Alyssa Rosenberg counted up the race and sex of the main characters on scripted prime-time network TV. I thought it would be interesting to present Alyssa’s count side-by-side with the US’s demographics.
Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled May 1, 2024A new cartoon for May Day! This has been an incredible year for unions in the USA - may next year be even better. Unions Have Always Done The Impossible! #PoliCartoon #Union #LaborDay2024 #MayDay2024 #May1st #UBI #LivingWage
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Wish there was a breakdown on “Asian or Latin@” as that’s a… very weird category.
Interesting.
I think it’s a difficult balance between accuracy, storytelling, and discrimination.
Accuracy would often produce disparate results: given the disproportionate white dominance of many industries there is probably a higher percentage of “highly respected POC partners or owners of large companies” on TV than there are in real life. And it’s probably even worse w/r/t men. In terms of reality, Asian and Indian under-representation on TV is rampant, especially w/r/t high level fields like tech or medicine.
It would be a much more telling workup if you ran a comparison with a bit more detail. I am not only saying that because the largest segment of the US population is “people whose lives are too boring to show up in a TV show,” but because casting, accuracy, and show theme are related. IOW, you would evaluate Grey’s Anatomy by comparing it to the racial makeup of surgeons; so on. They did that w/r/t a police department and it was much more compelling.
The %s are fucked.
alex is right. I figure “magical or is a robot” to be somewhere around 4%, especially if you count the robots inside most factories these days.
Re: Wish there was a breakdown on “Asian or Latin@” as that’s a… very weird category.
Each of those are weird categories by themselves.
Indians and Chinese have nothing in common with each other racially, but they’re grouped into the meaningless ‘Asian’ category. ‘Latino’ is somewhat more meaningful, but of course Latinos are a racially mixed population as well.
Not sure if this is what Alex meant, but the US population numbers can’t be correct–you have 31% white men, 6.5% black men, and 21% Asian/Latino men, for example, which totals to 58.5% of the population, and then say the male population is 49%.
The error is in the percentage of the country that is Asian or Latino. It should be 21% total, so 10% men and 11% women, not 21% men and 21% women.
Error? What error? You people must be experiencing a shared hallucination, since, as we can all plainly see, there is no such error in my table.
(Walks away, whistling innocently.)
I’m really fascinated that the two groups with representation approximately equal to real percentage are white women and black men. I don’t think I would have predicted that (though I’m not sure what I would have predicted, to be fair).
That one makes sense to me, if white people and black people have similar sex ratios on tv, and white people and men are both over represented, then if black people are underrepresented relative to white people by roughly the same ratio, then the under/over-represenation roughly cancels out for white women and black men.
The one I find most interesting is that the general over representation of men does not hold for the Asian/Latino category, where 2/3 of Asian or Latino characters are women, an even stronger and reversed disparity than the gender disparity for non-Latino whites and black people.
How big are spanish language networks in the US? Just wondering about hispanic under-representation.
Not wondering enough to actually plug it into google, apparently.
Of course, 25% of Latino households in the US speak only English at home. And the issue of representation is not just a matter of being able to find oneself represented.
Univision, the largest Spanish language network, is the fifth largest network in the US, although it is (roughly) tied with ABC in the 18-49 age range, which is how these things are often measured. CW and Telemundo are 6 and 7, but with substantially smaller viewership than any of the top five. (There’s an argument to drop Univision: it’s definitively below CBS, NBC and FOX. But TBH that also applies to ABC.)
That said, that not a lot of Hispanic people appear on English language television is either a reflection of a heavily segregated society or is failing to represent the presence of Hispanic people in society. Likewise, if there are no non-Hispanic people on Spanish language TV, it is similarly reflection of a segregation or a failure to represent the reality of Spanish-speaking American life.
I wish I could see more details of Alyssa’s counting methods and so on, because I’d love to be able to expand this to include Univision and see what happens (and to split Asian/Hispanic into Asian + Hispanic.)
(Also curious of Jews and Indians are over or under represented.)
A third of all people depicted on TV are in law enforcement? That’s remarkable.
Not “all people on TV” – it’s all main characters “of scripted prime-time shows on the big four networks.” That includes cops but also employees of various FBI type agencies. And yes, it is pretty remarkable. I wonder if it reflects an on-average larger cast size in the law-and-order genre?
[ETA: “also”.]
Also, there are a LOT of shows with cops. Looking at the current TV schedule: http://www.tvguide.com/special/fall-preview/fall-schedule.aspx , just about every network has at least one cop or FBI or other law-enforcement show every night. There are a few nights when there might be one network without one, but CBS certainly picks up the slack.
I for one am appalled that there is not better representation in the media of our proud magical-robot demographic.
When will our society cease its sorcerorobophobia?
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