Published: 16 December 2016
Region: Worldwide
Whether it is the latest Star Wars film or your favourite comic book, people can now rate the media they consume every day on the basis of racial equity and inclusion. Rate My Media is the first crowd-sourced website fostering action for a diverse media through more informed consumers and more accountable media.
The starting point of the website is that media should accurately represent the society we live in, but a quick zapping on TV is enough to understand that we don’t see all groups accurately portrayed on screen. As the UCLA Diversity Report highlights, from Hollywood to TV shows, minorities are still underrepresented in the media.
The creator of the website is Brendesha Tynes, entrepreneur and professor at the University of Southern California. The idea of using technology for a more racially diversified media originates from her academic research on youth experiences with digital media. The inspiration, however, came to her from the outcry against a McGraw-Hill Education textbook passage referring to African slaves as migrant ‘workers’.
“I wanted to start a company that would create tools that promote representations of groups in their full humanity,” Tynes said to women 2.0, “that would call out the inaccuracies in the ways people of color are portrayed across a range of media, and facilitate the development of more positive perceptions of self for underrepresented groups.”
One rating at a time, Rate My Media gets people to speak up against biases in the media and to make media content a reflection of all people in society.