“African-American Males in Advertisements in Primarily African-American Magazines”

Summary of Previous Findings
In study one, African-American men are often represented in ads, but mostly in ads for clothes shoes and accessories. In study two, African-American men were not seen often but they usually played major roles when they were shown.

Summary of the Previous Study
The study conducted by Ainsworth Anthony Bailey was done in two different parts. The first part used ads from two magazines aimed at an African-American audience and the second used two African-American magazines and two “mainstream” magazines. The first part of the study showed that African-American males are often only shown in nonoccupational roles or had limited portrayals in business or work-related settings, and while the second study showed a broader range of products advertised, the settings and roles were still similar.

Most Important Foundation Literature and Its Relation to the Current Study
The most important literature used by Bailey was a combination of two studies. The first was Shuey, King and Griffith’s “Stereotyping of Negroes and Whites: An Analysis of Magazine Pictures” from 1953 which described how African-Americans were portrayed in the .6% of ads they were in. The second was Taylor and Lee’s “Portrayals of African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans in Magazine Advertisements” from 1995 which showed an increase in the number of ads depicting African Americans rising and the role portrayals and products advertised improving. This literature was a basis for Bailey’s study of how African-American men are portrayed in the new genre of magazines directed toward the African-American market.

Corpus and Method
My corpus consists of full-page ads found in the January 2006 issue of Ebony and December 2005 issue of VIBE. This is a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the number of ads featuring African-American males, the products being advertised and the role the man seems to portray.

Findings





The men shown in the VIBE issue studied were advertising one of four things—shoes, clothes, liquor or CDs—with almost no exceptions. They were mostly shown with nothing around them to indicate class, though the products advertised would indicate that the people would have money. Most of the men shown are well-known, successful and respected in their fields. The men in Ebony, on the other hand, were shown advertising cars, the U.S. Navy, and a service offered for cell phone ring tones. The men in these ads appear to be more successful than those in VIBE. The men in VIBE are dressed in what is typically thought of as “hip-hop” fashion whereas those in Ebony are all well dressed. Only one ad in each magazine puts the man in the setting of his job. One is the director of “A Raisin in the Sun” sitting in the middle of an empty theatre and the other is a man who is a law student standing in the middle of a courtroom—oddly enough, this ad is for Honda.

Conclusions
This study fits the previous study pretty much exactly. Though the men in Ebony’s ads were portrayed in more professional and successful ways than in VIBE, the percentage of ads featuring African-American males is almost insignificant in comparison. One difference between this study and the previous one may be the use of all of the full-page ads in the magazines. The previous study does not say if Bailey used ads that did not include people in the design. The portrayal of African-American men in television commercials as compared to print ads might be a study that would be worthwhile to conduct.

A heated discussion

Today in class we talked about racism in how news stories were brought to the public. Before this discussion started we read one article and one op-ed piece that dealt with the Natalee Holloway and Latoyia Figueroa cases, with most of the discussion centering on the op-ed piece. Most of the people in class were talking about the concepts and ideas the author was trying to express and whether or not she was being facetious in the blatant hypocrisies she employed in her writing, and I understood and fully agreed with some of the points brought up in class, but as a copy editor I was looking more at the not-so-obvious discrepancies that appeared. There were little ones, like the use of unwed mother instead of single mother, or saying a woman was an immigrant and later saying she was here legally rather than saying she was a naturalized citizen or using other, not-so-loaded, terminology for her status.

Then there was a less obvious but, to me, more egregious one; this one was how the columnist used the names of the women. After the first reference to Latoyia Figueroa and the Hernandez woman--I'm sorry I don't have the article in front of me so I can't remember her first name--the author only identifies these women by their last names, occasionally with Ms. preceding it. Natalee Holloway, on the other hand, is never referred to by anything other than her full name and Laci Peterson is either referred to as Laci or Laci Peterson. The only time either of these two women is not listed by both names is when the article talks about the Peterson case, which is not so much a reference to her as it is to both her and her husband.

These are just a few of the problems that I found with the way this columnist wrote about this subject.

"We don't make the news, we just report it." This quote was used in the video today, and I just have to comment on it and some other aspects of today's discussion. My hometown has barely more than 3,000 people in it and I received my bachelor's from a college that had just fewer than 7,000 people attending. Both put out weekly papers, and I worked on the paper at ASU so I have some experience with small newspapers. In both places it was very easy to see that there was never really any news; we had to scrape the bottom of the barrell to fill a six page paper in a week. When that is how the paper is being filled, the editors are not just reporting the news, they are making it; because, honestly, who is interested in reading a 300 word article about the show in the planetarium. I wrote it and saw the whole six people who were there for the FREE show. Nobody cared.

Another issue I think should be discussed at some point is how diversity is achieved in the newsroom. The authors touched on newspapers hiring of minorities, mostly in reference to race, using affirmative action. Affirmative action is one of the movements that I think had good intentions behind it initially, but it doesn't always work in the intended way. I'm all for newsrooms being diverse, but I don't think that diversity should be forced above all else. If qualified people apply for positions, then, yes, hire them no matter if they are "black, white or polka-dotted" but don't limit the search to those in a minority group. If you have to go to extreme measures to find a qualified applicant that is part of a minority group, rather than finding a minority who is interested enough to search out your company, then that applicant is probably not who you want working for your media company.

By all means, go to schools with a higher percentage of minorities attending to let them know of job opportunities that they might not know of, but don't JUST go to those schools because you might miss out on a great young writer who is a part of the majority.

Stereotypes. They are seen in everything, but how true are they; should they all be deleted from memory, is it possible to completely get rid of them, or will new just pop up in place of the old ones? Many stereotypes are slowly coming into disuse in the public, but that is never talked about; neither is the fact that some stereotypes are in no way derogatory. All the stereotypes discussed are the ones that are negative and very visible to the public. This needs to change.