Pink Brick

In honor of Pride 2008, here’s a clip of Mikayla Connell delivering the Pink Brick Award to Bill O’Reilly earlier this month.

About the Pink Brick:

The Pink Brick recipient is a person or institution which has done significant harm to the interests of LGBT peoples to receive the Pink Brick. This person is selected by public vote for receipt of the Pink Brick, a faux award that represents the first brick hurled at the Stonewall Rebellion on June 27, 1969. (Read more here)

 

Pundits Lacking Diversity

I don’t have a television, so I often watch shows on the internet. I can watch full episodes of “Lost” and “The Office,” and I follow baseball games with the little online graphics MLB puts out. I don’t really miss TV at all. But the other night I was struck by the fact that in order to watch a live feed of McCain, Clinton and Obama’s speeches, I was forced to sit and listen to white male after white male talk about how historic Barack Obama’s nomination is. Where are the people that look like me? Where are the people that represent any of the diversity of our country?

Nicholas D. Kristof asks, “Are We ‘Too Male and Too White’?” in response to Deborah Howell’s article about the need for diverse voices in Washington Post Op-Ed pieces. She cites some numbers:

Of 19 weekly or biweekly columnists, 17 are men. Post editorial writer Ruth Marcus and former Post editorial writer Anne Applebaum are the only women with regular weekly slots. Two male columnists are African American — Colby King and Gene Robinson. Fareed Zakaria, who also writes for Post-owned Newsweek, was born and raised in India.

Ari Melber at The Nation discusses “White Male Pundit Power.”

The disparity is striking on air. Most anchors, producers and writers in television news are women, according to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, yet the vast majority of prime time hosts, who dominate campaign coverage and frame presidential debates, are white men. That includes all the Sunday morning hosts, all the prime time hosts on MSNBC, and all but one of the prime time hosts on CNN and FOX.

According to a recent, two-year study of the four major Sunday talk shows by Media Matters, out of over 2,000 guests, 77 percent were men and 82 percent were white. The top rated show, “Meet the Press,” also led the pack in male representation, at an embarrassing 85 percent. Latinos were almost completely absent, comprising one percent of the guests. Latinos make up about 14 percent of the population, and the study ran through 2006 and 2007, when immigration policy was often in the news.

Why does it matter that white men are overrepresented in the media? Because it teaches people that white men’s voices are the most important. It suggests that the voices of women and people of color are less valid or less qualified to weigh in on important issues affecting everyone. Most of all, it visually and psychologically keeps the power in the hands of white men.

Why should you care?

The way the public looks at issues – and whether or not the public is even aware of
certain issues like fair housing and voter discrimination – is directly related to the way
these issues are covered by media. The way that media covers these issues is directly
related to who is employed by the media – the reporters, producers and anchors who tell
the stories. Who is employed by the media is directly related to who owns the media.
And who owns the media is directly related to policies that determine who gets a federal
license to operate and who does not. (Media Diversity Matters)