Stereotypes and the Media:

A Re-evaluation

by Ellen Seiter

In research and pedagogy, the failure to

account f o r the evaluative and historical as
well as descriptive aspects of stereotypes has
led to a use of the concept as a “dirty word.”

It is a commonplace that the mass media are populated with stereotypes.

They are readily recognized on television, where their frequency has
been ceaselessly documented by researchers. Why, then, return to the
problem of defining stereotypes at this time? I believe that by re-
evaluating and clarifying the term we can improve the way we study the
media, particularly television, in the academy, in our research, and in
our teaching.
The study of stereotypes provides a point of intersection between
quantitative and qualitative research, between social science and hu-
manities perspectives, between the cultural studies and administrative
approaches. Assumptions about stereotyping influence the way we think
about media effects, uses and gratifications, and the ideological analysis
of television. While television content analysis has been useful-even
essential-its methods could be refined if researchers were to scrutinize
their use of the concept of stereotype.
Scholars in social psychology, mass communications, and popular
culture have used the term diEerently and often approach diEerent areas
in their research: the audience, for social psychologists; television in
general, for mass communications researchers; and specific texts and
genres, for popular culture critics. In each case, the definition of a
Ellen Seiter is Assistant Professor of Telecommunication and Film in the Department
of Speech, University of Oregon. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the support
of the Center for the Study of Women in Society. All opinions expressed in this article are
those of the author and do not necessarily represent the Center.

14
 Stereotypes and the Media

stereotype and the kinds of assumptions employed raise political and

pedagogical questions.
Let us begin with social psychologists. The authors of a textbook in
the field maintain:

Like most ( i f n o t all) social psychologists we believe that stereotypes

are unicersal, used b y every human being i n processing information
about the social encironment. In our opinion, stereotypes are not
only inevitable but also are usually quite functional f o r effective
social interaction. . . . Stereotypes are generalizations about social
groups-characteristics that are attributed to a11 members of a given
group, without regard to cariations that must exist among members
of that group. Stereotypes are not necessarily based o n people’s
first-hand experiences w i t h members of stereotyped groups. They
may be learned f r o m others or f r o m the rnass media. . . . The luck of
regard f o r differences within a stereotyped group makes stereotypes
into “over-generalizatiorzs,” and as such they are always at least
.somewhut distorted. However, many stereotypes m a y have valid
grounds and a “kernel of truth” t o t h e m (4,p. 75).

Such a definition of’stereotypes dif3ers substantially from that implicit

in a great deal of mass communications research. Social psychologists1
explain stereotypes in terms of cognitive skills, as one form of mental
I a m referring here primarily to psychological social psychology; see 6, 23, 29.

15
Journal of Communication, Spring 1986

category among many that allow us to organize information. The term

does not necessarily connote falseness or a perversion of social reality, as
it often does in mass communications research. In its emphasis on the
universality of basic cognitive processes, however, the social psychology
definition can obscure the ideological nature of many stereotypes.

The definition of stereotypes used b y many

social psychologists today includes only a
part of the meaning originally invested in the
term by its coiner, journalist Walter Lippmann.

In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Lippmann emphasized the com-

monsense aspect of stereotypes as well a s their capacity to legitimize the
status quo-the latter aspect being substantially lost in many of the
recent textbook definitions of the term (e.g., 2, p. 254; 42, p. 90). For
Lippmann, stereotypes are “pictures in our heads” that we use to
apprehend the world around us. They result from a useful and not
necessarily undesirable “economy of effort” (this “cognitive” part of the
definition has been retained by social psychologists). At best, individuals
would hold these “habits of thought” only lightly and would be ready to
change them when new experiences or contradictory evidence was
encountered--an ability that Lippmann suspected was related to educa-
tion. A series of survey research projects in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s
used this definition to study the correlation between belief in stereo-
types and personal contact with members of the stereotyped group, or
the persistence of national stereotypes (see 9). Lippmann’s original
discussion of stereotypes emphasized their use within a society, a use
that was often obfuscated by later studies involving different nations.
Stereotypes contain an evaluation that justifies social difherences. The
question of the truth or falsity of stereotypes is immaterial for Lippmann
and cannot account for their origin, which is to lie found in social
divisions:

A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. I t is not merely CI way of

substituting order f o r the great blooming, buzzing confusion of
reality. It is not merely a short cut. I t is all these things and
something more. It is the guwrantee of our self-respect; it is the
projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our
own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore,
highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are
the fortress of our tradition, arid behind its defenses we can continue
to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy (28, p. 96).

