The Press Room

I'm Tyler.  I do Tyler stuff.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 10

Earlier today (November 27), I was working on a group project for class, and the specific part of my assignment was to watch a video from an online news source and do a short write-up on what I saw in the video.  I watched a daily show from November 6 by Democracy Now!, which is a non-profit news organization.  Their show consisted of some voiceover stories on international news in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Israel, and China.  They also talked about two other stories in detail, which were about nationwide gubernatorial elections, and about Rodney Reed. I mainly want to focus on the story of Reed since that was the story that they talked about the most during the hour-long show.

To provide some background information, in 1996, in Bastrop County, Texas, Rodney Reed was accused of raping and killing 19-year-old Stacey Stites.  Reed is African-American, and Stites was White.  An all-White jury sentenced him to death.  His scheduled execution date was back on the 20th of this month, but he was granted an indefinite stay of execution, meaning his execution was stopped.  The reason why the state of Texas granted him this stay of execution is because White former police officer Jimmy Fennell was engaged to Stites at the time, and Reed has been adamant in saying that he did not rape nor kill Stites.  He, his family, and his supporters believe that Fennell killed her.

Democracy Now! interviewed Reed’s brother, Roderick, his sister-in-law, Uwana Akpan, and Bryce Benjet, a senior attorney from the Innocence Project.  The project helps to free innocent people from prison.  They were all talking about why they think Fennell killed Stites. Roderick says that Rodney was at his cousin’s place when she was killed.  Benjet said that there are a lot of tendencies that Fennell has that potentially point to possibility of him being her killer.  Both Roderick and Akpan are pushing for the criminal justice system to re-test DNA evidence to see if this case really is a cover-up to protect a former police officer from being convicted.

This is not the only case that involves a former police officer versus a black person in the criminal justice system.  Amber Guyger was a former Dallas police officer who shot and killed African-American Botham Jean in his own apartment.  She claims that she thought she was in her own apartment. The jury convicted her guilty of murder, and they sentenced her to 10 years in prison.  This was a breakthrough victory for the Black community because police officers are usually not convicted when they are up against a Black person, especially if the officer is White, like Guyger.  The Rodney Reed case will play a part in police accountability with the Black community just as much as the Guyger-Jean case did.  If they find sufficient evidence that shows that Fennell killed Stites and not Reed, will he be convicted of murder, too?

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 9

Earlier this week (November 26), my class talked about how Latinos and Hispanics are portrayed in the media, with one of the groups leading the discussion.  News media likes to focus a lot on Latin Americans immigrating to the United States. The way they portray the undocumented immigrant stories is highly charged and politically polarizing.  Traditional media have struggled to choose unbiased and accurate words to describe the people who do not enter the United States via the legal process.  Media typically call them “illegal aliens” or pretty much anything else with the word “illegal.”  With all of this in mind, as well as homeland security having been a hot-button issue since 9/11, it is no wonder why President Donald Trump used this issue as a central piece in his 2016 presidential campaign.

The hard part about all of this is that many of the Latino undocumented immigrants who are in the United States crossed the border with their parents when they were just young kids.  They have little to no recollection or experiential familiarity with their native country.  Furthermore, they virtually had no choice but to go with their parents to the United States since they were so young and could not make big decisions for themselves at the time.  These people are called DREAMers, which comes from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM Act.  These people received protection from the immigration policy known as DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.  The policy stopped them from being deported, and it gave them a few years to obtain a work permit in the United States.

One of the questions the group asked is: Do you think the negative language towards immigrants hurts our perspective of immigrants?  I am saying “yes” to that.  Not only is it a bad thing in general, but it also hurts the reputation of undocumented immigrants who are in the United States with no ill intentions; they are just people who are looking for a good job and a better life.  These people are mostly those who grew up in the United States for the majority of their lives.  I personally did not know about this notion until I watched a video about DREAMers earlier this year, and that was when my perspective shifted.  I wish I remembered what the title of the video was and who made it, but I cannot remember.  I believe there should be an easy path to U.S. citizenship for DREAMers since they are mostly familiar with the United States over any other country.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 8

A couple of weeks ago (November 19), my class watched a movie called Get Out.  It is a film by Jordan Peele, where the story is about a black man named Chris who is in a relationship with a white woman, named Rose. She is going to her parents’ place for the weekend and invites Chris to come along with her.  When they get to the home, her family shows him around.  However, Chris gets an uneasy feeling after seeing Walter and Georgina, who are both African-American.  They work on the land and cook meals, respectively.  As the movie progresses, things seem to be off about the family even more, like something is not adding up.  However, after Chris finds a secret room in the house, he finds pictures of black people that match case descriptions of black people that went missing in the past.  That was when he knew he was in danger.  He had to end up fighting his way off of the property.

