Illustration from Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writers Rooms
This week on CounterSpin: For many of us, while we recognize that the priorities and practices of news media affect our lives, news programming isn’t where we live, so to speak. It’s creative media—dramas, comedies, even cartoons—that engage us, with their opportunity to stretch imaginations, shift perspectives, reveal often hidden experiences. Which contributes to our disenchantment when the same structural problems that plague other US institutions show up in this realm, too, as we’re reminded every time we read a report on the staffing of, for example, television shows.
Year after year, we see people with disabilities, people of color, women and LGBTQ people un- and underrepresented in the rooms where ideas are generated. And, year after year, Hollywood pledges to “do better.” A new report on TV writers looks beyond the promises, and talks about the experiences of what it calls “diverse” writers once they get the job. The research comes from a group of working TV writers called the Think Tank for Inclusion & Equity. We’ll hear from project leaders Shireen Razack and Tawal Panyacosit Jr.
Transcript: ‘There’s Increased Hunger for Diverse Stories That Represent All of America’
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at AP‘s new guidelines on naming racism.
Why do Americans talk so much about Racism? As an American living abroad for 30 years and lived and worked in many countries. I find you are obsessed with this tradition that been going on since the birth of this nation on every darker race. It’s a mindset. Capitalism is not an ethic, it’s a process — one that requires losers in order for there to be winners in which living nature and people are commodified for conversion into dead capital.“Just think of how stupid the average American person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”
George Carlin