 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
In June 1993, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held meetings in Los Angeles as part of a multi-year study on the rise in ethnic and racial tension in the United States. These meetings responded to the resurgence of racial violence in major urban centers, addressing police-community relations, equal employment opportunity, economic development, and access to social services.
Upon closer examination, the investigation marked a significant reorientation of the racial paradigm, insofar as the hearings followed upon “civil disturbances” in predominantly Latino-populated communities.
The Los Angeles hearings had been planned before the riots; and, in fact, Chairperson Arthur Fletcher acknowledged that separate hearings were to have been held on Latinos in the media, since Latinos are much more underrepresented than other minority groups relative to their population. But, Fletcher explained, these hearings had been stopped by “powerful people on both sides of the aisle in Congress” who represented the interests of the film and television industry.
As a result, a day of panels on television were incorporated into the commission’s ongoing investigation when it met in Los Angeles. Below is an account of my own testimony which questions the “numbers game” that is held up as the prerequisite for social change in a democratic, free market society.
TESTIMONY:
Since the commission’s last report on minorities in television, Window Dressing on the Set: An Update (January 1979), three developments must be taken into account. First, networks have had to compete with cable, pay TV and home video — within a shrinking national economy. Conventional wisdom holds that these factors are responsible for the subsequent failure to diversify prime-time content and formats. I will show that this is misleading.
Second, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has supported deregulation of television, with the result that seldom, if ever has a station lost its license for equal employment opportunity violations. Given these two factors, the commission’s 1979 report still applies today.
Third, we are currently at the onset of a structural change in the television industry, with multi-media technologies predicted to supplant both cable and over-the-air broadcast. These much-heralded changes do not bode well in terms of access for the non-profit sector: public groups, education, independent producers, artists, and — even — government.
In short, there is an urgent need to ensure that civil rights and equal employment opportunity are part of the communications “superhighway” of the 21st century. Notice that no one is calling this new entity a “freeway” — it is a commercial venture — even though its infrastructure will no doubt be underwritten by government, and its revenue will derive in part from already-diminished education and library budgets.
There exists a similar need to examine the Latino population, which will become the largest minority group in the same time period. For the issue at hard, however, the problem can be broken down into three major areas: audiences, portrayals, and employment.
1. Audiences. In a Nielsen study commissioned by Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo, researchers discovered weekly prime-time HUT (homes using television) levels of 61% for Latino families, compared with a 54% average for the entire market. Latinos watched an average of 58 hours of television a week, compared to 47 hours a week for all viewers. The fact of a strong minority audience base often leads community and media activists to expect the television industry to exhibit some level of responsibility for this market.
The change that has occurred, however, comes not from producers, but from advertisers, whose expenditures directed at Latinos have grown 20% in recent years. After all, Latinos spend nearly $200 billion on consumer goods each year. In a sense, these figures argue against change, since the Latino population is shown as a pre-existing market that already displays the desired characteristics for profit: it is large, urban, with strong product loyalty, and watches a lot of television.
Thus, these figures help networks sell commercial time, and create an impetus for both minority-specific and integrated commercials, but do little to facilitate other changes.
2. Portrayals. Latinos comprise about 10% of the U.S. population, but have been featured in less than 1% of the continuing roles in prime-time television series, and even less in major films. In addition, these few roles appear in limited formats (situation comedies, action films) and depict characters with lower-status occupations. Between 1957 and 1987, whites played 94% of television’s educated professionals and business executives, while Blacks played 5% and Latinos only 1%.
3. Employment.
Actors: A recent report by the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists noted that women, minorities, older people, and the disabled are vastly underrepresented on screen in comparison to their actual numbers in society. In short, no portrayals, no employment!
Directors: According to a recent Directors Guild of America report, the number of days worked by Latino directors increased from 1.0% of all television and film work in 1983 to 1.3% in 1991. As director Jesús Treviño notes, at this rate, it will take 300 years for Latinos to reach parity with current national demographics. In this eight-year period, Latina directors worked a total of 27 days (roughly, 0.0001% of available work).
Writers: Minority screenwriters account for 4% of the guild’s membership, with Latinos accounting for 0.7%. For all minorities, employment increased by no more than 1% between 1987 and 1991. Again, at these rates, it will take over 100 years for minorities to reach demographic parity. The pay gap for racial minorities is 79 cents for every dollar earned by whites, and employment is often limited to situation comedies.
Production Executives: In 1968, the Kerner Commission drew attention to the need to diversify the management level as the crux for change within the industry. A quarter of a century later little has changed. The 1989 Hollywood Writers’ Report reveals that minorities make up 1.3% of all prime time executive and co-executive producers, and 1.6% of all producers and co-producers.
The number of minorities in "hyphenate" positions (writer-producer) has remained constant at about 5% over the past decade. In film studios, only 2.5% of production executives are racial minorities.
THE NUMBERS GAME:
While the figures for portrayal and employment have stayed the same, minority populations continue to grow faster than the rest of the nation. The Latino population in particular doubled both in real numbers (from 9.1 million to 20.1 million) and as a percentage within the total U.S. population (from 4.5% to about 10%) between 1970 and 1990.
Thus, since twice as many Latinos are fighting for the same number of jobs in the industry, actual employment opportunity has decreased by 50% since the 1970s. But since film and television are businesses, minority under-representation is often explained as a result of the need for a “universal appeal” that will satisfy a national (i.e., white) market. Minority themes and characters are seen as too much of a risk factor.
But consider that about 75% of new television series are canceled in their first year. Of the 34 series that premiered in 1992, only 8 continued to 1993, a success rate of 23.5%. In other words, following formats and actors with proven “track records” fails to achieve a “universal appeal” three out of four times. By their very nature, prime time television and feature films are high risk enterprises; so it is not a question of whether the industry takes risks, but of who it lets do so.
These contradictions reveal one thing about the numbers game: it’s fixed! Thus, the game becomes an impossible first step toward (1) obtaining the rights and protections already written into the law, and (2) the supposed opportunities or “level playing field” of the free market system.
After my testimony, I found myself questioning the commissioners themselves, asking if we really needed to prove that minorities were both under-employed and underrepresented in the media. In other words, did we really have to continue playing the numbers game, or could we move on to the practical steps that would solve these problems? Looking back at the past twenty years, progress has been the product of protests, boycotts, and takeovers more often than governmental regulation.
As a consequence, progress has also been sporadic and piecemeal. No doubt, the commission’s next report will identify many of the same problems that it did in 1979, again calling for additional data with which to bolster its critique of the FCC and the regulatory process. Unfortunately, this assumes that the statistical substantiation of discrimination will reform the film and television industries once that information is brought to light. It will not because it has not.
In the final analysis, the numbers game is more a strategy of power than a search for knowledge: its real function is to delay and disperse the demands being made by minority communities. What numbers “mean” — that is, the impact they have — depends on the power relations within which they are asserted; and, without public and political protest, they will mean nothing.
Notes:
1. This article is an excerpt from a larger article that appears in Jump Cut no. 39 (June 1994). It was originally published in the 1995 festival program of Cine Estudiantil: Chicano/Latino & Native American Student Film & Video Festival.
For more information regarding these articles and/or to submit an article yourself,
please contact Ethan van Thillo at sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com
San Diego Latino Film Festival,
c/o Media Arts Center San Diego,
2039 29th Street,
San Diego, CA 92104
TEL: 619.230.1938, FAX: 619.234.9722,
sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com, www.sdlatinofilm.com
Home || Advertise || Arte Latino || Awards || Call for Entries || Cine Cubano! || |
||