A Closer Look
Welcome to my media analysis blog!
This section is a blog composed for my senior class, Race, Gender and the Media: A Methods Approach. Throughout the Fall semester, we are to write a blog post about what we learned in the week’s readings, videos, podcasts, etc. The first five blog posts are written for the first half of the course, and the later five posts are in the second half of the course.
As both a journalism student and media consumer, I want to share how important media literacy is in a progressing and healthy democracy. Understanding how messages are made, which voice is the loudest and who is silenced allows us to critically examine what we see and hear, rather than just looking and scrolling. These posts show not only what I’ve learned through our class, but also my own reflections as a student of journalism.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog posts and my analysis of our weekly learnings. I hope it encourages you to look closer at the media surrounding you and think about how it shapes identities, cultures and stereotypes in our world today and in the future.
Blog Post Week 1
Oct 7, 2025
During week one, we went over media literacy and why it’s important. Media literacy is “the ability to analyze stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy and credibility”, according to Wikipedia. It helps everyone recognize how race and gender identities are represented, the stereotypes being used and whose voice is the strongest, or in that case, silenced. A lot of the stereotypes we see regularly are women shown only as caregivers or homemakers, men as leaders and minority groups depicted as criminals or impoverished.
As much as people want to believe it, the media is not neutral in any aspect. Media reflects who is at the head of the company (take CNN as a more democratic news network and FOX as a more conservative news network). Mainstream media has regularly had white, affluent males at their forefront, with others being marginalized. Media literacy teaches us that people will make their own judgements on media because of their life experiences. A representation that may lift up or speak to one group may feel harmful and stereotypical to another. This is all because of audience interpretation with media literacy.
Media literacy is able to show us viewpoints from a different lens. An example of this would be Black women facing “double marginalization” compared to white women or Black men. Race and gender don’t just exist on their own; they overlap with sexuality, age and class.
Our media shapes our cultural norms, beauty, gender roles and so much more. Media literacy will show how repeated topics or images can influence public opinion, perception, policy and self-perception. For example, once big-name fashion brands started hiring models that were more body positive, t=a movement for acceptance of all bodies began. This is an example of how media literacy helped promote the acceptance of all body types. In short, media literacy helps us to break down how race and gender are made out in the media. It can help us challenge harmful stereotypes, push for diversity, accuracy and inclusivity.
Next time you’re reading or watching the news, let this blog come back to you. Think to yourself: “Who is producing this?” or “What perspectives dominate others?” and maybe “Why is this being depicted in this narrative? “
Blog Post Week 2
It all begins with an idea.
Oct. 7, 2025
By definition from dictionary.com, the term “implicit bias” means “an unconscious favoritism toward or prejudice against people of a particular ethnicity, gender or social group that influences one’s actions or perceptions.”
In our Lind book of chapter one, Laying a Foundation for Studying Race, Gender and The Media, we learn that these stereotypes or biases are learned by culture and exposure to particular messages (p. 1-12). In short, this means that even when journalists (and audiences) think they’re being objective, biases can still show through coverages and interpret events.
An example of bias in media coverage is Black criminality. In our Lind readings, we also see that our news outlets overrepresent Black men as criminals, all-the-while underrepresenting them as victims or in a professional field. In our chapter Black Criminality and the Persistence of Stereotypes in the 21st Century (p. 19-23), we see the explanation of how our media commonly draws an association between Black people with danger, which reinforces the harmful and cultural narrative.
Biased content spreads because of agenda setting because the media often talks about race and crime stories. It allows the media to almost manipulate the public to see this as a prioritized social issue. We can draw an example of media manipulating the public to Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party took over all media outlets in Germany when they achieved leadership, ensuring absolutely no media was in opposition to the Nazi belief. Jewish people and Allied country’s citizens were described as “disgusting” and enemies of Germany. This continued to instill fear and hate towards a group of people by controlling the media.
The news media doesn’t do much of challenging inequality, but rather protecting the status quo. Since the media has repeatedly compared marginalized groups to negative traits, the media allows social “tiers” to still exist. As the Lind book tells us in the chapter titled The Social psychology of Stereotypes (p. 13-18), stereotypes exist to simplify a very harsh reality. Although in doing this, they also reinforces prejudice and inequalities.
Blog Post Week 3
It all begins with an idea.
Oct. 7, 2025
The media does a lot in our day-to-day lives. It allows us to gather information, lets us know breaking news and gives us the ability to speak about urgent issues.
The other thing it does is shape our perceptions and our world.
When we look at history, we also look at how women have attributed. They way women navigated journalism, how thy are portrayed to this day and what our stereotypes are all have one common factor: the constant fight against inequality and feminism. Throughout decades and especially in the last ten years, we have better understood the barriers on women and the possibility of change.
The history of women in the journalism field is filled with exclusion and persistence. Lind’s section Historical Contexts of Women’s and People of Color’s Access to Broadcasting (p. 274-280), we see how minorities and women did not have access to equal opportunities in media, which limited them to roles that were “lesser” or left out completely. Even when women did have the opportunity, their work was looked at as uninteresting and unimportant. Women journalists had to fight tooth and nail for credibility in a field of masculinity.
News media has always portrayed women differently than men, and media continues to do so. The chapter Never About My Work, Never About My Motivations (p. 269-263) details how women journalists of color are judged by their appearance, race and gender as opposed of skills. This flows into the broader stereotyped portrayal of women who are astonishingly beautiful and family oriented, while men are portrayed as leader, pioneers of their field or experts.