Described in this way, the significance of stereotypes as an operation of

ideology becomes clear: they are full of hegemonic potential (see 19).

16
 Stereotypes and the Media

Perkins (34) cfeveloped this aspect of Lippmann’s definition in

ideological terms, suggesting that stereotypes primarily function I)y
inverting caiise and ef€ect.Stereotypes al)oiit blacks, for example, often
describe diff‘ei-ences iii education between Iilacks and whites. The
complex, deeply entrenchhed factors that keep blacks from succwding in
a white-dominated educational system--an effect of their subordinate
position in society-is represented in the stereotype as a single, racial
characteristic: blacks are less iiite1ligt:nt than whites !XI nuture. Such
stereotypes attempt to explain and to jiistify obvious inequalities in a
society whose official ideology is racial equality (see 22, pp. 51-86; 26).
Perkins iises the example of the “irrational, illogical, inconsistent
‘female logic’ stereotype” to explain this ideological process. The
housewife’s job deniaiids that a woman develop a variety of skills and be
able to change fi-om the performance of one skill (say, housework) to
another (childcare) very rapidly:

W h i t the rtereotype does is to identq!l t h i s Jcciture of the womuii’s

j o h situcition, place (i iiegatiue etaluntiori o r i i t , und then establish it
u s u r i innate femule cliciructeristic, thus iiicerting its stcrtus so that it
becomes (I c(iuse rather thcin urt c.Sfect. I t is thcse feotures of
stereotypes which e x p l a z n wliy stcrcwt!/p~~r cipl-lcur t o he f u l ie-
indeed, are fklse. The point is t o ideiitif!l their culiditil, because the
streiigth of stereotypes lies i n thir cmnl~inutioiz of culiditcy unct
distortion (34, p. 154).

The “flightiness” associated with women in the stereotype of female

logic is, in Fact, a desirable characteristic for those who must perform the
job of housewife. In the stereotype, it is negatively evaluated, ascribed
to nature, aiid used to justify women’s atisiiitaliility for other kinds of
labor.
A great deal of stereotype research in social psychology has been
concerned with documenting knowledge of stereotypes within a popu-
lation and persistence of Ilelief in thein (at times failing to distinguish
between the two). Often stereotypes are treated a s simple falsities that
no liberal-minded and educated citizen shoiild be guilty of entertaining
(8,pp. 170-175). (Current definitions of stereotypes in social psychology
attempt to deal with the assumption of fLlseness by distinguishing
between stereotypes and prejudice.) Other research introduced the
“kernel oftriith” hypothesis to account for the persistence of stereotypes
despite first-person contact with the stereotyped group. This hypothesis
fails to analyze the social origins and ideological motivations behind
stereotypes and conflates their descriptive and evaluative dimensions.
Its implications are profoundly reactionary.

17
Journal of Communication, Spring 1986

“Sex-role stereotypes” have dominated the

increasingly active field of stereotype
research since the early seventies.

