still happening when, according to Nielsen, white people don’t even make up the majority of the viewing audience?

“It’s not only that the African-American audience watches more TV, but it’s substantially more — two hours over other groups,” Ron Simon, head curator at the Paley Center for Media, told theGrio in an interview. “It’s known in the industry, but it certainly hasn’t gotten the attention I think that it deserves.”

Race and Watching Habits

Race is a social construct — that is the first thing we need to realize if we are going to discuss race at all. It is a way to categorize people into neat groups.

Except those groups aren’t so neat anymore.

Here are some pretty startling statistics about race and television in the United States:

This is a problem. When you look at the statistics, stations like Mundo, which focuses on the Latino community, or BET, which focuses on the black community, sometimes overtake shows on mainstream networks that are fledgling. According to the report, African Americans watch 37 percent more television than other demographics, which means that they are watching shows that don’t always represent them in the best light. Or worse — they are watching shows that don’t represent them at all.

Whitewashing

Whitewashing happens when an actor or actress is completely stripped of his or her ethnic qualities and either declared or assumed white by the writers and viewers of the show. Whitewashing is a dangerous happenstance because it not only eliminates the ethnic identity of the actors, but it also impacts the fans of the show. As we become more and more connected to our television shows through social media, and we know more and more about the actors, it seems harmful to completely remove their cultures. However, what about the people who don’t follow the actors and know their backstories — they simply never realize that they are watching someone who isn’t just white.

“Vaguely Eurasian”

One of the better shows on television when it comes to portraying diversity is Fox’s “Glee.” The show has been groundbreaking (though sometimes problematic) in giving light to all different types of characters. There’s no doubt that Kurt Hummel will go down as one of the revolutionary LGBT characters on television. But what about his boyfriend? Darren Criss, the actor who plays Blaine Anderson, is half Irish from his father and Filipino from his mother. Early in his tenure on the show, he is referred to as “Vaguely-Eurasian” by another character. Vaguely-Eurasian. It seems like a slap in the face because Darren Criss is clearly part Filipino. He has almond eyes with extravagant lashes, medium gold toned skin, and thick black curls. Many just assumed his character had the same history that he did.

Until the next season, when they cast Matt Bomer as his brother. Matt Bomer is a fantastic actor, but he is English mixed with Welsh, Scottish, and German. Now this wouldn’t be a problem if the show had given context for his family, but they haven’t. One cannot assume that there was a remarriage or they are step brothers. They are called brothers in canon, so that is what the viewer must take them to be. Could it possibly be that Fox didn’t want to push the boundaries by showing a couple that was gay AND two different races? Not so fast — another couple on the show, Brittany and Santana, fit that bill. So why whitewash Blaine Anderson? Is it because Darren Criss could pass as white? Is it because Darren Criss is the heartthrob of the show, and the heartthrob couldn’t possibly be anything other than white? Is it a push from Fox? Or are they not whitewashing him, just not talking about it? Glee isn’t the only show that does it, and it isn’t always a problem. But there is the question: why did they choose to whitewash him on a show where diversity is celebrated?

Awards and the Changing Times

The Emmy Awards are always a point of contention for viewers of television shows. The same complaints always arise during nominations — “why wasn’t [insert name here] nominated?” or, “Wow! [insert name here] was snubbed!”

One of the biggest snubs of the 2014 Emmys was of sitcom actress Mindy Kaling.

Kaling was a surefire nomination for her show “The Mindy Project” because she had been tapped to announce the nominees. When it came time to announce the category she was supposed to be nominated in, her name was nowhere to be found.

Is this a case of racism on television, or were there just more worthy nominees?

While we can’t get into the mind of the voters it is important to note that there has been only one non-white woman who has won an Emmy for acting in a leading comedic role: America Ferrera as Ugly Betty.

In fact, 2013 was the first time ever an African American woman won an Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama: Kerry Washington for “Scandal.”

