WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
The new study released Feb. 22 on the motion picture and television industry about diversity in entertainment media is nothing new. It merely confirmed what minority actors and pop-culture pundits have been saying for years, Hollywood is "an old boys" club that systematically excludes African/Americans, Asian/Americans, Hispanic/Americans and other people of color.
Even as America is shifting to a minority majority country, you wouldn't know it by watching the movies and TV shows coming out of what most people consider the entertainment capitol of the world.
The USC report "Inclusion or Invisibility: Comprehensive Report on Diversity in Entertainment," concluded that an "epidemic of invisibility" runs throughout the entertainment media industry as if people of color didn't exist in America.
It is as if the media industry is in a time warp where it is perpetually stuck in 1950.
RELATED: #OscarsSoWhite - The SequelA study released by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism gives a failing grade to every movie studio and most TV networks.
Stacy L. Smith, a USC professor and one of the study's authors, said, "The prequel to OscarsSoWhite is HollywoodSoWhite," in reference to the hashtag that went viral on social media when all of the 20 the Oscar acting nominees turned out to be all white for the 2015 awards show. For the second straight year, the nominees for this year's Academy Awards that will air next weekend, didn't include a single actor of color or a single movie dominated by minority actors. Only the nomination of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the film Revenant broke the string of blinding whiteness.
Characters from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups are also excluded or erased from mediated storytelling. No platform presents a profile of race/ethnicity that matches proportional representation in the U.S. Over 50% of stories featured no Asian speaking characters, and 22% featured no Black or African/American characters. The complete absence of individuals from these backgrounds is a symptom of a diversity strategy that relies on tokenistic inclusion rather than integration.
Some of the more striking discrepancies include the fact that only a third of all speaking characters are female, at least half of all stories don't include a speaking African-American or Asian character, and females represent less than a quarter of all top executives. In short, the film and television industry does not match the demographic breakdown of the United States.
"Hollywood is not really (about) numbers, more so than it is nepotism," said Miki Turner, a full time lecturer at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. "People tend to hire the people they know and [that] look like them."
Including more underrepresented directors can lead to more diversity on screen, too. Only 26.2 percent of on screen characters came from underrepresented backgrounds whenever there was a white director. However, that numbers rose to 43.7 percent when a minority directed a project.
It appears that race, ethnicity and gender have a direct impact on what groups are represented on screen. Instead of hiring actors based on talent, these other factors play a more influential role.""People are invisible. Every person deserves to be seen and heard. These data make a compelling case that storytellers need to think beyond their own bias.”
"We see a titled reality of exclusion for different groups," Smith said. "My hope is that companies will… take actionable steps… to be more inclusive, so that we can see talent that looks like the population of the United States thriving on screen and behind the camera."
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