Since when does TV closely align with reality? Pretty rarely. However, whenever there’s an agenda to be achieved by doing so, you can expect liberals to chime in.
Recently, NPR reported results from a University of California study that revealed TV portrayals of women who have abortions make them whiter, younger, wealthier and less likely to already have children than true statistics reflect.
According to research sociologist Gretchen Sisson, “very few people have a context for the reality of abortion care, so these fictional stories that happen on-screen can have greater power to influence perceptions of what that care looks like in real life."
A Huffington Post article weighed in on the same study. “Abortion on the small (and big) screen helps to push the conversation forward, normalize a still very taboo topic, and de-stigmatize abortions and the women who have them.” Aha! So there’s the agenda.
The misrepresentative factors on TV work “to build an interesting social myth,” Sisson continued. The top on-screen reasons for abortion “contribute to the construction of abortion as a self-focused decision, and to the belief that abortions are 'wanted' because of personal desires rather than 'needed' because of circumstances such as poverty.” Even if you acknowledge the rare cases of a mother’s life being jeopardy, abortions would be rarely “needed.” There’s a great solution for impoverished mothers who can’t support their babies – adoption. Maybe Sisson hasn’t heard of it.
But here’s the real question. Do the liberal media really care about accurate representation? Or does it matter only when there’s an agenda to be advanced? It certainly sounds like the latter. There’s no one on the left pushing for a 3 percent cast limit on LGBT characters. In fact, there are continual cries for greater (and might I add, inaccurately representative) numbers.
In his Newsbusters column, MRC President Brent Bozell stated, “There's no wonder that a Gallup poll in 2011 found that on average, American adults estimate that 25 percent of Americans are homosexual. They're getting that crazy idea from TV.”
Talk about social myths.
In an NPR interview, UCLA researcher Gary Gates debunked the inflated 10 percent gay demographic that was widespread at the start of the homosexual rights movement. The “Kinsey Institute has - which is the legacy of Kinsey - has stated very clearly that their view is that this was a kind of a political decision of gay activists in the '70s,” he said. “They needed at that time to convince people that the gay people actually existed and in fact that they were kind of everywhere.”
The LGBT movement is more subtle now, if not more strategic. No one ever mentions the true percentage of LGBT people in our population — that would be harmful to their agenda. Americans get their information from the media, so what better way to inflate the demographic than by increasing the amount of LGBT content on news sites and amplifying the number of LGBT characters in movies and TV?
As the MRC’s Katie Yoder explained, “The New York Times disproportionately reports on gays versus Catholics,” although “Catholics account for almost 25 percent of the U.S. population and gays and bisexuals account for 2.3 percent. Yet The New York Times placed “gay” in 1.84 percent of articles and “Catholic” in just 1.14 of articles in 2014.” In the 2012-13 TV season, Fox had LGBT characters in 42% of programming hours.
In the Pacific Standard, reporter Nathan Collins wrote that “researchers showed that watching the film The Cider House Rules, which centers on abortion in a case of incest, could shift opinions on abortion.” In the same way, a poll commissioned by GLAAD and The Hollywood Reporter showed that 27 percent of respondents said “inclusive” TV shows had made them personally more "inclusive."
It’s clear that the liberal media want depicted on TV only what will advance its agenda. Thus far, they have succeeded quite well.
