How minorities are represented in any form of media?

In media studies, representation is the way aspects of society, such as gender, age or ethnicity, are presented to audiences. It is how media texts deal with and present gender, age, ethnicity, national and regional identity, social issues and events to an audience. Media texts have the power to shape an audience’s knowledge and understanding about these important topics. This makes them very powerful in terms of influencing ideas and attitudes.

While media representation of minorities has increased over time, creative and innovative changes need to be made to give our society honest representations of the cultures and skin colours of all of God’s children. For some young students, portrayals of minorities in the media not only affect how others see them, but it affects how they see themselves.

Empirical data from the last two-and-a-half decades tells stories of upper-caste hegemony and lack of lower-caste representation in Indian media. Even though the advent of digital media, led to the proliferation of social media and content-sharing platforms by Dalit–Bahujan professionals and enabled many amateur journalists to start their own websites and video channels and have their footprints on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, the divide between the upper and lower caste still remains colossal.

Another thing of concern is that the Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines are mostly unread by the non-Muslims. With respect to their cases and apathies, they are usually shockingly reported days after the tribulation. Thus, the reach of Muslim media is limited to Muslims which emerges as a matter of concern.

Apart from the state owned ‘Door darshan’, right from NDTV to Network 18 to Jagran, the private media houses are owned by the elites who are mostly from the upper-caste and upper-class strata. Strangely, not a single prominent private news network is owned by Dalits or Muslims.

Even though due to rising vote bank politics, atrocities against Dalits and Muslims do come to light, the numbers remain minuscule and Indian media still seizes to be an upper caste Hindu dominated fortress.

Solving the issue of diversity in media is a prolonged process but the civil society needs to play a proactive role and Governments should take note of it and try to accommodate Dalits and minorities in good numbers because when representation in media will be proportional to the population, diversity will exist.