Brown’s (8) discussion of the problems with stereotype research in

social psychology can especially illuminate sex-role studies:
Stereotypes m e not objectionable because they are generalizations
about categories; such generalizations are zjaluable w h e n they are
true. Stereotypes are not objectionable because they are generaliza-
tions that have been pro.r;enfalse; f o r the most part w e do not know
whether they are true or fulse-in their probabilistic forms. Stereo-
types are not objectionuble because they are generalizations ac-
quired b y heursny rather than hy direct experience; many generuli-
zations acquired b y hearsay are t r u e and u s e f u l . W h a t is
objectionable then? I think it is their ethnocentrism and the impli-
cation that important traits w e inborn f o r large groups (p. 181).
Like many of the earlier studies of national stereotype, sex-role
research measuring respondents’ beliefs in stereotypes frequently uses
word-choice tests (see 3). The Adjective Check List, for example,
measures the association of words such as “aggressive,” “courageous,”
“
filssy,” “sensitive,” and “assertive” with men as against women (see
41). “Male and female sex stereotypes may be defined as the constella-
tion of psychological traits generally attributed to men and women
respectively” (4, p. 327). Such a definition emphasizes the psychological
dimension of stereotypes at the expense of their grounding in the social
structure. The definition results in part from the use of the term “sex
roles,” to which feminists have objected because it “tends to mask
questions of power and inequality. The notion of ‘role’ has tended to
focus attention more on individuals than on social strata, more on
socialization than on social structure, and has therefore deflected atten-
tion away from historic, economic and political questions” (30, p. 719).
The research on sex-role stereotypes often addresses the fact that
what is described in a stereotype is held to be inborn: that it evaluates
men’s and women’s natures, and does so differentially. Sex-role research
is much less sensitive to ethnocentrism. Instruments such as the Adjec-
tive Check List dissociate personality traits from their social context,
ignoring the fact that qualities such as “assertiveness” are evaluated very
differently depending on the race, class, and age of the group to whom
they refer and the group that makes the judgment. The same behavior
may be evaluated as “assertive” in the white professional or as “bitchy”
and out of line in the woman who is poor and black. Many studies of
sex-role stereotypes tell 11s a great deal about what white middle-class
students think about the psychological make-up of men and women who
are white and middle-class. But they obscure the political power of

18
 Stereotypes and the Media

stereotypes over those who may be most afbected by them: poor and
working-class women of color (see 24).

Stereotypes have been associated with the mass

media since the term first gained currency.

Mass communications researchers have often used stereotype to

mean representations of reality that are false and, by implication,
immoral, and have proceeded without further clarification to document
their frequent appearance in the mass media (33, p. 149). Television
content analyses, my primary interest here, have focused on the fre-
quency with which women and minorities appear on TV and in what
kinds of roles. The results have been startling in their indictment of
television as a medium overwhelmingly dominated by white males (11,
37, 38).
The limitations of content analysis as a method have been com-
pounded, however, by a lack of theoretical discussion (see 10). There is
a frequent failure to specify what is meant by stereotype (often it is just
used as a “dirty word”) and how it is related to ideology (20). Blanket
assumptions are often made concerning the effects of media stereotypes
without drawing distinctions as to the kind of stereotypes and the kind of
audience being referred to. Notice how in the following rather typical
statement stereotypes are associated with minority groups and the
audience is implicitly white: “The major concern with the presentation
of stereotypes on television is that the result of such portrayals may be
the acquisition of negative attitudes towards certain groups by the
audience and the solidification of sexual and racial stereotypes” (36, p.
71). The origins of stereotypes, their relationship to the social structure,
and their history are typically left aside in these studies, while a vague
effects model is used to justify the research.
Stereotypes of socially powerful groups are studied less frequently,
and the relationships among individual stereotypes are rarely examined
(except in sex-role stereotype research, which as mentioned earlier
rarely focuses on diEerences in the content of stereotypes based on race,
class, and age). This suggests that positive, “majority” stereotypes are
somehow more realistic and do not warrant the kind of examination
“minority” stereotypes deserve. To understand the ideological aspect of
stereotypes in the mass media, we must look at their evaluative as well
as their descriptive aspects. For example, stereotypes usually describe
all women in terms of their personal relationships to men and in terms of
their sexuality, while white men are rarely described in this way. As
Perkins explains:

19
Journul of Communication, Spring 1986

There is a male (he-man) stereotype, a n upper class (leader) stereo-

type. These stereotypes ure important because other stereotypes are
partially defined i n terms of, or i n opposition to, them. The happy-
go-lucky negro attains at leust some of its meuning and force f r o m its
opposition to the “puritan” characteristics (somber und responsible)
of the WASP. Positiue stereotypes are an important part of ideology
and are important i n the sociulisution of both dominunt and op-
pressed groups. I n order to focus attention on the ideological nature
of stereotypes it might be rnore useful to tulk of pejorntice stereo-
types and laudatory stereotypes, ruther t h a n t o conceal the
pejorativeness” i n the meuning of the term (34, p, 144).
‘<