Peele uses this film as an example to show what Black people have experienced in the sense of being subject to White power.  For example, Rose’s mother offered to use hypnosis to help Chris convince himself that he was going to quit smoking, but that was all it took for her to be able to have him fall into a deep sleep with simply just the tap of her spoon against her teacup.  She used this to the family’s advantage to prevent him from escaping the property after he found out what he was actually there for.

We can assume the missing black people in the pictures were pervious victims of this family. What they specifically wanted to do with Chris was replace his brain with one from a White person.  The person who was going to have his brain removed was nearly blind, and he wanted to see what a Black person saw.  Another interesting thing to note is that when Chris and Rose were on their way to her family’s place at the beginning of the movie, they hit a deer, and after a police officer inspected the damage to the car, he asked for Chris’ license.  Rose asked why, since she was the one driving, and not Chris.  She told him to not do it for that reason.  However, the real reason why she did not want him to give the officer his license is because the officer would have known about what Rose actually wanted to do to Chris.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 7

Last class (October 29), I watched a documentary called, “The Mask You Live In.”  It discussed the negative consequences that are put on males if they are not enough of a “man,” in the sense of what society determines as masculine.  In society, we see masculinity associated with being physically fit and strong, emotionless, financially wealthy and independent, the family breadwinner, having the dominant role in families and relationships, and the like.  If men do not fit these criteria, they are not a “man.”  This can be rather problematic in the sense that men may have to resort to bullying or putting someone down in order to build themselves up—to make them look like they are strong.

The documentary said one in four boys is bullied at school.  It can start with a group of boys asking each other, “who’s the sissy?” according to the documentary, and from there, whoever is determined as the “sissy” by the group is picked on for not being masculine enough.  This leads to bullying, and the vast majority of victims fall into depression.  Even though it is a good idea for victims to seek help, they are not supposed to according to norms, so they get depressed, and as a result, they either get violent, contemplate suicide, or both.

I want to open up and say that I was in that 25 percent of boys who were bullied as a kid.  To provide some preliminary context, I was diagnosed with high functioning autism when I was 3. In elementary school, I was known as the socially awkward kid, and as a result, only a few of my peers were friends of mine.  Most of my friends at the time were some of the school staff and faculty.

I always did things differently than other kids, especially with learning and socializing.  Some of my male peers could not understand me as a person, and so they decided to bully me, probably to prove to others that they were masculine enough for society to agree.  The situation got so bad by the fifth grade that I was thinking suicidal thoughts. After I told my mom, she said she could homeschool me, and that is exactly what she did when that school year was over.  My situation almost instantly improved when I started with homeschooling, which was in the sixth grade.  I got involved with some homeschool cooperative programs right off the bat, where the people accepted me for who I was, and their definitions of masculinity were not even close to society’s.  I had nothing to worry about anymore.

In the end, I think men need to be reminded often that it is okay to cry; they do not have to be financially wealthy and independent by a certain time; their physical strength and masculinity are mutually exclusive; it is okay to ask for help; and the like.  I know from experience that this will eliminate a lot of potential trouble down the road.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 6

One of the groups that presented during last class (October 29), talked about male entitlement, which is the idea that men are superior to women, and as a result, are in charge of what women are supposed to do.  They used examples like 1970s Playboy cartoons. The vast majority of the cartoons showed men in a dominant position clothed in job uniforms, and the women were scantily clothed or fully nude.  The women were portrayed as submissive toward the men.  The group said that cartoons like this support the idea that male entitlement is inescapable.  Men of all ages have access to beautiful women, and they are sexually active creatures.  In a nutshell, men are entitled to women, and thus are superior to them. The group showed a real-life example of male entitlement.  Elliot Rodger killed six women and injured 14 other women just because he said women were not attracted to him, according to a YouTube video he made, called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.”

In media, male entitlement is in video games, politics, TV/film, and music.  But what would it look like if the roles were reversed?  An example the group showed was Jennifer Lopez’s music video, “I Luh Ya Papi.”  The video shows Lopez hanging around multiple shirtless men.  This music video challenges the norm of men objectifying women in music videos.  In this video, the men are the objects.

I want to answer some of the questions the group asked the class. First, can you think of other examples in media that challenge male entitlement?  The big one that comes to my mind is Nicki Minaj’s song, “Anaconda,” specifically where she says “Boy toy named Troy;” she is objectifying the male sex here.

