The Importance Of Diversity In The Media

The film industry was created for white people by white people. Therefore diversity has had no part in the media when it first took place, and to this day it is yet to be achieved. Diversity in the media is a wide variety of different races, cultures, and religions. The media consists of TV shows, movies, radio, news, and social media. Today, the media is incredibly more diverse than when it first started,but it 's yet to be where it should be. Diversity in the media is very crucial for society, Michelle Sanchez’s article about importance of diversity has even said, “Media remains a critical element in achieving equal opportunity and full participation in civic life” (Nam par.3). Due to its capability of having such an impact it, what is being

The media has struggled to achieve diversity. The graph above reflects the percentage of diversity in the top 100 films of 2014. Just by looking at the graph, one can see the significant difference between the percentage of white actors than the rest of the races. White actors makeup 73.1 percent of the actors leaving only 26.9 percent for acting roles for minorities showing that diversity has yet to be achieved. Even though society is supposedly evolving there is less than fifty percent of the acting roles that were going to minorities.
Diversity in the media is important for adolescents to create a sense of worth and to build self-esteem of adolescents. If diversity was in the media for children to see, they could have something of value, to look up to, to aspire to be, and to feel appreciated. Michael Nam has even said, “A lack of representative diversity can deeply affect ambitions and aspirations of the underrepresented from an early age.” (Nam par.3). At such a young age a child’s self-esteem can be affected by what they see. Nam has also brought up a study showing white males are likely to to increase whilst it decreases for white girls and black children with consumption of television media (Nam par.3). Showing evidence that this an actual problem society faces He has also mentioned the effects of the way news outlets talk about minorities. “These homogenized story choices can, in turn, affect the diverse communities in terms of how they view authoritative sources like the mainstream media and how they view themselves.”(Nam par.3) Revealing that the way the media treat minorities is the reasoning for how minorities feel about themselves and authoritative