If we fail to examine the evaluative as well as the descriptive

components of stereotypes, there is a danger of mistaking the presence of
white, bourgeois values for the absence of stereotypes and, therefore, for
more true and realistic representations. Professional achievement, am-
bition, puritanism, and individualism may be heralded as components of
new “positive images” of white women and of men and women of color.
But such representations may obsciire economically based social divi-
sions and circumvent the recognition of shared experiences of oppres-
sion. Television content analysis should be carefully scrutinized in
terms of this kind of ethnocentrism, especially since so many studies use
white college students as coders.
Our agendas for “progress” in TV representation need to lie similarly
analyzed. Many quantitative studies of television content conclude with
conspicuously weak statements about the need for greater diversification
of character types. Sometimes a plea is made for more “democratic”
representation, where the population of television characters would
reflect audience demographics proportionately: “The common culture of
American society cuts across ethnic lines in dozens of ways but the
phenomenal degree of integration which has been achieved in America
has not become as visible as it could” (37, p. 288). This line of argument
is dead-ended by the rejoinder that the commercial television industry is
interested in a market of white, young, middle-class consumers.
A second conclusion offered by quantitative analyses explains the
repetition of stereotypes in terms of narrative conventions: “stereotypic
portrayals may provide the lowest common denominator on which to
build storylines; perhaps without exaggerating or distorting writers and
producers have difficulty creating interesting yet credible characters and
situations” (39, p. 238). This explanation constitutes one kind of “return
ofthe repressed” in television content analysis: having banished context
in order to isolate units of content that are quantifiable, the research
leaves conventions of genre, modes of narration, and visual and thematic
codes outside its scope. Both kinds of conclusion negotiate a tenuous

20
 Stereotypes and the Media

position between idealism and apologism, and reduce the “problem”

with television content to the audience itself.
A third and less frequent conclusion compares television stereotypes
to social arid economic divisions among the groups they represent. Gross
and Jeffries-Fox voice the typical discomfort with this issue when they
say, in. discussing sex-role stereotypes, that this “sort of bias is in some
moral sense more ambiguous than the others. Many of the more stereo-
typed features of the portrayal of women on television are also accurate
reflections of the sexist reality of our society” (18, p. 253). This is the
mass communications research equivalent of the “kernel of truth”
hypothesis in social psychology and stems from the initial tendency to
think of stereotypes a s both pejorative and false. If the descriptive aspect
of stereotypes can be seen to be accurate (albeit in highly selective
ways), their evaluative aspect cannot. For we are dealing not with a
question of triith and falsity, but with ideology.

In humanities criticism, stereotypes are distinguished

f r om well-rounded, individuated characters.

Dyer (17) has outlined the qualities associated with the novelistic
conception of character a s particularity, interest, autonomy, roundness,
development, interiority, motivation, discrete identity, and consistency
(p. 104). When these standards for the representation of fictional char-
acters are applied to the mass media, the niedia inevitably come up
short. Critics may siiggest that the fictions created b y the mass media are
stereotypical because they are both false (characters portrayed are
one-dimensional, undeveloped, not true-to-life) and aesthetically bank-
rupt (plots and characters evidence formulaic repetition). A hierarchy of
cultural forms exists within the humanities based on the suitability of
negative aesthetic judgments such a s “stereotypical” to describe them.
Critics rarely speak of stereotypes in opera or ballet. Novels fare better
than plays; theater fares better than film; film fkres better than television.
The word “stereotype” condemns any individual product of the mass
media: TV critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel use it to describe films
they dislike; newspaper columnists complain that series are “full of the
same old stereotypes.” Popiilar genres such as soap opera or science
fiction are deemed fiill of stereotypes; the troubled, alienated white
intellectuals who populate the art films of Berginan, Fellini, or Antonioni
are deemed individual characters. In this view, Art never resorts to such
crude conventional techniques as stereotyping and remains untainted by
ideology.
These aesthetic judgments ignore the fact that the novelistic concep-
tion of character, with its basis in nineteenth-century realism, itself
reflects a political position. As Dyer explains,

21
Journal of Communication, Spring 1986

the peculiarities of the bourgeois conception of individuallcharacter

are, first, that the stress on particularity and uniqueness tends to
bar, or render inferior, representation of either collectivity and the
masses or the typical personlcharucter (types being relegated to a
merely functional role i n promoting the central character); and
second, that the concern with interior motivation reinforces a model
of history and social process i n which explanation is rooted i n the
individual conscience and capacity rather than i n collective andlor
structural aspects of social lije (17, p. 108).

