Media Journal 3

Movies:
None

Music:
Various Russian Songs

TV:
The PJ's
Family Guy
King of the Hill
Myth Busters
Reno 911 (A Lot)



This blog should probably be called black exploitation in the media, but that's not too catchy. Somehow I manged to get a good taste of the two most exploiting things post 1979. I recently saw a commercial for the new Tyler Perry movie. I'm going to preface this by saying I fully support the right to freedom of speech and I am against all forms of censorship, but this topic makes me want to vomit. I don't know anything about Tyler Perry personally and this has nothing to do with how he is in real life. So far most of his movies were bad but they never quite crossed the line. Just take a minute to click on the you tube preview below so maybe it'll help illustrate the point I'm going to make (try to focus on Medea) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTSXPmsYH5A To me, her character epitomizes the stereotypes of crazy black women. Jerry Springer and day time tv don't help either. Every time I hear about how some crazy black girl destroyed her ex's car because he cheated on her, it kills a little bit of the love I have for my people.

Another show I started watching (or I say watch again) is the PJs. This show came on originally when I was 11 and I used to watch it every week. However, now I am old enough to understand I think it fits properly in this blog. Here's a video of the first 10 minutes of an episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDIS0mr7zdc&feature=related
I don't really need to say more about this show.

Now I know the first question to come up is "Why would many shows portray black people like that if it wasn't true?" I look at it like how the news portrays crime. The news has so many stories on crime it makes it seem like its gone up a million percent, however crime has actually gone down but the coverage has gone up (because for some reason more crime means more viewers). So many shows portrays this stereotype even though the majority of black people are not like that.