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Thursday, October 25, 2018

Vox Popoli: Everyone is black and gay (On TV shows and advertising)


Or so you'd think if you watched television:
Broadcast television is enlisting a record percentage of LGBTQ characters and featuring more LGBTQ characters of color than those that are white for the first time in the 2018-19 television season, a report published Thursday found.

GLAAD's annual "Where We Are On TV" report, released Thursday, found that LGBTQ characters comprise 8.8 percent of all regular characters this season, up 2.4 percent from the 2017-18 season. (Last season had previously held the record for largest percentage in the report's 23-year history.)
But we can do better!
Characters with disabilities are still significantly underrepresented compared to their presence in the actual U.S. population: Only 2.1 percent of characters on broadcast are disabled this season compared with 13.3 percent in the U.S. population.
If they do the same for the underrepresented demographics what they've done for the LGBTQP crowd, 58.5 percent of all television characters will be disabled and 132 percent will be obese. And in British advertisements, 86 percent of all blonde women are married to the same bearded black guy. Although I actually saw him married to a black woman the other day, so apparently he's branching out.