Why don’t we have more diversity on TV?

Could the lack of diversity on television be caused by a lack of diversity among its writers? That is certainly a possibility. Shonda Rhimes is one of the only black female writers to get a television show of her own, and she now has three: “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Scandal,” and “How to Get Away With Murder” – all of which have strong, diverse characters.

So what are we to do to encourage more representation on television? Part of it is up to the viewer: demand it. Don’t watch shows that feature people of color in supporting roles that are degrading. Tweet about it to the companies, the actors, and the writers. Support shows that do provide a realistic depiction of diversity.

We need to also encourage more children of color to go into the arts, whether it be acting, writing, or directing.

The steps aren’t going to happen overnight, sadly, and the momentum is shifting — we just need to continue pushing.

Resources

Primary 

Critical Media Project

Center for Media Literacy: Does TV Shape Ethnic Images?

Additional

Salon: Whitewashed TV Isn’t Just Racist. It’s Boring! 

The New York Times: Minorities in Movies and Television

Grio: Nielsen Report Confirms Blacks Watch More TV Than Any Other Group

Hollywood Reporter: The Emmy’s Rocky Race Relations

Lee & Low Books: Where’s the Diversity? A Look at the Emmy Awards and TV 

San Jose Mercury News: Fall TV 2014: Diversity, is all the Rage–Finally

Noel Diem

Law Street contributor Noel Diem is an editor and aspiring author based in Reading, Pennsylvania. She is an alum of Albright College where she studied English and Secondary Education. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, theater, fashion, and literature. Contact Noel at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Diversity on TV: The New Normal? appeared first on Law Street.

Anyone who has ever been to school or needed a simple explanation of a complicated subject, or just needed any information ever, can appreciate Wikipedia. It’s a great resource for background info. Don’t use it for your papers, kids, but feel free to use it for pretty much everything else. Most of the time Wikipedia can be trusted, as long as you’re using it as a resource and not a legitimate source. But every now and again, people mess with the entries to make them incorrect. Usually they’re corrected pretty quickly. If the edit was particularly bad, Wikipedia has the ability to track the IP address and figure out where the offending edit came from.

Here’s a concrete example: on the Orange is the New Black Wikipedia page, the Advocate, a well known LGBT publication, is quoted saying that OITNB “contains the first ever women-in-prison narrative to be played by a real transgender woman.” This sentence was referring to Laverne Cox. Well last week, there was a disturbing edit made to this entry — the phrase “transgender woman” was changed to “a real man pretending to be a woman.”

Not only is that fundamentally incorrect, it’s ridiculously insensitive, disgusting, and bigoted. So what asshole decided to make that edit?

Someone working in Congress, of course.

This has to be an isolated incident, right? There’s no way that Congressional staffers, funded by our tax dollars, sit around and edit Wikipedia pages, sometimes pretty offensively, instead of working to fix a Congress that has an approval rating that is languishing in the low teens.

Nope. That appears to be a lot of what they do — edits from Congressional IP addresses are pretty common. A Twitter bot called @congressedits collects all of them, and it’s had a kind of busy summer. Here are some of my favorites:

Tranny Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives http://t.co/SkIIKhDxBu

— congress-edits (@congressedits) August 20, 2014

Oh look another case where someone in Congress edited an article to do with transgender people…incorrectly and offensively! In case you were wondering, the edit was to change the phrase “assigned sex” to “biological sex.” That’s incorrect. Great job, random Congressional staffer, that was a worthy use of your tax-funded paycheck.

Chrisley Knows Best Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives http://t.co/39F07XgCoU

— congress-edits (@congressedits) August 19, 2014

This one is benign at least. It’s an edit on a Chrisley Knows Best Wikipedia page, an American TV show. Someone with a Congressional IP address thought it was essential that we know exactly what suburb of Atlanta is the setting for the show. Which is at least correct, I presume, but again, not a good use of time or money.

