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Outline Introduction a. Thesis : No matter how innocent the Medias appear to be, what’s being communicated is desensitizing and reinforcing discrimination among the youth b. Plan: address arguments as they appear in paragraphs c. Background info: Personal example, questioning, going for a more emotional start. Supporting argument a. How much time people/youth spend watching TV and on the web and how it factors into how they think and form biases. b. What messages the media is telling why it’s targeting the younger audience.
The outcome of those messages are telling ounger crowds it’s “cool” to display or act out negative stereotypes which they get discriminated against. c. Children aren’t born with discriminations, they are taught them or allowed to have them Assessment of objections a. Responsible parents will guide and direct a child, by limiting his or her viewing time and monitoring content. b. Discrimination is a dying idea, and we as a race have moved on so it’s okay to make light of the stereotypes. It makes for entertaining movies and news. No real harm done. c. Children grow out of things Conclusion a.
Reinstate the thesis. b. Bring new meaning to the thesis and provide sum thoughtful solutions c. Close with a poem. The discrimination of youth Let’s imaging for a moment that I am a young brave 19 year old fresh out of high school. If I were to be making a choice between going to the movies with one friend rather than another based on uncomfortable feelings, there wouldn’t be anything unusual about it. But, let’s say I chose that one friend over the other based on how their “race” makes me feel uncomfortable, now things are starting to push out of bounds.
Then, I go a step further and make it a point to tell others that they shouldn’t ang out with African American males because they all carry weapons and that makes them all dangerous. I would then be the walking definition ot racial discrimination because IVe singled out a certain group of people with an unfair understanding rather than focusing on the qualities of that one friend. History tells us that somebody somewhere has these views, but to suggest that I was “born” thinking that African males are all dangerous seems pretty unlikely.
This is a stereotype and the ground for which racial discrimination builds on. Children grow up believing what their environment surrounds them with, which means that iscrimination of any kind is a learned notion and not totally self generated. There are many causes for these biases to form in young minds but I believe that the most important cause of today is the saturation of mass media and its influence. Regardless of how innocent the Medias appear to be, what’s being communicated is desensitizing and reinforcing discrimination among the youth.
Did you know that according to the Nielsen numbers the average American spends about 4 hours a day watching TV, that’s almost 30 hours a week and 2 full months a year glued to the tube or popular social media sites. Americans as a single group watch annually 250 billion hours of television (Nielsen 6) and spend about the same amount of time listening to music. Yet interestingly enough when a survey was conducted nearly half of adult Americans admitted that they watch too much television and wish they hadn’t.
When asked about their children they said the same thing but with a higher number of exceptions and excuses as to why they don’t enforce a limit on view time. Excuses such as “l need time for myself, my child has ADD and will only sit still while watching TV” and “it’s not so bad because they are oung and cartoons are harmless but some shows aren’t appropriate”. So to make sense of this correctly, Americans know that they watch too much television but when it comes to their children theyre more concerned about the content then the time spent idle.
Media defenders state that responsible parents set limits because they don’t want their children exposed to violence and adult themes, claiming they understand that it would damage teachings about discrimination and morality. True, but the problem is that when I was 10 1 watched anything I wanted because I knew ore about the channel guide than my parents did. In a study done by A. C. Nielsen CO the number of hate-crimes and murders a child sees before finishing elementary school is 8000 and 200,000 before adulthood “despite” parental guidance.
Large amounts of popular music has also added its sway with the use of more and more explicit content. Just on the surface their lyrics include discriminating against women as disposable sexual objects and boastful lies to everyone about the Joys of doing and selling drugs, need I go on? Most messages the media send to children are harmless and entertaining but in o way come from the heart of a nonprofit organization. Movies and shows are planned out and obviously marketed toward a younger audience which is perfectly legal. Skeptics believe that since discrimination of all kinds has lessened over the years its safe enough to Just ignore it.
This might be okay for grownups, however as children grow up they begin to role model their peers, parents and older siblings thinking that what they do is important and acceptable. In many sad cases where a child is abused by someone older it often leads to an unhealthy outlet of some sort. There’s a saying that “misery loves company’ and there are whole genres of music and tilms devoted to wallowing in it Children don’t completely understand now the world works yet so when certain stereotypes of people are presented on screen in a way that relates to them, it reinforces a notion the child may desire to belong to.
For example the term “emo” has a lot of loose meanings but from what I understand, it’s an awful stereotype; it’s a young person who is very emotional, dressed in a darker manner who listens to depressing music and might be afflicting physical injury on themselves. If this preconception is so negative then why do kids every day in high school associate themselves with being emo? I argue because both home life (including social media, magazines and music) and public life (school) influence them so immensely that they tolerate discrimination aimed at themselves.
It’s estimated that the average youth spends almost 900 hours at school per year and 1 500 hours watching TV or surfing the internet (Nielsen 20, 21). The reality is that adults are busy and can’t monitor every moment of their child’s life. The final point I want to make is that again no one is born biased. The media has been influential is raising a generation of young people who don’t understand themselves and on top of that believe in clich???? unrealistic lifestyles. African American Rappers pump out lyrics and music videos about driving Cadillac’s, escaping from the cops, getting with every hot girl and drinking till 4 am in the morning.
In my own experience growing up I have known many African Americans peers who idolized these rappers and acted Just like them. A vivid example I remember was in 6th grade when a shy pretty girl in my class asked if she could blow her nose, immediately one f my black friends shouted “you a dirty hoe! ” that followed with a crying girl and 3 day suspension. I still don’t blame him though, for acting that way, I blame first his parents and second the garbage I knew he listened to.
There was no need for him to shout that but he felt compelled by what he thought was cool or funny to say. I fully understand that people grow out of things and discrimination can change but that’s not the issue here. What’s substantial is the amount of evidence piled high against the media. In a cover story about the new 2013 M rated game Grand Theft Auto, a tore clerk spoke out about how many copies he sold to parents who didn’t give a dam about how old their child was (Kotaku 1). The gameplay consisted of Joining a gang of murderers, theft and a whole bunch of prostitution.
That’s right, parents are openly inviting their child to commit digital hate crimes and laugh at situations they aren’t old enough to handle. So now IVe seen it all. Singer-songwriter Jack Johnson is a well-known children’s folk artists and he talks about the real root of the problem namely the human condition, singing “it was you, it as me, it was every man, we all got the blood on our hands, we only receive what we demand and if we want hell then hells what we’ll have” (on and on album) meaning that the media is Just a two way mirror reflecting the things we want to see.
He accounts the invention of the television as “magic at first, but let everyone down, now this worlds gonna hurt, u better turn that thing down, or turn it around” (on and on album). The invention of TV was amazing at first and I’ll be the first to say how much I love watching movies but there is definitely too many inappropriate things on elevision these days.
I will admit that as responsible adults we must be more aware of the digital age and rate its expanding, every precaution to make it harder for children to witness violent or racial events should be taken seriously. Youth centers are an ettective way to reach children because they instill good morals and reveal the media messages that could potentially cause biases. Responsive steps also include crack downs on rating enforcers to make it harder for children or irresponsible parents to purchase mature material and more protocols for social media sites.
I could spend all day coming up with responses to combat the Medias influence but conclusively, as long as critics are bribed into writing false reviews and Hollywood is making money, I fear there will be an ever going cycle of discrimination. Work cited “www. kotaku. com. ” . K0taku, 2309 2013. web. 18 NOV 2013.. Herrman, Norman. “Television and Health. ” 2007 the sourcebook for teaching science. California state university, n. d. Web. 19 Nov 2013.. “Discrimination and the media. ” CHildren and discrimination. children rights information, 01 7 2013. web. 19 NOV 2013.