Different media theories like symbolic annihilation, social cognitive theory and the framing theory all show how inequalities are shown. For symbolic annihilation, we see women not really being covered in major media unless it is applicable. The social cognitive theory illustrates how women are portrayed as passive or a decorative “object”. This is so harmful to gender identity because it reduces our role in society to nothing more than just a mannequin. The framing theory explain how media shapes interpretation. For example, female politicians are framed by their clothing or tone of voice while male politicians are framed by their policies and activities.
A feminist approach to mass media would challenge these stereotypes by questioning whose stories are prioritized, who gets to speak and how power can be gender-ized to help shape coverage. Lind’s Framing Feminism (p. 118-123) demonstrates how feminist critique actually exposes how restricted mass media is and how we can have more equal representation. Cameron Russell’s TED Talk Looks Aren’t Everything does a great job at reminding us that even women who are “benefited” by beauty standards are still held down by them.
By analyzing our history of underrepresentation of women, we can have a better understanding that women have always fought for their place, regardless of the ride. We can move towards the conclusion that women are valued for their voices, work, skill and for their humanity, not just their appearance.
Blog Post Week 4
It all begins with an idea.
Oct. 7, 2025
This week went over how the stories we share and the stories we silence shape our culture’s understandings of race. From the incredibly misleading term “colorblindness” to the work of The Black Press, we learn that the media doesn’t just hold power in what it reports, but also in how it challenges our world’s norms.
At first, colorblindness does sound like equality: the idea that if we don’t “see”race, we treat everyone with the same regard. But as Lind’s chapter "Trust Me, I’m Not Racist (p. 212-217) says, we get into how colorblindness is hindering the progress of equality. The term is problematic, as it erases people of color’s experiences and turns a blind eye to racism in real time. Pretending race doesn’t matter allows racial inequalities to develop even more, and then it becomes a privilege- a privilege that lets white Americans turn away from the uncomfortable while others live through it.
The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords tells how Black journalists built their own platforms to tell truths that mainstream white press outlets refused. Newspapers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier reported lynchings, the realities of segregation and Jim Crow laws when the white papers would not.
Key and Peele’s comedy sketch Is This Country Song Racist? does a great job at using humor to truly show that racism is still very much a problem even though laws have changed and it is wrong. By presenting a skit where country singers casually used racist innuendos and lyrics, the duo exposes white privilege and how it allows some people to ignore the racism in our very culture, especially Southern culture. This ties into Lind’s How Not to Interrupt the Intractable Whiteness of Late-Night Comedy (p. 154-159), which argues that satire is both a weapon and a shield: highlighting racial bias, but also limited by whiteness platforms that share it.
The Black Press wasn’t just another news outlet; it empowered people and gave them the confidence to tell their stories. The coverage helped so many movements come to fruition, like the Great Migration and the Double V Campaign. These papers gave Black people a voice for reason in a time where they felt unheard completely. The courage and grit of the journalists working under constant threat shows how powerful storytelling and reporting can be.
Blog Post Week 5
It all begins with an idea.
Oct. 7, 2025
In a social culture where bodies must be perfect, hair must be voluminous and lips must be kissable, beauty has become less about self-expression and now about self-surveillance. The readings this week and Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly 4 do a great job at uncovering how ads and media have created unattainable beauty standards, but also how they have weaponized them, turning insecurity into dollars.
As Kilbourne expounds on how beauty standards aren’t natural in Killing Us Softly 4, we start to unravel the money side of our beauty standards. These standards are made by advertisers to sell products and keep a hand on social control. These ideas were born decades ago, the marketing that linked thinness, youth, and perfection to women and their worth. The “perfect woman” you see in ads are just that: an advertisement. Her body is digitally manufactured and airbrushed so there isn’t a pore to breathe, her skin is lightened shades above what it is naturally and her identity is reduced to what is on screen.
This isn’t just vanity, it’s power. When young girls are taught to value their looks over their smarts or individuality, it teaches them to not love their uniqueness and quirks. Instead, it keeps them insecure, easier to influence and hinders their self-expression. We see this in The More You Subtract, The More You Add (p. 131-136) Lind reading.
The effects of these controlled advertisements go way further than looking in the mirror. Girls today internalize these beauty standards, going as far as restricting their food and editing their pictures. We read about this in Body Image and Adolescent Girls’ Selfie Posting, Editing, and Investment (p. 30-35). These constant self-comparison is the perfect foundation for anxiety, low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, eating disorders and sometimes much worse.
This harm isn’t just tailored to women and girls. Men and young boys are affected by the patriarchal idea of strength, dominance and emotional repression. These pressures lead to body-image struggles and emotional disregulation. People of color face even more harm: beauty standards stemming from whiteness diminish darker skin representation, textured hair and non-European derived features.
The 2025 Super Bowl Carl’s Jr. “Hangover Burger” ad featuring TikTok and Instagram influencer Alix Earle proves how little beauty standards have changed. Despite the growing awareness and demand for representation, advertisers and companies still exploit sex appeal for views and attention. To change this harmful cycle, we have to push advertising “big leagues” to embrace ethical representation- use real, diverse bodies and genders, stop digital manipulation and shift the focus from appearance to authenticity.
If ads can sell insecurity, it can 100% sell empowerment and truth. The industry has so much power, and it’s time we push the industry to use that power for good. We can redefine the way beauty is sold- as confidence, individuality and self-acceptance. Media literacy isn’t just about understanding a message, it’s about reclaiming the narrative. Beauty doesn’t need to be filtered- it just needs to be real.