Do you think male entitlement is inborn and inescapable? Why or why not?  I believe it is learned.  It just depends on what you are exposed to and what you think about. Also, even though I think it is escapable, it can be rather hard to escape it since male entitlement is quite normalized in society.  A good example of that would be the fact that one in four adult women in the United States experience severe physical violence by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline (https://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/).  That is a pretty big fraction, if you think about it.

Lastly, how can we teach future generations about the harm of male entitlement?  I will be concise here: treat women with respect.  Make them feel like ladies, not objects.  If you do that, you will see what male entitlement actually looks like and what it really does.  In other words, you will not be desensitized to it.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 5

Last class (September 24), I learned about body image and the objectification of women in media, especially in advertisements.  Since the mid-twentieth century, women have been shown in the media to be tall, slender, white, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed, and even though some of those phenotypic traits have been relaxed as time has progressed, like the hair and eye colors, the body shape has remained the same, and so has the white skin color.  Recently, especially in advertisements, women have been used to advertise products, like food, in a sexualized way.  Carl’s Jr. commercials are infamously known to feature slender and “sexy” girls biting into hamburgers that are a rather large fraction of the size of their heads.

Because the media have defined what beauty is since the mid-twentieth century, this display of women’s objectification in the media can be problematic for other women who want to look tall, slender, and the like, which are really just from genetics.  Women who want to look “sexy” are more known to be prone to having eating disorders. Cameron Russell said in her TED Talk “Looks aren’t everything.  Believe me, I’m a model.” that she is insecure about what she will look like in the future.  Not only that, but many media organizations are utilizing the power of photo retouching software, like Adobe Photoshop, to alter how a person’s face looks.  They have used this feature so much to the point where people start looking artificial, such as a woman’s midsection being smaller than her head, which is physically impossible.  If I saw a retouched photo of myself and it did not look like me enough, I would not be too happy about it.

If I had to answer a discussion question that was asked in class, it would have to be: Has the way women are represented in advertising affected you, and how?  I would say yes because this has been the norm in advertising for twenty plus years.  I remember when I was in junior high and high school, back before my family switched to over-the-top media, watching those Carl’s Jr. ads and thinking to myself, that must be a pretty good burger, especially if a girl like her enjoys it, even though I never bought one and tried it for myself at the time.  I believe that if this definition of beauty is something that needs to be addressed, which I believe it should, I would suggest challenging it head on.  Let’s hire more women and models who are non-white, not as slender, and use less photo retouching so that their faces look more genuine.  I know this has already been implemented in some areas of the globe, but it needs to continue growing, especially in the United States.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 4

A couple of weeks ago (September 10), my class watched a TED Talk from Cameron Russell, who is a model.  She talks about how the photos of her are created, and that she actually doesn’t do a whole lot compared to the photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists.  She actually has said that some photos were a bit uncomfortable for her.  She believes she became a model because she won a genetic lottery, meaning she was born and raised looking physically fit (tall and slender), and she is the recipient of a legacy, meaning she looks very feminine. In addition, she believes part of the reason why she is a model is because of her whiteness.  Russell mentioned a study done in 2007 by an NYU Ph.D. student who counted every model that was hired, and out of those who were hired, less than four percent of them were non-white (27 out of 677).

Russell talks about questions she gets asked a lot as a model, like can I be a model when I grow up?  Her response was more of an “I don’t know,” and she instead encouraged other jobs women can have a larger impact in, like being the President of the United States. She said that being a model is basically like winning the lottery, and models are not in charge of anything; they are just a canvas for the makeup artists and hair stylists and like modeling clay for the photographers.  She describes her photos as constructions by professionals, and that they are not really her.

Russell goes on to mention that good things happen to her because of how she looks and not who she is.  She says that the opposite is happening to people who are the opposite of her—good people who don’t look “good.”  She also says that she is insecure about how she looks every day.  This can make sense since when we think of female beauty, we first think of a tall, white, slender woman.  I believe this notion of beauty has been socially constructed since the twentieth century, with people like flapper girls, to Marilyn Monroe (who I think really normalized it), to Russell.  If we want a more diverse set of models to hit the runway, I think the best way to challenge this social construct is to attack it head on—hire more women who aren’t “tall,” “white,” and “slender.”

