leticia

End of the election season, thank god.

I would have made this post last night, but I was stuck at work way late and got home at bedtime. This is the first and hopefully last thing you'll see from me on the election.

( Cut for liberalism (and length) )

Apparently just 7.2% of America's broadcast media outlets - TV and radio - are owned by the 33% of Americans who happen to be less melanin deficient than your standard European-descended neo-colonialist.

Shameful, huh?

Of course, a disgraceful and disproportionate number of those 33% live in poverty, having been kept down by institutionalized racism, so it shouldn't be that surprising they own less businesses.

But that's not the point. The same people that are ranting and raving about these studies quietly point out that ...women, who make up 51% of the US population, own less than 6% of broadcast outlets. Yes. There's more of us than there are minorities (though of course, approximately 33% of us are minorities as well, and how many of THEM do you think own broadcast outlets?) and we have even less voice in the media. We're still the pretty chick whose purpose is to breathlessly read from the teleprompter with a tight shirt and some nice cleavage, when it comes to broadcast media.

I'm getting pretty tired of being dependent on the charity of men to tell my story - and the story of other women, and the story of our ongoing conflict with so-called traditional gender-based oppression.

But you know something? The FCC wants to let the big (white, male) corporations get their hands on even more. To let the same people tell you the same story even more often. To let even /accidental/ errors propogate with ease - let alone deliberate or malicious ones.

Go do something.

Both democracy and capitalism depend on actors in the market - be it shopping for cars or shopping for congress representatives - having full and accurate information - and being represented in full, having the power and voice to act on the information.

Right now, we - as working Americans who actually understand what it means to have a credit limit, as women, as minorities (which I am not, I should qualify) have neither of those.

Do something. Because if we don't, we will be sentenced to more and more coverage of Britney Spears and her custody battle for the rest of our lives.