What’s up TV?In this issue of what’s up TV, we’ll talk about biases,

misrepresentation and stereotyping in the movie

TUBE magazine

12 TUBE MAY 2008

IT was my fi rst time sitting down in my living room on a Sun-day evening, relaxing after a

busy week of graduation project.

On Channel 5 was a Sunday Evening movie called ‘Flight Plan’. A movie released in 2005. Missed it when it was out on cinema and it was a good time for me to relax myself and catch it fi rst time.

Like many other movies, ‘Flight Plan’ was another action, mystery and thriller movie that is rated PG. Starring in it was Jodie Foster as Kyle Pratt, Peter Sarsgaard as Carson and more to be name.

This movie started out with a tragic death of Kyle’s hus-band and left her with a little daughter and as they were on the plane from Germany to New York, her daughter vanishes and no one onboard admitted that they saw her.

After a long searched, a scene that caught me instantly. That was a part where she had become a little crazy over the fact that

the captain of the fl ight told her that her daughter did not came onboard with her. And she insisted that she did and a scene of two Arab men came in. She insisted that the Arabians kidnapped her daughter and had such bad attitude over them.

There was a twist in the story lines where in the end, surprisingly the Ara-bians wasn’t the ones who kidnapped the child instead it was the white posing as a police who plans to blow up the plane.

Yes, isn’t that what is hap-pening to the media today? After the event of 911, many medium had portrayed Mus-lims, Middle Easterners as people of terrorism. They are being put in to blame when there are any bomb-ing events and something took place and went wrong.

To a certain extent, yes that the JI are made up of Muslims but the truth is that not all Muslims are the terrorist. Today the Middle Easterners are being put in a role of terrorism in many movies.

Not only today, biasness of races had

TUBE magazine

TUBE MAY 2008 13

already been around in the early days where the blacks are the minority in Amer-ica. They are always being portrayed as gangsters, rapists, murderers, cleaner and any other servant roles.

“Crush” is another movie that portrays a high amount of racial biasness. There are scenes like Asian roles being the un-reasonable ones making the most unreasonable re-marks and being portrayed as the loud-mouth.

Another was two African American youth as gangster, creating troubles, and the role of the ‘whites’ are the ‘high’ roles like governors, Po-lice and any other ‘good’ roles.

However, one good thing about the end of ‘Crush’ was that the different indi-vidual had realised that they have the wrong perceptions of those that are of other race.

This entire message serves us well be-cause many of time we look at different race with a standard mindset. We ste-reotype everyone with something that we sees on the media but how many of us had really experiences that?

I have many African Americans friend who are based in Okinawa, Japan. My percep-

tion changes as I hang out with them and got to know them more. They are the best people to be with; they are the most excit-ed people you could have come across.

Because today media holds a very large part in many of our lives and that has also become also our sources of information and as we tends to rely more on it, our

perception will keep also be what the TV or media tells us. Misrepresentation of the Black, Asians and other minority groups are and has always be-ing portrayed as men-tioned above, some guides we could do:

(1) We can’t stop it, since the media are the manipulator but we can stop it by stopping to have such mindset.

(2) We should never ‘always’ believe what the media tells us be-cause it is just their in-dividual perceptions.

(3) We should be wise in what we are watching and know the dif-ferences between framing and misrepre-sentation of each issue in this case rac-ism.

(4) We should stop being partiality and start to love people around us. It’s al-ways good to have friend then an enemy isn’t it?