Is the Media Diverse Enough?

Recently diversity has been coming up a lot in modern topics, as well as things that have been discussed for a while. Diversity is something important in our society, it’s something that although there is a lot of, there can always be more. There are many arguments about what we should strive for, some arguments better than others, but we should all be trying to improve how we handle our issues about diversity.

It is always good to have many different influences from around the world, which is to say we shouldn’t just be given certain news and entertainment from just one point of view. In the world of cinema, we have seen a lot of movies in America featuring primarily white leads. It is not an issue for a film to star a caucasian actor, but some people believe that when most films are starring the same kind of person it becomes a problem. A reason that we make films that mostly star white actors is that we live in a primarily white populated country. According to the New York Times in a 2018 study, 70.7 percent of all films the year before starred a white-skinned actor (which includes light-skinned Hispanics). This study can be taken two ways. One problem that many people have with this is that it is over seventy percent of the films that are made don’t star a person of color. On the other hand, we live in a country that is 72 percent white populated which would make the films being made technically more diverse than the country actually is, which makes the movie industry more diverse than the reality we live in. This means that the viewers are represented accurately while also more being diverse.

Movies aren’t the only type of entertainment media though. The music industry has for a while been pretty diverse and has only been improving. In the fifties, almost all of the music industry was dominated by the white majority, but recently the top sellers of the year have become incredibly diverse. In 1993, 8 of the top 10 best sellers were made by African American musicians according to Billboard magazine. In 2000 it was a diverse mix of white, African American, and multicultural artists are the top artists of this year are 50 percent minority.

The writing industry is just as important as music and film, but the racial diversity is far from comparable. On Amazon’s 2018 list of best-selling books, there was only one author of color (Michelle Obama for her book “Becoming Michelle Obama”). The diversity of authors in this country is not as much as it is in other media, as only ten percent or less of the best selling authors are of color.  Part of the reason that the best selling writers are white is that the primary amount of people who get a job in writing are white. In a PUMS file, it shows that only 14.2 percent of the writers and authors in the country are of color, which would make only about 14.2 percent of books being written be from authors of color.

The issue with the lack of diversity in the media is not the lack of diversity, it is the perception of diversity. When people say there isn’t an accurate representation of diversity in the media they really mean there isn’t an equal amount of diversity in the media. In most cases, the amount of diversity is fairly accurate or even more diverse than what we really have in this country. When you criticize an industry for something that is out of their control, it only makes them have to work harder for an unrealistic representation of people. It isn’t a bad thing for people to want a variety of actors in movies but it helps no one when you hide behind a mask of justice to have a simple change of actors. If enough people have enough demand for this change the supply will increase and it would work the way it needs to.