JOUR 4250: A Different Time

Before last class, I never knew nor ever heard of Jet Magazine. Two of my classmates did their content analysis projects on this same magazine. One student even had a video of his parents talking about how important Jet was in their lives.

 

These students informed the class that decades ago Jet was one of the most popular magazines dedicated to delivering news and entertainment to black people at the time. The magazine was eerily similar to other, well-established magazines at the time. This happened to be the sole topic of discussion for one student’s project.

This student’s content analysis focused on the depiction of dark-skinned people in the magazine, or the lack thereof. Each cover had a very light-skinned black man or woman. The inside content was not much different. I thought it was odd for a magazine focused on delivering news to black people to not depict dark-skinned black people. Many of the images shown resembled a white man or woman. The student had to explain to the class that those models were, in fact, black.

After being shown examples of Jet’s depictions of black men and women, the class was shown a copy of Time magazine from around the same time period.

The Time copy showed mostly white men and women. The only time I can remember being shown a black person was when a picture was included of minorities in an article dealing with welfare and the downward economy.

In a class like this, I like to think of someone who has never been to America and what they would think of race differences when they just look at magazines like this issue of Time. Every other article featured white men and women. Black people seemed to be included in sections with bad news only.

The cover of the Time magazine issue juxtaposed a white American schoolboy to his Soviet counterpart. A person from another country would most likely assume that American children are friendlier and have access to more money and resources. They would think the soviet children were menacing and poor.

This class reinforced the belief that images and content focused mostly on one group can support stereotypes. One group being cast in a light completely different from another group can easily create prejudices.