The questions of how African-Americans are portrayed in the American mass media is a complex one. Two of the most important complicating factors are the dramatic differences among the media themselves and the almost incalculably large rage in the way that people respond to such depictions. There are as many different ways to interpret the images of blacks as there are audience members.
The image of blacks on the small screen is dramatically, almost unrecognizably different from the image of the Africa-American as seen in the pages of the black press. The women who appear in Essence are not those who appear in Ms. The characters in a Spike Lee film do not talk like the aliens in Star Trek, Episode One. There is no single image of the Africa-American in today's mass medium. This marks a substantial change from a generation ago, when blacks could be reliably counted on to be drug dealers, gang members, prostitutes (sometimes with hearts of gold) or sometimes cute little kids like Gary Coleman (Coleman, 1998, p. 37).
This splintering and to some extent breakdown of the image of the African-American in the mass media results from a number of different causes. One of them has to do with the changing position of blacks in American society. While blacks still face more limited opportunities than do whites, those opportunities do continue to expand. And as African-Americans have gained some measure of power within mass media companies - Oprah Winfrey being the archetypal example of someone who has used talent, intelligence and luck to gain money, fame and power with the world of daytime television - they have begun to be able to change the way that blacks are depicted, whether it be in Lee's movies or in Oprah's guest list. In the same way, as more and more black reporters have joined the ranks of mainstream newspapers, and as some of them have begun to work their way up into the management ranks of these newspapers, they have been able t...