Casting the American Scene: A Look at the Characters on Prime time and Daytime Television from 1994-1997
Summary of Recommendations
The 1998 Screen Actors Guild Report:
Casting the American Scene, Dec. 1998
George Gerbner
Republished with permission
Fairness and Diversity in Television: Update and Trends since the 1993 Screen Actors Guild Report Women and Minorities on Television
A Cultural Indicators Project Report Highlights
- Despite slight progress toward more equitable representation, men still outnumber women two to one.
- The representation of African American males (but not females) increased each year until it reached 171 percent of its real-life proportion.
- Commercial media shun poor people. Low-income wage earners are virtually invisible.
- Asian/Pacific characters are still less than one half of their proportion of the U.S. population.
- Latino/Hispanic characters are less than one third of their real proportion of the U.S. population.
- Television characters in the nineties are healthier and wealthier, than in the eighties.
- The characters (especially women) are also younger. The stage is set for more younger women - older men relationships.
- There has been a decline in the number of characters with disabilities, and disabled performers still do not play "normal" roles.
- Women age faster than men and as they age they become more evil.
- Mentally ill characters and "foreigners" fail most often, and commit most crime and violence.
Introduction
Electronic media have re-shaped the way our children are reared and socialized, the way we manage our lives, and the way we conduct our public affairs. A child is born into a home in which television is on an average of almost eight hours a day. For the first time in human history, most of the stories are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community who have something to tell, but by a group of distant conglomerates that have something to sell.
This is a radical change in the way we employ creative talent, govern our societies, and cast the cultural environment. That historic sea-change has made the cultural environment the new frontier in the struggle for equity and justice. This is one of a series of reports from that frontier.
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) commissioned a study of television and motion picture "Casting and Fate" in 1993. It was a part of SAG's continuing effort to broaden the range of media images of women, racial, ethnic and all age groups, and people with disabilities. That study included an analysis of 10,796 characters appearing in prime time dramatic programming from 1981 to 1991, recorded in annual weeklong samples from ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX (in 1991), and 1,058 characters appearing in daytime serial dramas during the 1991-92 broadcast season.
This follow up to that 1993 study looks once more at characters who appear on prime time and daytime television. Unfortunately, it finds that this aspect of landscape of American television has changed very little over the course of the decade.
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