Media & Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment (Spectrum Series) (Spectrum Series: Race and Ethnicity in National and Global Politics) - Softcover

Stephanie Greco Larson has provided an invaluable service by synthesizing a vast quantity of studies of entertainment media and news about racial and ethnic minorities, about civil rights movements, and about elected officials of color. The recurrent patterns she finds across media, across subject matters, and across different races and ethnicities are vividly presented, sobering, and of importance to those both inside and outside of the media. -- Timothy Cook, Reilly Chair in Political Communication, Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University Media & Minorities is a wonder of empirically-grounded comparative research that both illuminates current realities and helps set the agenda for work that will be done in the future. This substantial volume will be a standard reference for those in academia, public policy circles, and community-based media organizations. -- Darrell Y. Hamamoto, University of California, Davis Media & Minorities is a must-read not only for political junkies but also for ordinary people who are trying to figure out why minority stereotypes are so ubiquitous on entertainment shows and how those same images are employed in political discourse and in the coverage of minority candidates running for political office. In revealing how the media sometimes surreptitiously invoke stereotypes, Larson demonstrates how the choice of words, descriptions, and images can be used to malign minorities and their causes. Media & Minorities contains a sufficient compendium of research resources to satisfy scholars and enough accessibility to alert other readers to the complexity of media interaction with politics. It is also a wonderful tool for teaching students about the way the media, both broadcast and print, influence the entire political process. -- Wilbur C. Rich, Wellesley College [Larson] is to be commended for understanding her topic broadly: she targets both news broadcasting and popular entertainment (television, film, radio) and focuses not only on African Americans and Latino/as but also on Asian Americans and Native Americans. Her numerous film examples range from the contemporary to the classic to the obscure. Armed with thorough scholarly evidence, and selected original data, Larson looks at patterns in coverage of people, political movements, and politicians. * CHOICE * This is a god read for those interested in the representation of race and ethnicity in the media, especially in the U.S. Media & Minorities unravels a rich and captivating historical journey through the media coverage of diversity; it shows us what has changed and what has remained the same on screen and in press representations of Otherness * Ethnic and Racial Studies *

Media & Minorities looks at the media's racial tendencies with an eye to identifying the "system supportive" messages conveyed and offering challenges to them. The book covers all major media-including television, film, newspapers, radio, magazines, and the Internet-and systematically analyzes their representation of the four largest minority groups in the U.S.: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Entertainment media are compared and contrasted with news media, and special attention is devoted to coverage of social movements for racial justice and politicians of color.