Media stereotypes are inevitable, especially in the advertising, entertainment and news industries, which need as wide an audience as possible to quickly understand information. Stereotypes act like codes that give audiences a quick, common understanding of a person or group of people—usually relating to their class, ethnicity or race, gender, sexual orientation, social role or occupation.
But stereotypes can be problematic. They can:
- reduce a wide range of differences in people to simplistic categorizations
- transform assumptions about particular groups of people into "realities"
- be used to justify the position of those in power
More often than not, the groups being stereotyped have little to say about how they are represented.
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