TV Not Representative of Society, Study Finds

In what was billed as the most comprehensive study ever of casting on television, a report released Tuesday by Hollywood’s two major actors’ unions found that white males under 40 work more and earn more than any other group.

Women, minorities, older people and the disabled are vastly under-represented on screen in comparison to their actual numbers in society, according to the study presented by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists during a four-day Washington conference to promote equal opportunities for actors.

The study was based on a 10-year analysis of nearly 20,000 speaking parts in 1,371 TV programs--including network prime-time, daytime and children’s programming, and cable programming.

It found that one out of every three characters in prime-time television was a women, and that those women aged faster than their male counterparts and were more likely to be portrayed as unsuccessful. The situation did not differ drastically for minorities.

Things were even worse on Saturday mornings, the report said: Only one of five characters were women, 3% were African-American and less than 1% were Latino.

“Television seems to be frozen in a time warp of obsolete and damaging representations that deprive millions of people the chance to see themselves growing up with the same opportunities, values and potential as everyone else,” said the study’s director, George Gerbner, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

“In an inescapable way, this has to be seen as an indictment of civil rights, especially in a medium that is licensed not just as a business but as a public trustee,” he said.

Gerbner was most alarmed that the numbers have improved only marginally since he conducted a similar study in 1979, despite an increase in special-interest groups advocating change.

His findings were released one day after a five-year study commissioned by the Writers Guild of America, West, found that the film and television industries are not making much progress in employing more women and minority writers.

The essential goal of the actors unions in commissioning the work was to help Hollywood move toward a more “fair and equitable” picture of American society, Gerbner said.

Every time a production company signs a collective bargaining agreement with the Screen Actors Guild, for instance, the company agrees to “realistically portray the American scene,” thereby providing all qualified performers with equal access to auditions and casting. But that’s not what Gerbner found:

* Seniors over 60 of both genders are diminishing on screen, down to 2% in network prime time, despite the fact that they are a fast-growing segment of society. “As characters age, they lose importance, value and effectiveness,” he said.

* Although 13% of the U.S. population earns low incomes, low-income people represent 1% of the major characters in prime-time television.

* Daytime TV programming featured almost as many women as men, but “minorities are seen less often than in prime time and disability is virtually absent.”