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 3

Last class (September 17), a group did an oral presentation on Stephen Colbert and racial colorblindness.  One of the clips they showed of Colbert was when he humorously said that people tell him he’s white, and he believes them because the police call him “sir.”  He has listed other reasons why, but the reason why these statements can sound problematic is that in the long run, being colorblind is actually more harmful than beneficial, even though it may carry good intentions.  The group said that the problem of colorblindness is that it eliminates race’s social and political salience.  Furthermore, it enables people to deny the consequences of racial thinking and action.  Simply put, being racially colorblind dismisses and disregards people of color’s struggles for freedom.

Jonathan P. Rossing said “we do not claim to be ‘gender blind’ in relation to phenotypic markers and recognizable performances; how do we claim to be color blind?”  In other words, we notice and hold value to gender in our everyday lives, so why not race as well? In my opinion, a good way to do that would be to refer to what Tim Wise said near the end of his documentary film, White Like Me, that we should be color-conscious, not color blind.  This will help open our minds to what other races have experienced in comparison to our own.  This can also help up us empathize with people who are a part of a different racial or ethnic group, or learn about something specific to that group.

One of the discussion questions that the group asked is how does Colbert use humor to bring light to racism?  I think his humor to racism did a bit more harm than good, and it shows that racism is still going on, even though many of us thought it was over with when Obama was elected President in 2008.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 2

Over this past week (September 3-10), my group and I worked on a presentation on how feminism and feminists are framed in the media.  The reading we went over was by Rebecca Ann Lind and Colleen Salo Aravena.  They did a word filtering study and compared words like “feminist,” “feminists,” and “feminism” with words like “woman” and “women.”  They used six different kinds of frames in which feminists are portrayed: demonization, personalization/trivialization, goals, victimization, agency, and the site of struggle.  For each frame, they found that feminists were demonized more, women were personalized/trivialized more, feminists were more associated with general women’s goals than women, women were portrayed as victims more than feminists, feminists were more associated with agency than women, and feminists were more involved with media/arts, politics, and religion than women; education was roughly equal.

To sum up Lind’s and Aravena’s findings, even though feminists are actually portrayed pretty well, except for the demonization frame, they are not portrayed very often in the media.  Because of symbolic annihilation, which is defined as an absence in the media of certain groups, which leads to their marginalization in society (the dismissal of a group as unimportant), feminists have the bad reputation that they do, and a bit of it also comes from the demonization frame.  Furthermore, demonization is the frame least commonly associated with women.

When it comes to feminism itself, we asked the class how many of them identify as a feminist. Most people raised their hand.  A couple explained that feminism is the movement to help promote equality of the sexes.  For me, it would just depend on how one would define feminism.  If feminism has to do with the promotion of equality of the sexes, I am all for that.  Another question we asked is why we think the media portray feminists differently from women.  We were told that our culture has normalized what people ought to think about feminists and feminism since the general statements of feminists being man-hating, hairy-legged, bra-burning, radical lesbians have been used in the media for so long.  People are just used to hearing that, so they think it is the feminist norm.

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JOUR 4250 Blog Post 1

On September 3, I got to watch a documentary, called White Like Me.  In the documentary, Tim Wise, an anti-racist writer and activist, talked about his upbringing, which took place around numerous black people.  What was interesting was that he was educated in schools where blacks were the predominant race, and how that shaped his views on race today.  Wise talked about the history of racism in the twentieth century, and what the government did to suppress blacks at the time.  Legislation, like the G.I. Bill, overtly excluded blacks, or were strategically written to exclude the vast majority of blacks from the provisions written in them.  Wise says that we are being dishonest if we fail to mention this.

At the time (around the 1960s), white people thought that black people were as free as whites.  It makes me think that even though white people thought this back then, do white people, like me, think the same thing?  I know we have progressed a lot with racial equality since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, but are blacks really just as free as whites?  I definitely think they are close, but I believe blacks are still oppressed in more subtle ways.  A good example of this is the Southern Strategy, which is a method that politicians (primarily Republicans) have used since the 1970s to appeal to white Southern voters by using racially coded language, like “states’ rights.”

You can say the Southern Strategy is still active in politics today, but has branched out to affect other races, like Latinos; for example, when President Trump says to “build the wall” and to deport undocumented immigrants.  I understand he wants immigrants to go through the legal process to enter the United States, but there are some people who are unable to have the means to do that.  If you couple that with undocumented immigrants who went to the country as toddlers, they could also be in jeopardy of being sent to a country that they probably have no recollection or familiarity of.  The same can be said for an American marrying an undocumented immigrant and starting a family; they would be in jeopardy of being separated. Even though we thought racism was a thing of the past when former President Obama was elected back in 2008, it seems to have cycled back in a more subtle form, and it is our job to decode that coded language.