Sociological Images

NPR reports that Beef Products Incorporated, the company that makes “finely textured beef” (a chemically-treated paste made from non-muscle cow parts used as a filler in ground beef), will be closing three of its production plants this month.  Dozens of food manufacturers, grocery store chains, restaurants, and school districts have announced they never did or will no longer use the product.  This after just two months of media coverage and activism around the product, kicked off by an ABC News report on March 7th.

The swiftness and sureness of this victory against this product is a testament to the value of the right language and one good image.  In case you haven’t caught on yet, finely textured beef is better known as ”pink slime.”  Between that nifty pejorative and the image below, which you probably saw, finely textured beef never had a chance.  This is  “mechanically separated chicken” (made with a similar but not identical process); it appears to have become synonymous with pink slime, correctly or no:

This is the power of framing.  The product at issue is not “slime,” it’s cow-part paste.  Of course, it’s not “beef” either, it’s cow-part paste.  Both are discursive frames; it’s a classic “he said, she said” social movement framing battle (along the lines of “life” vs. “choice”).  The outcome of the contest depended, in part, on which language captured the public’s imagination.  And… well… we saw how that went.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

This morning NPR aired a segment on media stories about the “boomerang generation,” college-education children who return to live with their parents after graduation. A widely-repeated figure is that currently 85% of recent college grads are moving back in with their parents, taken as a sign of the ongoing, and potentially long-term, consequences of the economic crisis.

Except for the part where it’s not true.

You may have heard this figure. CNN Money seems to be the first to cite it, in 2010; Time and the New York Post, among others, repeated the number:

It  continued to spread, most recently ending up in a political ad from American Crossroads that attacks President Obama.

But PolitiFact recently looked into the claim and declared it false. It supposedly came from a survey conducted by a marketing and research firm from Philadelphia. Yet as they dug further into the story, PolitiFact found many things that might make you suspicious. For instance, some people listed as employees claimed never to have worked for them, while others seem to be fictional, their photos taken from stock photo archives. One employee they did find turned out to be the company president’s dad. When they found the president, David Morrison, he said the survey was conducted “many years ago” but refused to release any information about the methodology, saying he had a non-disclosure agreement with the (unnamed) client.

But as the story of this shocking trend was reproduced, it appears reporters did not try to access the original survey to fact-check it, or surely they would have discovered at least some of these discrepancies, or the lack of any available data to back up the claim.

In contrast to the 85% figure, a Pew Center report (based on a sample of 2,048) found that for young adults aged 18-34, 39% were either currently living with their parents or had temporarily moved in with them at some point because of the economic downturn:

And importantly, of those currently living with their parents, the vast majority of 18-24 year-olds said the economy wasn’t the reason they were doing so. The study found no significant differences by education for those under 30 (42% of graduates were living at home, compared to 49% of those who never attended college), but for those 30-34, only 10% of college graduates were living at home (compared to 22% of non-college graduates).

But once the more shocking 85% figure had been cited by a mainstream news source, it was quickly reproduced in many other outlets with little fact-checking. As PolitiFact sums up,

…once a claim enters the mainstream media, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. “The dynamic of trust is built with each link,” Wemple said. “It barely occurs to anybody that all those links may be built on a straw foundation.”

Earlier this year a University of Wisconsin-Madison student at a fraternity house yelled racial slurs and threw a glass bottle at two Black female students.  The story is reported in the Wisconsin State Journal with the following title:

Notice that race isn’t mentioned, but alcohol is.  This makes no sense.  The March 23rd article is about an instance of racial harassment that occurred on March 16th.  The “alcohol incident” was old news; it had happened six months earlier in September.  Why is the old news the headline?

This wasn’t on purpose, was it?

It looks that way.

Reader Nils G. pointed out that the URL of the article reveals that there was a decision to change the title of the article from one that focused on race to one that focused on alcohol.  When you’re posting an article, the program automatically creates a URL using the first title you choose.  If you later change the title, the URL stays the same.  The URL of this article?:  ”UW Fraternity Temporarily Suspended for Racial Incident.”

So, there was a choice to change the impact of this article from one that put race front-and-center to one about (frat) boys being (drunken frat) boys.  We can only speculate about why.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Yesterday Native Appropriations featured a presentation about Urban Outfitters, cultural appropriation in fashion, and the struggle to get the clothing chain to stop labeling clothing as “Navajo.” The presentation is great both for explaining this particular case — which included the Navajo nation sending a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Urban Outfitters stop using the term Navajo in its marketing — and also because it shows how one particular story spread through social media, which increasingly have the ability to bring mainstream media attention to stories that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.

Notice anything about the 17 photographs the New York Times chose to highlight the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Last year we posted Anita Sarkeesian’s great discussion of the manic pixie dream girl trope.  The manic pixie is a female side character who, through her whimsical approach to life, “helps the male main character find himself, love life again, or overcome some obstacle.”  Think Natalie Portman in Garden State.

Anyhow, I came across a skit making fun of the trope by taking the manic pixie to its logical conclusion, titled “Welcome to the State Home for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”  Yep, it’s a state-run institution for the charming but totally helpless, perhaps-mentally-challenged not-so-dream girl.  I’m putting it up here because it’s quite funny, but I also like how it deconstructs a version of ideal femininity, revealing it to be rather impractical indeed.

Film by Natural Disastronauts. Found via BoingBoing.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Transcript, by Trellany J. Evans, after the jump:

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Last fall I posted about the continued use of race/ethnicity as a basis for decisions about hiring when casting roles in Hollywood. Though using race or color as a qualification for a job is illegal in the U.S., it is still widely, and openly, practiced when choosing actors for movies and TV.

Dolores R. sent in an example of a casting call for an Acura commercial that shows how race and skin color requirements are explicitly stated. The role is for an African American car dealer; however, the description calls for someone who is “not too dark”:

The casting document was posted by Oh No They Didn’t! after an African-American actor who didn’t fit the profile passed it on to them. Someone at the casting agency claimed that the reason they didn’t want an actor who was “too dark” was that it would make lighting and special effects more difficult.

Seriously.

Acura has apologized, though as Forbes points out, they probably had little to do with the actual casting process; the casting call was mostly likely written within the casting agency.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, within the industry roles are generally understood to be for non-Hispanic Whites unless specifically stated otherwise. However, as this casting call shows, even when a role is open to racial/ethnic minorities, additional restrictions related to skin color or other features may still severely limit the pool of actors who have a legitimate chance at winning the role.

The final commercial: