Written Analysis 1 Due. Aug 31, 2014

            Today’s news headlines out of Ferguson Missouri are in direct relation with the portrayal of race in American media. Just like in older days the American Indians were portrayed as savage beast to be shot down by cowboys, black and brown people are today portrayed as thugs and hoodlums that need to be apprehended, incarcerated or just plain killed. In the sixties, those images of blacks were of drugs gangsters or prostitutes. And the role blacks were assigned to play in the media such as films and television were in the line with that image.

With the advent of television the images of blacks stared to change little by little thanks mostly to Black Entertainment Television (BET). The 1970’s were still a bit stereotypical, the shows were funny but still portrayed blacks in a back shade. Then came the BET cable channel launched in January 1980, the programming of which gave birth to the pro-eminence of HIP-HOP, probably the world’s greatest American cultural export phenomenon, copied and imitated the world over. Hip-Hop has made black culture “cool” all over the world.

The 1980’s brought about a sort of revolution in the media when it comes to black’s image in the media. NBC television started broadcasting The Cosby Show, a SITCOM about a middle-class family in New-York, whose father Bill Cosby was a Medical doctor and his wife, Felicia Ra-shad was a lawyer. Their children were college bound kids and well behave. This show was not about the usual ghetto types of before. The offshoot of the Cosby show was A Different World, a show about the college campus life of young black men and women, which also showed that black kids could actually aspire to higher education.

These days black entertainment executives like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have built up their own entertainment empires, allowing them to produces movies and TV shows that portray blacks in favorable lights. They have been able to bring about an era that promotes black people in better way. The so called mainstream media still does not help and continues to kill black image in their portrayal of them. That is what leads to a lack of democracy evidenced in the treatment of blacks by the police and the powers they have.