Media is powerful when it comes to stereotyping. Media stereotypes are inevitable, especially in the advertising, entertainment and news industries, which need as wide an audience as possible to quickly understand information. Stereotypes act like codes that give audiences a quick, common understanding of a person or group of people – usually relating to their class, ethnicity or race, gender, sexual orientation, social role or occupation. Media-generated stereotypes encourage the public to think about certain groups of people in ways that are simplistic, one-dimensional or sometimes disrespectful.
I would like to cite an example of how media works with stereotyping. In commercials and advertisements, models used are usually beautiful and good looking, meaning they have all the perfect physical features of an “ideal” man or woman. But where did we get this idea of perfect beauty?
Well, by the time people came in contact with media, this has been the way human beauty and perfection had been described or presented. That is why, beauty or perfection is usually equated with “harmony” or “proportion” of all the features of the human body. Moreover, media has presented the “western man” as the icon of perfect human beauty. Now that the mind of the audience has been formed by this mentality, the idea of what is beautiful and who is beautiful or handsome is already conditioned.
Although media has done something to overcome these “stereotypes”, still much more has to be done. For example, many commercials or advertisements already feature black people and people from different cultures as models but still the idea of perfect beauty as “western” lingers. Since media has been responsible for these kinds of stereotypes then it must also be responsible to do something to overcome them. Media has to consider that we cannot generalize everything because each individual is unique and that we cannot equate beauty only with external appearance. ®
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