billboards, radio, television, newspapers, advertisements, World Wide Web, books, CDs, video cassettes, SMS, computer games, mobile computers; we are besieged by these media.
Today’s world is dominated by the power of the media. Different images, analyses, news and realities are produced according to the attitudes, attachments and ideologies of the Media and all of these may belong to sponsors who are of different racial, ethnic, religious, political, economic and identical origins; People who support the media financially, ideologically and politically. So the reality produced cannot be the real reality because it feeds on the ideological points of view of the sponsors.
What Baudrillard referred to as “hyperreality” refers to the artificiality of the real that blurs the boundaries between the “real” and “simulation, entertainment, and actuality” (quoted by Barker, 2001: 212).
The United States, as a multicultural society with diverse racial and ethnic groups, is of concern in this article as it focuses on blacks and how the media as message producers or transmitters of ‘signal vehicles’ (cited by Rojek, 2003; 94 ) in this Melton Pot is exerting the power of ethno-racial construction.
Breed has been a controversial issue since the exploration of America. It is woven into the warp and woof of American society and permeates all social institutions, and the media is no exception.
Media with the potential to disseminate facts, information, and opinions have a special place in American society. According to Media Policy 101 statistics, the average American spends more than 4 hours a day watching TV, 78% of adults listen to the radio, 88% of Americans believe the Internet plays an important role in their daily routine and the average American child watches 40,000 commercials per year. About 12 million viewers watch the nightly news on ABC, NBC, and CBS (Jacobs, 2000; 24).
And how are ethnic and racial groups like African-Americans represented in this important venue?
In the United States, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that we find black families in television drama (Barker, 2000; 267). Hall believed this show was a sitcom that became symbolic of the degradation of blacks through its use of humor based on stereotypes. Media representations of people of color increased during the 1980-90s.
Stuart Hall believes that there are binary forms of representation between ‘them’ as white and ‘us’ as black. White has always been represented as good and black as bad, respectively civilized/primitive and attractive/ugly. Takaki also in ‘The Storm in the Desert’ showed this kind of binary position in the case of the British and the Irish (Takaki, 1993; 28). Although these two are of the same origin, the British consider themselves to be civilized and educated, but the Irish are natural and wild.
This misrepresentation and ignorance also happens to Arabs in Hollywood movies. Norman Solomon indicated that Arabs in Hollywood are always portrayed as dirty, untrustworthy, violent, and lewd (Solomon, 2004; 4).
media support ideologies
Althussers was a Marxist philosopher who defined a concept of ideology. He believed that ideology is one of the three levels of social formation. This concept means representation system as images, myths, ideas or concepts (Barker, 2000; 77). Ideology constitutes subjects and subjects are fragmented and have plural subject positions. Ideology is understood as a material phenomenon rooted in everyday conditions. In his definition, there are four Ideological State Apparatuses:
1.family
2.educational system (transmit the ideology of the ruling class)
3.church
4. media
For me, ideology can be one of the important factors in the formation of the media.
In America, since 1975, two-thirds of independent newspapers and one-third of television owners have disappeared. Just 4% of radio stations and less than 2% of television stations are owned by people of color.
The reason for the misrepresentation of African Americans goes back to occult ideologies. The existence of racial media depends on the existence of racial ideology.
Based on the above statistics, I believe that the American media is becoming more and more dominant in the masses and they decide not only what to see, but also how to think and believe in “produced reality”. I can also say that almost the power of the media is controlled by white Americans, not people of color. This shows how much they are marginalized from the mainstream space of society and how racial ethnic power also exists in the media.
Gramsci, ideology and hegemony
Gramsci, an Italian writer, politician, and political theorist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, defined hegemony as “a situation in which a historical bloc of ruling class factions exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate classes” ( cited by Barker, 2000; 80).
He believed that the representation of the formal education system as a meritocracy and people of color as naturally inferior and less capable than white people is shaped by ideology. The hegemonic bloc, as he said, is not a single socioeconomic category, perhaps ideology plays a crucial role in group alliances. In Gramsci’s words, hegemony has to be constantly remade and renamed.
To have these two theories as a model, I believe that African Americans have experienced subservience to whites throughout history and this historical block has existed since the exploration of America. The history of slavery and torture against black Americans was a cycle of rebuilding and regaining hegemony for white Americans.
During the 1960-1970s, the United States experienced a race crisis that caused so many professionals and journalists to organize a series of conferences to consider racial issues. At that time the media was deficient in the neutrality of racial issues. Carolyn Martindale in her pamphlet “The White Press and Black America” stated that the media had failed on three issues:
1. Cover blacks as a normal part of American society instead of reinforcing and promoting stereotypes.
2. Portray the problems facing black Americans.
3. Explain the causes and underlying condition of African Americans.
According to Martindale (1986) and Campbell (1995), African-Americans in the news are portrayed as criminals related to guns and violence (cited by Barker, 2000; 269).
So far, in reviewing the theories of Althusser and Gramsci, I have grown tired of saying that the representation of blacks in the American media implies the existence of concepts of ideology and hegemony. Clearly, media such as newspapers, television, websites, and other forms (mentioned in the introduction) are dominated more by white power in America and blacks, a part of the American population, are subservient to white and black exceptionalism. white hegemony in directing and sponsoring the media.
Also white media produce reality that can be hyperreality involving white values and ideologies. Media have this capability for two reasons:
1. The media are managed by the corporation’s capital, so profits play an important role in the production of reality. In my idea, the media is a capitalist phenomenon that lives only on money.
2. The media create reality and what they offer audiences is a version of “hallucinatory resemblance” (Barker, 2000; 212)
According to Nietzsche, pure knowledge is inadmissible and nothing more than the convenience of a certain race and species (quoted by Barker, 2000; 199). That is why today in the media we have different narrations for the same event. Each medium interprets the world with its own eyes. This goes back to the media feature. I believe that the media are not and cannot be a neutral phenomenon. It is basically oriented to profit, regardless of economic, cultural or political.
The media as a tool to form public opinion are more worrying for politicians and government agendas. Governments can stabilize their hegemony over the control of the media and the persuasion of the masses by ideologies. Censorship and articulation of specific news, the representation of minorities as problems, alterization and racial/ethnic discriminations are policies of the sponsors of the media. I think the media has this capability everywhere, it’s not specified in a particular part of the world, but the difference is in the amount and degree of interference.