Wow, Connections!

I really didn't know what to make of Wednesday's class discussion on hegemony and the like. It added to my theory of the media being something really creepy, but I really didn't make any connections about whether or not I've really noticed it. However, when I found myself reading a book for my research paper a few hours later, I came across a sentence that made me really think. It's referring to 1950s cinema and television and the amount of Antiblack and anti-Semetic attitudes.

""Media executives sought to indulge the prejudices of their majority audiences while not foisting too much egregoious offensiveness onto minority-group members--who were ticket buyers and TV watchers themselves--or onto majority-group members who might not like to think of themselves as prejuidiced or mean-spirited even if they did accept demeaning images of minorities."

Stop. Rewind. Go back to Wednesday's notes: "Media Agenda Thoery: the media tells us what issues we should care about."

So, in the 50s, according to all this, media producers tried riduclously hard to make it seem like racism didn't exist. If people didn't see it on the big screen, why should they worry when they saw it in the real world? After I read this, I thought back on all the old movies I've seen. I was startled to realize that I honestly can't think of ONE that featured a black actor or a Jewish actor in the foreground. Even "The Diary of Anne Frank," which is about the Holocaust, doesn't really talk about it. The movie tries to make it seem like the Holocaust wasn't really taht big of a deal--people everywhere have to suffer, and this time it was the turn of the Jewish people. CRAZY!

The book went on to site a Gregory Peck movie that tried to tackle the subject of racism: when Peck's son came home crying because people made fun of his Jewishness, Peck told him "Oh, don't worry. You're not REALLY Jewish!" WHAT?! How does that help anything?

Of course, now racism is a subject we can't escape in the media. It's in every cheesy tv sitcom, every big budget movie, every novel, blah blah blah. So what pressing topic is the media ignoring now? What information are we missing out on these days because the "Big 10" don't feel like tackling them just yet?

In the words of Allen Ginsberg, "America, this is quite serious."

My media blog is quickly turning into a paranoid rant.