Hip Hop and Race Portrayal in News - Essay Example

Is Media Power Increasing or Decreasing? Discussion Based on Gender Portrayal in Hip Hop and Race Portrayal in News Introduction According to Hibbert (2006, p. 4), the media occupies a central position in very many issues in life, standing between people and the world. The extent to which the media influences lives cannot be overstated and does not necessitate quoting of statistics for it to be appreciated as there is enough evidence that nearly all individuals cannot go through a day without making use of one or more of the different forms of media. With the traditional position of the media as an immensely powerful object in the society appreciated and accepted, an issue arises on whether such power is increasing or decreasing. As people gravitate towards liberalism and independence, the influence that the media has on society is now in question. The study aims to establish whether the media power is increasing or decreasing. The selected strategy to do this is through an analysis of hegemonic discourses of gender and race through the use of two media examples. These are the genre of hip hop and the film. The guiding thesis for this study is that the power of the media is still increasing albeit not always along the traditional ways. Hegemonic Discourses of Gender in Hip Hop Hegemony in gender usually follows a pattern in which men indirectly dominate women in society. Through discourses perpetrated through various ways especially in the media, such positions appear ingrained in the society and unquestionable. Douglas (2006, pp. 13-20) explores the issue of hegemony arguing that there is meaning, context and representation of various sociological aspects with most of these being used to perpetrate hegemony. Dyer (in Durham and Kellner 2006, p. 353) discusses the establishment of stereotypes in detail and explains that stereotypic images portrayed in media forms are widely believed and agreed upon as being right. As Douglas (2006, p. 15) states, analysis of hegemony involves historical socio-cultural inquiries into how culture and various social institutions from the media have been used to facilitate domination on rather broad social and political ends. Thus, in order to determine whether the media’s power is increasing or decreasing, this discussion shall seek to establish hip hop’s perpetration of gender hegemony and the counter-efforts to break these hegemonic discourses based on a time series analysis. The hip hop genre is known to perpetrate gender hegemony and misogyny and has, in fact, come under heavy criticism for this in the past (Weitzer and Kubrin 2009, pp. 3-29). Perpetration of gender hegemony in hip hop involves using lyrics and videos to portray women as sex objects, trivialising them, marginalising them and using derogative terms to refer to them. Some explore themes of gender violence. However, there are a limited number of hip hop songs portraying females in respectful and positive ways (Yocum 2010, pp. 2-6). The underlying explanations generated for such actions include hegemonic masculinity that subordinates and objectifies women in the general society and pressure from music executives to make provocatively themed songs to maximise sales. There is also the issue of the male gaze where due to dominance the predomination of men in the genre most of the themes about women will be generated from a male point of view. It is widely appreciated that music has the capacity to influence listeners, develop and maintain how individuals view the world around them. To establish whether the hegemonic discourse of gender as perpetrated by hip hop is on the rise or not, it is crucial to explore the genre’s recent timeline. This is gradually bringing it to what can be currently observed and finally the future direction in terms of the portrayal of women. Weitzer and Kubrin (2009, pp. 4) observe that throughout the timeline of hip hop there has been hot debates and condemnation from women groups and other interest parties. The two authors further observe that although gender stereotypes have been perpetrated in all popular music, it has been considerably higher in hip hop with research showing that, in hip hop’s early years of 1980s, it contained much more misogyny and stereotyping than the heavy metal genre. The same pattern has been observed to be maintained ever since. However, this has been accompanied by a shift in lyrical depictions of women over time with complexity and diversity being introduced into the female persona image. This, however, does not mean that women are presented as independent or intelligent as men; rather derogative themes still persist with the only difference being that their characters are not overtly simplified. A conclusion that can be arrived at is that the timeline of hip hop is characterised by themes of gender hegemony with the female image becoming more complex but not improving towards positive portrayal. The male gaze described earlier is considerably toning down over the years as more and more women make headways into the rap genre. They may, however, not necessarily seek to break the hegemony since it would mean poor commercial performance. The most recent evidence reviewed is Yocum’s work (2010), which still argues that themes of female degradation still persist to date in hip hop. Using this to establish whether the media’s power is increasing or decreasing, it is easy to find that it is not diminishing since it is still being used to fortify the gender hegemony in society even today. Although there are instances in which hip hop music portrays women in good light, these are quite limited. It has also been established that hip hop music influences the cultures of listeners hence indicating that it is still effective in promoting hegemonic discourses of gender. As Devereux (2007, p. 191) argues, media representation of gender helps to establish the dominant views on femininity and masculinity and thus prescribes proper behaviour for men and women. Besides, Weitzer