The novelistic conception of character implicitly demands certain things

from the cultural producer (artist/writerldirector) and from the artwork
itself. Uniqueness and originality are used to define the cultural produc-
er’s talent in creative terms. The work must evidence complexity and
detail, which, in realism, presumably derive from the maker’s ability to
observe and record reality (see 31, pp. 64-78). According to this aes-
thetic, characters should not be created for the purpose of political
statement, for they could not then meet realism’s demands for particu-
larity. The cartoon, the soap opera, and the socialist realist film can all be
condemned on the same aesthetic grounds, i.e., for using stereotyped
characters. Humanities scholars on the Left have also despised mass
culture for its use of stereotypes, as the work of George Lukacs, Theodor
Adorno, and Max Horkheimer so clearly indicates (see 1).
Scholars of popular culture such as Robert Warshow, John G.
Cawelti, and Paddy Whannel and Stuart Hall (12, 21, 40) dissociate
themselves from high culture critics by arguing that a11 forms of fiction
employ rules and conventions-stereotypes among them-and that such
use does not necessarily reduce the work’s value. Popular culture critics
also take exception with empiricist mass communications researchers,
whom they accuse of oversimplifying the relationship between culture
and society by treating it as direct and unmediated. The popular culture
perspective argues for the necessity of understanding intrinsic forms: the
genres, narrational rules, visual and thematic conventions of mass
culture.
This has brought about the salvation of the popular artist as creative
genius in the work ofAndr6 Bazin, Andrew Sarris, Stuart Kaminsky, and
Jim Kitses, among many other film scholars who have embraced auteur-
ism (5, 25, 27, 35). In television studies it has been more difficult to
single out for this honor a creative force in the production process, but
Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley have attempted to do so with the TV
producer (32). Popular genres, such as the Western and the detective
story, have also been elevated to the status of Art.
To avoid the pejorative connotations that surround the word “stereo-
type,” such critics describe popular culture’s characters as archetypes.
Cawelti describes the standards proposed:

22
 Stereotypes and the Media

The good writer must renew these stereotypes by adding new

elements, b y showing u.s some new unexpected facet, or by relating
t h e m to other stereotypes in (1 particvlarly expressice fashion. The
ultimate test of a truly citalized stereotype is the degree to which it
becomes an archetype, thereby transcending its particular cultural
moment and maintaining an interest for later generations and other
cultures (13, p. 11).
Cawelti adds that “the addition of significant toucher of human com-
plexity or frailty to a stereotypical figure” is one of the primary means of
“
stereotype vitalization”: these are the same terms that describe the
bourgeois conception of character. In Cawelti’s aesthetic scheme,
uniqueness and individuality can be “added on” to debased stereotypes,
and popular culture can thereby live up to the ideals of realism and
durability.
Popular culture critics emphasize formal rules and a limited set of
(often psychological) thematic concerns; they frequently exclude ques-
tions about the relationship between the products of popular culture and
the society that produces them. They have failed to scrutinize the
systematic exclusions, niarginalizations, and vilifications of particular
groups as represented in the fictional world. By analyzing stereotypes as
part of a formal genre system, they exclude the social origins of character
types. Stereotypes of white heroes are frequently elevated to the status
of archetype and invested with deep psychological significance and
social meaning (see 12, 25, 27). Analyses of the Western exemplify the
tenuous position held by critics who choose to apologize for-or ig-
nore-a text’s overtly racist premises, while claiming for it the privileged
status of Art, above the vulgar scrutiny of sociologists. Although the work
of early popular culture critics such as Warshow and Whannel exhibited
a sophisticated understanding of politics and a compelling analysis ofthe
social meaning of stereotypes, popular culture studies since the 1970s
have been dominated by a weak and often vague form of functionalist
sociology, as indicated in this passage: “Formulas resolve tensions and
ambiguities resulting from the conflicting interests of different groups
within the culture or from ambiguous attitudes towards particular
values” (13, p. 35). If the tendency in social psychological and mass
communications research has been blindness to dominant group stereo-
types, popular culture criticism has suffered from inattention to stereo-
types of socially oppressed groups.

