Study reports on 'Whitewashed' Hollywood

AP News reports on a study released today by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism that exposes the Hollywood media’s lack of racial and gender diversity.

The study has been made public in the midst of the Oscars debate over insufficient Academy Award nominations for minority actors, with many members planning to boycott the ceremony. The study states, "Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed.” Researchers found that only 28.3 percent of speaking actors are minorities, 9.6 percent less than U.S. minority population figures.

As for film directors a troubling 87 percent are white. The most staggering shortfalls found were that around 50 percent of the media investigates did not have a single Asian character and 20 percent lacked a single black character. Rather than just a specific issue with the Academy Awards, these statistics suggest an institutional problem within the media industry.

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Mary Schlichte