Who's really being cheated during prime time?

Kweisi Mfume and the NAACP are mad as hell, and they say they're not going to take it anymore.

On July 12, Mfume, the NAACP's president, announced that his organization plans to turn up the heat on the major television networks and their advertisers in an effort to reverse the shrinking percentage of black characters in prime time.

Although Mfume wants to meet with network executives to gauge their receptivity to his complaints, he predicts that, ultimately, boycotts of both shows and sponsors will be necessary. Moreover, he says that the NAACP is actively exploring taking legal action against the networks and their affiliates based on the premise that "the airwaves belong to the public."

The bad news was pretty much everything else, which basically stayed the same.

A consistent finding in the MRC studies was that the more religion matters to a TV character, the more likely it will be a negative influence on him, or that he will be a negative figure. Depictions of devout lay people were overwhelmingly unfavorable--twice by a 4 to-1 ratio, once by 6-to-l, and in '97 an astronomic 10-to-1.

Typical of that year, an investigator on NBC's "Profiler" speculated that a murder suspect originally went bad because he was "abused by very traditional religious parents." A character in the CBS miniseries "True Women" commented, "I read Frederick Douglas' book . . . I was shocked to hear that religious slaveholders were the cruelest." And so on.

If actual believers were as depraved as these fictional ones, the world would be a dreadful, dreadful place, wouldn't it? It just demonstrates how little prime time corresponds to reality.

Things were a bit brighter, but not bright enough, where portrayals of the clergy were concerned. After receiving more negative than positive treatment each year from '93 through '95, priests, nuns, ministers and rabbis were dealt with positively more often than negatively in the following two years.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Aug 20, 1999
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