UFO sightings in Russia Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives http://t.co/IsWVBxNqVC

— congress-edits (@congressedits) August 4, 2014

Oh, look, here’s one where the article UFO Sightings in Russia was edited anonymously from a Congressional IP address. A particular incident where a UFO sighting was reported in Russia was added to the article. Why does someone who works in the Capitol Building have such an encyclopedic knowledge of UFO sightings in Russia? I’m not sure, but that seems healthy.

There’s also more edits than can be counted on members’ pages, bills, etc…many of which are incorrect, argumentative, or biased. Wikipedia administrators have blocked anonymous edits from Congressional IP addresses multiple times because of these issues. The IP address used to make the Laverne Cox edits, and many of the edits to do with transphobia, has been blocked three times this summer. While it’s probably the same incredibly immature staffer/intern, there’s no way to actually know.

So real talk, guys. I know that work can be kind of boring in Congress, especially during recess. But seriously, stop with the edits. Play 2048, or prank your coworkers, or take a nap, I don’t care! But this whole editing-Wikipedia thing looks really bad. Just stop.

—

Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Johann Dréo via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Good News! Your Tax Dollars Go to Bad Wikipedia Edits appeared first on Law Street.

A few years ago, the only way you could watch a TV program was to catch it when it was being aired. Then we got DVR, and then there were shows available online on demand; and now we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and thousands of other (legal and illegal) ways to get our fix. And in so many ways, the Internet has completely revolutionized the way we watch TV. Because for a lot of us, TV isn’t contained to a physical television anymore. In fact, I, for the first time in about 3.5 years actually have a real, concrete television in my apartment. It only has the most basic of cable, but I often forget it’s there, because I’m so used to watching any and all TV programming on my computer.

So here are 4 different ways that the Internet has revolutionized TV…and whether these changes are good or bad.

4. We have an ability to find old shows that are new to us. 

Before this weird meld of Internet and TV, the only way to discover a show that was off the air was to catch reruns. Growing up, I watched plenty of shows this way, but they were often out of order, disjointed, and difficult to follow. The Internet allows us to watch a show from the beginning, even if it hasn’t aired on TV in any capacity in years. For example, my freshman year of college, most of my roommates and I got really into The West Wing. It had originally aired 1999-2006, so given that I was in middle school at the time, it obviously hadn’t caught my attention. And it’s not just my friends–when both House of Cards and Scandal began airing, I heard them compared to the incredibly idealistic liberal love letter that is The West Wing by other college students. Tons of political junkies my age are discovering the show that we were just a few years too young for when it originally aired. A couple days ago, The Wire did a “best fictional president” bracket in honor of the West Wing, and of course, President Jed Bartlett won it. I’m betting the reason that The West Wing remains in our memory and is still so regularly referenced is because the Internet allows new watchers to discover it whenever they want, in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s still streaming on Netflix. 

Good or Bad? Good. Finding a show that speaks to your interests is a great thing. Now my West Wing example is incredibly silly, I know, but I’ve absolutely used common interest in that show as a conversation topic before in my daily life. Most of my friends have seen it, and it’s just another thing that connects us. TV, for better or worse, plays a large part in our lives, and it’s pretty cool that the Internet has opened us up to shows from before our time. This doesn’t extend purely to shows that are before our time, this also allows us to see shows from other countries that usually wouldn’t make it to our TVs, which is also pretty cool!

3. Shows made exclusively for Netflix and other online networks. 

This is also an incredibly recent phenomenon. In the past two years or so, Netflix has released a number of original series. The two most well known are probably House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, but there are a few others, including Hemlock Grove, and Lilyhammer, and there are also exclusive documentaries and stand-up comedy shows. These are high quality shows, and because they aren’t airing on TV, Netflix can afford to be risqué. This year, Netflix made history by being the first non-TV network to win an Emmy. Netflix isn’t the only Internet network to create their own content, though they are probably the most critically acclaimed and well-known. Amazon Prime and Hulu have also started producing their own content.

