Is it in the Picture??

For the past week I have been observing advertisements that I see daily. I observed these advertisements in three different ways or mediums, these beings a magazine, two newspaper inserts, and television. Below are brief descriptions of some of the advertisements and specifications on the race and gender present in all of them.

Liz Claiborne Ad in Glamour (April '09) pg 39
There are 6 individuals in the ad and five were women. One is black and one woman is clearly older. The older woman is positioned in the front of the ad. The black woman is in the background. She is not as easily seen as the rest of the models in the picture.

Here is an example of an ad similar to the one that I viewed in the magazine.

Lacoste Ad in Glamour
There are four people in the ad. 2 men and 2 women. The only there are two people whose faces are not all the way in the ad. One of them happens to be an Asian female. Her face is cut in half by the edge of the advertisement. It makes me wonder why did they do this. They could have easily fit her into the ad. I know it could have been done when editing this picture.

Community Ad's for the week

Ad for Dots:
Dot's is a new fashion store opening in the Norman area. There are two different girls featured in the add. There are two females one seems to be South American and the other seems to be black or of mixed race. The women who seems to be black or of mixed race is light skinned with a less ethnic grade of hair.

Swing Set at Walmart
There are five children playing on the swing set. There are three girls and two boys. Three out of the five children seem to be non white.

Television ads

Cars (Disney XD)
Commercials During the movie that were not Cartoon commercials:
Fashion n' Studio: Three white girls
Hot wheels: Black and white boy
Disney Vacations: 3 different minorities and whites in the commercial

Catch Me if You Can (TNT)
Centrum Silver: White couple
Verizon: White customer and an Asian Salesman
DirecTV: Black and White men in a bank robbery
Maybelline: White Woman
Colgate: Brooke Shields
Sports and Movie Ads:

Coming to America ( Bravo)
Cheerios: White Man, white woman w/ Child, Black Woman with Husband
Turbo Tax: Same as above
Slumdog Millionaire Movie
Hoover Vacuum: White woman and Man
Joe's Crab Shack: White group of friends

This is what I observed from the magazine ads. When there we ad's with African American women as the only model they fit a certain type. They were light skinned and and had more of white features( Beyonce, Halle, random black model with green eyes).
For advertisements on television it is only natural to notice that they reflect the type of channel that is being viewed and the actual individual show. Most shows that are most likely to be viewed by adults were the ones that showed non whites in the typical ways described by the Coltrane reading. That is being in the background and subservient to white authority figures. Most of these advertisements illustrated these roles and did not deviate extremely from commercial to commercial, the trend was similar
I noticed that when I viewed a cartoon(Cars), which is geared towards children the ads had more minorities in roles. In a typical commercial break, there would only be one commercial with n all white cast. This makes me think that the generation that watches these are going to be more receptive to diversity on advertisements that were before hem. This is a good thing because they are starting at a younger age.
As far as gender goes, most of the commercials had females in them. They were in typical roles though. For example in the Joe's Crab Shack commercial their are several people sitting at a table and one of them is a female. Her food comes out and it has a cover over it. The guy asks her to take her top off, referring to the top of her food but it does have a sexual undertone because the female misunderstands him at first.

In my opinion, the advertisements were disappointing. I wanted to believe that stereotypical roles no longer prevalent in todays advertisements but I couldn't. It is very evident once I began to observe the trends in the advertisements.

News Tracking

After tracking the crime sections of news cast I was not surprised. It really did not seem to be anything strange about the way the stories were being displayed. I saw no correlation between the anchor of a crime story and the offender. I also saw no correlation between the race of an victim to the race of the offender. Most of the time the race of the victims were not obvious.  

The main things that I noticed were that most crimes that were being seen on the newscast were done by people who were not white. I don't know if this says that white people do not commit crimes but it does seem to subtly give that impression. This seems makes me wonder why it seemed that most criminals were not white. I know that people do not want to see people that are similar to them being portrayed in a negative light and if the majority of a news audience is a certain race then maybe they are less likely to cover those stories in their newscasts. If so, this is not right but it would help in making the audience favor their news over other news channels. 

Do minorities tend to do more crimes than whites? Are the only news worthy crimes being done by minorities? These are questions that need to be answered in order to figure out if the news fair and balanced. If this is not what statistics show about crimes in a certain area then more accuracy need to be displayed in the news. Fair and balanced news goes beyond whether or not both sides of a story are being covered. It needs to illustrate all standpoints of society. If their is proof on whether a certain race does more crimes than the other then that can be displayed in the news, if not then whatever the crime trend is should be reflected in the news.