Gender Roles on Television Shows

Marc Jung-Whan de Jong

Media producers often attempt to provide their audiences with a window on the world. However, because of the one-dimensional nature of television and the complex multidimensionahty of social reality, such windows seldom offer accurate views of the world. Even perceived unscripted television programs such news broadcasts, at closer inspection, are not so unscripted after all. Journalists' and newsroom editors' personal biases, often unintentionally, influence how information is framed as “news.” By definition, news selection processes, a standard in journalism protocol, distort social realities because these processes isolate information from their complex, multidimensional contexts. Journalists, like their audiences, process information through preestablished interpretive frameworks, processes that are, therefore, inherently biased. Given the multifaceted nature of information and the ways in which individuals construct social reality, news, which essentially consists of reproduced information, largely reflects a journalist's subjective interpretations. Thus, media messages are rarely exact reflections of social reality, and yet people ...

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