"Cultural Bias in Prime Time Television and Teenage Viewers: Cultural Media Literacy for High School and Higher Education"

Teenagers, as formative adults and aspirational viewers, look to prime time television programming to assist them with defining their roles, behavior and social expectations. Television continues to project characters and storylines steeped in cultural bias. Studies revealed that the programming showed persistent, overt and subtle, negative stereotypes of numerical minorities, women and young people. Current trends in corporate media conglomeration, centralization of control over all media outlets, help explain the challenges of the teen media and television environment. Teenagers are falling prey to the prejudiced characterizations, negative portrayals, wholesale omissions of sub-cultural populations and advertiser-driven balkanization of television audiences. The primary objective of this study was to qualitatively assess the level of televisual bias and segregation that is validating oppressive ideas and behavior that threaten the cultural life of the United States of America. Media literacy education, with a focus on communal and cultural issues is a positive, though still largely latent force, that can help to counteract harmful human messages that often lie hidden in the technically sophisticated, though narrowly conceived programming. Prime time programming watched heavily by teenagers was recorded and analyzed, observing five cultural parameters: Culture/National Origin/Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation, Age and Ability. By exploring these categories of sub-cultural presentation, patterns of portrayals were found that gave perspective to practical issues currently challenging social cohesiveness. This qualitative study gave rise to a cultural media literacy presentation, created as a proactive outgrowth of this research in the interest of addressing the issues of social discord, geared for high school and college students and adaptable for adult audiences.