Welcome to the University of North Texas for Fall 2021! After a year and a half of Covid shrinking my world to only 5 miles, In-person classes are back in session at UNT. I have to admit that I am very nervous, mostly because no one knows how long this normality will last with the Delta variant now in the US. In my class Jour 4250 – Race, Gender & Media, I have been tasked with creating and maintaining a blog for the semester; for a girl who always gave up writing in her dairies after 3 days, this will be interesting.
Dr. Bland, my professor for that class, raised some very thought-provoking questions during the lecture. two of which were, “What are the different types of diversity?” and “Do I have the ability to critically understand media content?”. For the first one, diversity is in itself diverse. To me simply have a black person or a gay person is not true diversity; to achieve that you must have a certain percentage of different people to have real diversity. If a single person is made a representative of a demographic, that’s not diversity that tokenism.
For the latter, I feel that for 100% of Americans (including myself) we have come to understand that the media is part of a bigger machine that wants media consumers to think and act a certain way for the profit of big companies. Where we split is whether we want to be told a boring truth or an exciting lie. Turn on any news channel, such Fox News or CNN, and all you will see is yellow journalism and artfully crafted bald-faced lies that would make any lawyer blush. It really does worry me that this way of reporting stories will only get worse and we’ll suffer more for it. As much as I would like to have the hope of this situation improving, as long as media companies continue to make millions off of people’s fears and ignorances, I highly doubt that it will.
Perfectly Imperfect 