Study finds whites dominate prime time

LOS ANGELES, June 24 (UPI) -- White characters get the vast majority of screen time, while black characters are largely relegated to one or two nights on "one of the smaller networks" and Latino characters are relatively scarce everywhere on the prime time TV landscape, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.

The study -- "Prime Time in Black and White: Not Much Is New for 2002" -- was based on a content analysis of 234 episodes of 85 situation comedies and dramas on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, UPN and The WB during October and November 2002.

It found that white characters accounted for 81 percent of screen time, appearing on TV for 224 hours out of 276 hours of screen time for all characters. Black characters accounted for about 41 hours of screen time -- or about 15 percent of screen time. Latino characters accounted for seven hours, or 3 percent of screen time. Asian Americans accounted for four hours, or 1 percent of screen time.

Darnell Hunt, the study's principal author and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, told United Press International the trend towards media consolidation tends to discourage integration in prime time, as parent companies seem to be carving up the TV ad market along ethnic and racial lines.

"Integration is not a central value (of broadcasters and advertisers)," he said. "What's really driving them is a business logic that says you can more efficiently reach certain market segments by dividing them along certain lines. Advertisers will know what to do with that. The cost is that we have splintered one of our key cultural forums that could be a meeting place for the whole."

The study is the second of a planned five-year, annual examination of diversity in prime time. Hunt said that although shows that feature minority characters are largely relegated to one or two nights on smaller networks, he would not characterize those programming blocks as a ghetto -- as he did in an earlier study.

"The UPN Monday night lineup was such a major component of black presence in prime time that the word ghetto seemed to be apt. It's declined a little bit ... but Monday night on UPN is still clearly a black night."

Of the 125 black characters in prime time on Monday nights, 112 were on UPN.

The study concluded that white characters were most overrepresented, in relation to their percentage of the population, on The WB and NBC. Whites accounted for 83 percent of characters on The WB and 81 percent on NBC, while non-Latino whites make up 69 percent of the nation's population.

Researchers concluded that Latinos "continued to be the most underrepresented group" in prime time "despite being the nation's largest minority group." Latinos -- who make up 13 percent of the population -- accounted for 3 percent of characters in prime time in 2002, up slightly from 2001.

Asian Americans accounted for about 3 percent of characters while accounting for about 4 percent of the population. The researchers said Native Americans were "invisible" in prime time, the same as 2001.

Hunt said there are successful shows in prime time with integrated casts, suggesting that viewers will accept more ethnic and racial diversity than they are getting on network TV.

"Tastes don't fall from the sky," he said. "People aren't born with the proclivity to like this or that. If there were more integrated programming that portrayed people from different racial and ethnic groups more fairly, I would argue that we'd probably develop a taste for that."

Spokesmen for ABC, CBS and NBC did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the UCLA study.