Effect of Media Depictions
As writers and directors cast blacks as president in several memorable portrayals, depictions of fictional black presidents may have accustomed Americans to accept a black man as president. Actor Dennis Haysbert who played a black president on the hit show 24, said the portrayal “may have opened the eyes, the minds and the hearts of people because the character was so well liked." The show also raised the issue of whether television series "like political trial ballons, can ready the populace for change."
After Barack Obama's election, the television show the Cosby Show was cited for what has been termed the “Huxtable effect” for the influence of its "warmhearted" portrayal, "free of street conflicts and ghetto stereotypes - that broke ground for its depiction of an upwardly mobile black family." The show has even been cited by some observers as a factor in Obama's victory.
Read more about this topic: Black President In Popular Culture (United States)
Famous quotes containing the words effect of, effect, media and/or depictions:
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“Surely, of all creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix optera is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire.... If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)