We have generally failed to teach or research the

history and analysis of individual stereotypes and
their relationship to social and economic power.

Stereotypes provide an opportunity to connect theory and practice in

teaching about ideology. We can use them to demonstrate to students in

23
Journal of Communication, Spring 1986

a dramatic way the various forms of racism, classism, sexism, and

homophobia that circulate in our culture.
The shame associated with holding stereotypes, as well as the
incentives in a liberal, academic environment to prove that one doesn’t,
niay deter us from examining their content. The typical example offered
in social psychology textbooks, for example, is the “safe” stereotype of
the redhead. This is a comfortable example for classroom discussion
among white students, but it also obfuscates the ideological function of
most stereotypes. A more appropriate a i d meaningful discussion of
stereotypes might ask: How does the corporate executive compare to the
drag queen? The black matriarch to the society woman? The dumb
blonde to the tragic mulatto? The criminal Asian to the Uncle Tom? The
black prostitute to the femme fatale? The judge to the factory worker?
The tennis instructor to the football player? Behind each stereotype lies
a history that relates both to comnionsense understandings of society and
to economic determinants. When we start studying the content of‘
individual stereotypes and their relationship to one another, a series of
new issues are introduced in the classroom, many of which involve
confronting and unlearning racism (see 22, 24, 26;).
Too often communications students leave the university with a
heightened sense of moral outrage over the grievous practices of televi-
sion networks, while they remain smugly (and erroneously) confirmed in
their own freedom from racism, or sexism, or elitism. (Homophobia still
tends to be more openly acceptable; for a discussion of gay stereoQpes,
see 14, 16.)In television criticism classes, students may learn that public
television is aesthetically superior to network TV because of its freedom
from stereotypes. Students niay hold a vague, utopian longing for a
democratic medium whose character population would mirror the de-
mographics of the United States, where men and women of color, white
women, and the poor would be treated positively, i.e., as capable of
aspiring to the same standards a s middle-class white men. Following the
aesthetic theory of Brecht ( 7 ) ,Citron (14),Cook (15),and Dyer (16) have
argued that the deliberate use of stereotypes may be preferable to this
aesthetic strategy.
We need a pedagogy that refuses to confirm white middle-class
college students in their ability to evaluate objectively the quality of
aesthetic products based on the presence of stereotypes without drawing
any distinctions among types or understanding their social basis. We
must not reinforce students’ feeling of neutrality in relationship to the
media by employing them as scientific coders of television content or as
the subjects of psychology experiments where they can prove their
enlightened position by disclaiming any knowledge of stereotypes. We
must challenge the students’ opinion of the audience as primarily like
them, only poorer and not so well educated. When we presume a
television audience that is white, straight, male, and middle-class we
need to say so, and if we do not know much about the rest of the
audience we must learn.

24
 Stereotypes and the Media

These same strictures apply to those who research stereotypes. The

term stereotype has little explanatory value and less theoretical ground-
ing; at the same time, its use suggests many simplistic assumptions about
the debased nature of mass media. Research designs must make explicit
their orientation to theories of ideology, must account for change in
stereotypes, must tie sensitive to context and the way meaning on
television is produced, must conceptualize the differences-especially
those of race, class, and gender-within the television audience.
All stereotypes were not created equal. We cannot afford to see media
stereotypes defined primarily in psychological or politically neutral
terms, nor can we see thein a s merely a symptom of our debased cultural
life. We must consider careftilly the relationship of stereotypes to the
legitiniation of social power. We must distinguish between their descrip-
tive and their evaluative aspects, analyzing their history and content as
well a s their frequency. Finally, we must ask ourselves how different
social groups will tinderstand stereotypes, believe in them, laugh at
them, embrace them, or despise them.
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