In the nineteen fifties when I grew up, shows such as Father Knows Best and Westerns reflected the morals of the times. In the nineteen sixties, although there were shows such as Leave it to Beaver,there developed a disturbing trend in the late sixties with shows such as Bewitched and the Munsters putting a peaceful face on the horror shows our parents and grandparents watched at the cinema.
In these witchcraft became good and beneficial, witches and monsters were seen as ordinary people with strange powers, not the denizens of hell that they really were. Now we see an increase in psychic readings, witchcraft as a good force, and Christianity, the only thing necessary to stop this, is shown as a hypocritical religion.
Television and movies also influence family life Have you noticed that many of the shows in the nineteen sixties and seventies featured couples dating for inordinate periods of time so that it seemed their biological clock would run out before they popped the question?
In the eighties, we developed racially oriented television. I cannot count how many police show had black police captains, and how many had the sterotyped wise Japanese or Chinese. In fact, it still is that way now and we wonder why many young men of European ancestry do not go to University or drop out. In the nineties the Japanese and Chinese as well as the other nationalities were now viewed as the rest of us with all the traits of goodness and badness that makes up the human population. The blacks, however, were now shown as very good even when they were on the side of wrong, knowledgable and the holders of moral values as so perfect. (Star Trek Voyager makes fun of this attitude with Tuvok.) We also had shows in which the black cop or partner had children while his white partner was single, had no children, or going through a divorce after a childless marriage.
This trend has now increased and the media is to blame. Most shows put blacks in superior positions, teachers, police chiefs, heads of companies, etc. The danger in this that it discourages those who are non black (that is white) from trying. Now not only are the blacks in superior positions, but they are usually arrogant,and bossy. However, when I watched a documentary about a murder, the police chief there (who incidentally lived in an area with a high black population) answered the interviewer's questions with decency and politeness, showing that television does not echoe real life. You cannot stereotype ethnic groups and you cannot get ahead at the expense of others.
Now in twenty first century, we have the shows in which if there is a pregnancy and a birth, the child is always, every single time, a girl We have shows where if a child dies, it is a boy, not a girl. If a boy lives, it is usually non white. (Now I hope this trend does not continue, I do not want to see any increase in the membership of such organizations as White Supremecists and the KKK who would be watching these shows.) I even watched a show where one of the heroines said to one of the characters that "your son died so that little girl could live." It seems that baby boys and little boys are a dying race on television land. So how do we change this?
Apart from writing to television stations, whenever an actor or an actress has a baby boy, those who are on posts can write with the same enthusiam as when the actor or actress has a baby girl. If one writes fan fiction, don't kill off the boys. Don't just make the boys in minority races. If you are writing a continuing story speculating the hero and heroine, have a least one of the children a boy, and don't make him die or (in the case of one particular story I read) all the boys die in infancy while the two sisters survived. Not real life.
We can remember that not all boys grow up to be wife abusers, some actually become decent citizens and how many of you "I want the baby of this particular show to be a girl because they are so cute and innocent" are able to carry down a two hundred pound unconscious man down a ladder from a blazing building? If television were real life, are any of you girls or women willing to work as hard as your fathers or husbands or brothers the whole time up until you are sixty five or beyond, with the same intensity, in the same hard jobs they do? Not every woman is built like a Word Federation Champion.
Television, Movies, and Ethnicity and How They are Played Out
First I believe there are two races on Earth, the Children of God and the Children of the World. However for those who believe that there is a white race, a yellow race, a red race, and a black race (making it simple), it often influences the roles the particular ethnic group plays on Movies and Televsions. Today, mostly when watching a show about someone being victimized, wrongly accused of a crime, having his child denied a life savings operation, being pursued by the CIA, FBI, or whatever, being mistaken for a vicious criminal, etc., he is always an African American or Black (that's so we can distinguish if he was from the United States or from Jamaica or someplace else, but I doubt he was from the latter definition.)
Now giving that these horrible things could happen to everyone, when watching these shows, one gets the impression that the person was persecuted because he was African American. In other words, he was persecuted because of the color of his skin.
Such portrayal of the media is wrong and diminishes the sympathy and help to those who are not black who are being wrongly accused, etc. It also makes people blaise about black people in the Sudan who are being persecuted for being Christians.See Sudanpage.Unfortunately the media only got interested when the Arabians from the North started attacking all the Black people in the Sudan, not just the Christians, but also the Moslems and Animists.
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