Using your own detailed examples explore representations of ethnicity in the media today.

There are many representations of ethnicity is the media however they all seem to be very limited if not overlooked completely. Many of these tend to be as token gestures or stereotypical to fit with the dominant ideology.

To explore this further I will be primarily looking at the representation of Gypsies in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, a TV programme produced by Jenny Popplewell shown on Channel 4.
I will also comment on other representations of gypsies in the media such as those in Snatch and The Traveller Times Online.

In the media, gypsies are portrayed in a negative light. Every single media product stereotypes them as dirty, tramps and thieves. We see this everywhere, in magazines, films, TV programmes and Documentaries. A good example is the article titled ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves?’ it varies in different words that are linked with negativity throughout the whole article. While including examples from Snatch, the article says ‘Messages of gypsies in Snatch are deeply negative, putting us, the audience in a superior position’. This clearly shows the negativity of them in the media. Only 300,000 gypsies and travellers live in Britain. Only small part of them are in TV programmes and other forms of media therefore the representation is disproportionate to their population. Not all Irish Travellers are dirty or thieves.

My Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is clearly produced purely for entertainment reasons. It started off as more of a documentary however after the dominant readers started to demand more, the facts and choices of what scenes to put in the weekly shows have started to vary. This started giving off negative and stereotypical facts about gypsies in the programme. Its decides to shows us the way they live (mostly caravans), the way the girls drop out of school at a very young age of 14-16 to work and clean at home. It doesn’t shows us a lot of gypsies who live in nice houses with a very advanced education whose lifestyle is very similar to ours. And you know why? Because it’s boring, people don’t want to see that, its not very entertaining watching a programme about normal people.

Characters in MBFGW Life on the Run are also portrayed negatively from the start. The narrator seems to have a nice soothing voice – almost like she feels sorry for them. You feel sympathetic until you see how they have parked in a public park where residents clearly have a big problem with it therefore get evicted by the council after 1 night. We see and interview of an older man who says how unsafe he feels so he made sure he locked all the doors to avoid burglary. This episode seems to focus on Helens family. Helen is very young. She lives with hey younger siblings and gets regular visits of her older brother. She is engaged to somebody she has known for a few months and got engaged just after 7 days of speaking to him on dating websites. She has been evicted many times and had been to 20 public parks in a space of a month because been evicted. Her younger siblings are shown and say how they are always called names like pikeys, gypsies, gyppos. Later on in the programme we see Helens brother goes out to buy a quad bike and one of his friends steal oil. This reinforces the fact that there thieves and reinforces the stereotype of Irish Travellers. In between the chats with the main characters, you see pictures of dirty caravans, rubbish, children running around hitting each other. The producers choose to include this to reinforce the gypsy stereotype for entertainment reasons.

Irish Travellers tend to usually be portrayed negatively and often stereotypically by the media as its usually created by non gypsy community for non gypsy (audience).
Even though the negativity seems to be the trend, there are exceptions like The Travellers Times Online- which is a portal created by the gypsy community and doesn’t provide judgemental and stereotypical view on the travellers.
The reason for the stereotypical use of ethnicity tends to be common as reflects the dominant ideology and are easy for mainstream non gypsy audiences to recognise.

In my opinion, the representation of the Irish Travellers in the media is incorrect. Just because they have a nomadic lifestyle doesn’t automatically make them thieves or tramps. They should all be given equal life chances.