and Kubrin (2009, p. 6) indicate that hip hop music alongside other genres of popular music has been, over the last three decades, used to resist feminism and maintain the grip by males in the society. The power of the media has increased due to the fact that efforts to break the hegemonic discourses of gender still have to use media extensively, hence placing it at an exceptionally strong position in society. Hegemonic Discourses of Race in News Representations Representation of race in terms of otherness has considerably taken a backseat in modern society with powerful film industries such as Hollywood and television industries around the world taking sharp shifts from presenting racist images as had been done in the past. However, the very concept of hegemony involves indirectly enforcing the same stereotypes in the society through the use of journalistic techniques that mask racial themes in the modern liberal society. The question of whether the media’s strength is increasing or decreasing can also be tackled through establishing its capacity and adaptation to maintain racial hegemony in society. This calls for a time-based analysis of the role that film and television have played in establishing racial stereotypes and their impacts on the society’s perceptions. According to Allan (2004, p. 152), television news played quite a significant role in consolidating conservative racial hegemony in the societies in USA and Britain. Historically, the media’s role in promoting racism in the USA took a form that can be categorised according to the phases and strategies used. These phases include exclusion, threat, confrontation and stereotypes. Firstly, the media effectively undertook exclusion of non-whites through refusing to acknowledge their presence in the society when presenting media reports. This contributed to the alienation of non-whites from whites and the relegation of no-whites from the mainstream society. The second phase saw non-whites being introduced into mainstream media but in a manner that presented them as a threat to whites. The media thus undertook to present non-whites as posing a threat to established societal order, depicting American Indians as savages and African Americans as violent. The confrontational phase was closely related to the threat phase. Here, the media took the position of us versus them (150) when presenting conflicts between the whites and non-whites in the American society. This had the effect of galvanising the perception of the Whites as having common enemies with the other races. The last phase is the promotion of stereotypic perspectives about the other race in television and films. In television news, the images depicted being African-American as a form of otherness that threatened the very idea of American nationality. Since such images cannot be represented directly in the modern society, hegemonic control takes place where racial hierarchy is reaffirmed as being common sense. Allan (2004, p. 154) undertakes an analysis of how direct racist elements were evolved into hegemony over time. In the 1970s, the media visibly highlighted mugging as a serious and frightening new form of crime. This crime was, however, associated with young African American and West Indian males living in the cities. Thus, the media created a form of moral panic, which effectively reconfigured the public consensus about crime. The result was the implementation of a policing strategy to handle the mugging while actually perpetrating racist lines. Shah and Thornton (2004, p. 220) state that newspaper coverage of inter-ethnic conflict would involve news items that promoted the prevailing racial hegemony in the society. Media undertakes hegemonic racial practices in modern day through hiding racial themes under multicultural media forms. Here, items about racial problems appear to be about tackling the issue of race but instead carry on the racial themes similar to those of pre-liberalism by relying on stereotypes to develop their concepts. The explanation for this is partly due to the gaze present in the media sector where the principle resources lie with the predominantly White population. Here, non-White newspapers would have the intent of breaking the hegemonic discourse in reporting. Although the number of non-Whites in media continues to increase, the hegemony remains strong and reinvents itself in a manner that keeps it relevant. As a result, it can be observed that the media is not experiencing any decrease in power. As earlier pointed, the media would still be needed to counter the hegemony, or to re-establish it; hence its importance remains. Conclusion The media has always occupied a central role in the lives of people and influences societal norms and perspectives. The power of the media to do this is, however, in question following the advent of liberalism in societies and independent thinking. A discourse analysis of gender hegemony as advanced by the hip hop genre and race hegemony in news items reveals that the media plays an increasing role in shaping societal perspectives through masking stereotypes and indirectly upholding them. Through hegemony, it is thus established that the power of the media is actually increasing rather than decreasing. References Allan, S 2004, News culture. 2nd edn, McGraw-Hill, England. Devereux, E 2007, Media studies: Key issues and debates, Sage Publications, London. Durham, MG & Kellner, 2006, Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, Blackwell Publishing, UK. Hibbert, A 2006, The power of the media, Franklin Watts, London. Shah, H & Thornton, MC, 2004, Newspaper coverage of interethnic conflict: Competing visions of America, Sage Publications, UK. Weitzer, R & Kubrin, CE, 2009, ‘Misogyny in rap music: A content analysis of prevalence and meanings’, Men and Masculinities, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 3-29. Yocum, A 2010, Rhetorical construction of gender: How women are portrayed in popular music today, Cal Poly, viewed 28 November 2011, . Read More