Importance Of Diversity In The Media

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Embracing diversity in the media is important because it will shed light on the importance of protecting against racial stereotyping. Racial stereotyping is a well know problem that all minorities have faced. Racial stereotyping is when a person has preconceived notions on a person because they are of a certain race. A great deal of stereotyping stems from the media’s lack of diversity that has casted stereotypes towards minorities. Not only does the media have a scarcely portrayal of minorities, but when they do, they repetitively show them in a repetitive negative manner, which is how stereotypes form. For example, when Michael Nam discusses how the news chooses to depict a person in a certain manner because of that person’s race “The type of coverage that gets chosen by editorial staffs then reinforce stereotypes rather than clarifies the news. This is apparent in the different ways white subjects and black subjects are portrayed, such as black victim Michael Brown, who ‘struggled with police before the shooting,’ versus white Aurora shooter James Eagan Holmes, remembered as a ‘brilliant science student’ ”(Nam …show more content…

Diversity in the media will bring awareness to situations that are happening in communities that not everyone is accessible to that, in turn, can better those circumstances. Due to the lack of diversity in the media, it has put a strain in minority communities which Nam goes on to quote Dori J. Maynard, “Lacking these voices, the ability of the media to serve the public interest is itself compromised. ‘The news media is not only failing to serve the communities, but the country at large when they fail to reflect what’s going on in communities of color,” said the late Dori J. Maynard, former President of the Robert C.’(Nam par.2) and the causes the media to fail in not informing people everything that's going on but Instead picks and chooses what they