Signs of race and ethnicity appear everywhere in our media culture, shows on the media are trying to merge races; however the shows still target audience by race and ethnicity. Clearly, things have improved since the days of an all white media in the 1950's, but the only difference is now there are shows and channels for other races like BET, MTV, and Univision. And the question now is do these channels merge the races or do they just segregate race and ethnicity even more?.
Two things might explain why there is still race and ethnicity issues in the United States. First, most Americans continue to live in racially segregated environments. Second, the mass media, which represent all major sources of information about the world outside our segregated lives, play the "race card" in substantial ways. While nonwhite racial groups still remain underrepresented in the mass media in terms of employment and portrayals. Also they have been equated with violent crime across the programming spectrum, from entertainment to the nightly news. Even though a black or Latino actor may now play a homicide detective as often as a violent criminal, the low visibility of nonwhites nevertheless still doesn't represent the United States population.
While I watched T.V over the course of a couple days, I noticed the lack of nonwhites in the media. At one point I flipped through 80 channels and saw no more than 4 nonwhite characters on all the channels, and if that is true of the population we would be living in would be a ratio of 1 nonwhite person to every 20 whites. Also I noticed when I watched a show targeting African Americans the commercials and dialogue are completely different in what they are selling and what they are representing. For example on MTV, direct effect a hip hop show, will have a black news caster for the news "10 to the hour every hour" and for any other shows like real world there will be a clean cut white guy.