Good or bad? Good. More quality content is good for the viewers, to be sure, and it opens up opportunities for more experimental shows that networks may not want to chance, given that the content is less severely constrained by broadcasting. Television networks are complaining that it’s cutting into their viewership, but hopefully the competition will force them to up their game. After all, do we really need another “Real Housewives of ______” show?

Sheldon doesn’t think so.

2. The Veronica Mars Kickstarter and Arrested Development Relaunch. 

I will unabashedly admit that Veronica Mars and Arrested Development are arguably two of my favorite shows ever. In some ways, they have a similar story–they were both cult favorites with high critical ratings but pretty low viewership. They both got cancelled after three seasons. And they both got a final hurrah in the last year–Arrested Development through a Netflix original fourth season, and Veronica Mars through a full length movie that was released late last week. I, like so many other fans, anticipated the extensions to both of these shows with bated breath.

The relaunch of these two shows is a testament to the seductive power of creating a product for fans. Netflix took a chance on Arrested Development, to be sure, but it was surely backed up by data. Netflix doesn’t release viewership figures, but they must have seen something in the data about the first 3 seasons previously available on the site to make them think that a 4th season would be profitable. A lot of people didn’t actually end up liking the 4th season much, myself included, but the fact that it was even undertaken in the first place says a lot about the lobbying power of fans.

The Veronica Mars is a more perfect example of my point. The movie was primarily funded by a Kickstarter campaign, run by the stars of the show and creator Rob Thomas. The Kickstarter reached $5.7 million in pledges from fans. The fans of the show literally paid to have this movie made–that’s how passionate the fan base is. Those who contributed certain amounts got perks too–like small extra roles, or online access to the movie. The film has gotten mixed reviews (I, for one, loved it!) but the launch has reprised a lot of discussions about how before-it’s-time the show was, like this one about rape culture  or this one about social class. My point is though, that TV is more influenced by fans than ever before.

Good or bad? Both. I loved that both these shows got their much-needed endings, but there is something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie. The Veronica Mars movie was, in my opinion, good, the Arrested Development season 4 was bad. You know when a kid wants candy and you give it to them and then they get sick from too much sugar? Catering to fans’ whims has the potential to end up like that, and networks need to watch out for being too responsive to fan requests.  

 1. The phenomenon of “binge watching.”

Binge watching is new, created by the ability to access shows online with the internet. Binge watching is defined as 2-6 episodes of one show in a sitting. The only precursor was perhaps the TV marathon, but I don’t really think that counts because even in a marathon, the TV network still did stop airing the marathon at some point. 

We now have the ability to sit on our asses and watch a show for as long as we please. I am absolutely being a gigantic hypocrite right now, because I have totally binge watched quite a few shows, but I am trying to make some effort to stop. Binge watching is when you let Netflix play until the wee hours of the morning, watching a show until it really barely makes sense anymore. It’s when you get that immediate gratification of watching the next episode instead of actually thinking about what you just watched. Roughly 61% of respondents to a Netflix Survey last year say they regularly binge watch. 

Good or bad? Guys, I’ve got to think this is a bad thing. First, I have binge watched many a show that I can barely remember the next day. It’s impossible to thoroughly pay attention to anything that long, at least with the kind of attention that allows you to appropriately appreciate the show. It takes away the ability to talk about the show with your friends and coworkers the next day the way you can when the show is aired once a week on a network. And finally, as big a fan as I am of TV, that’s just too much. So here’s a suggestion–go ahead and binge-watch, in moderation. But take some time to appreciate what you’re watching. And remember, things are changing about TV and you don’t want it all to pass you by because you can’t stop watching House of Cards.

—

Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured Image Courtesy: [Flickr/Wesley Fryer]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Meld of Internet and TV…Good or Bad? appeared first on Law Street.