Malcolm X's Cultivation Theory

In 1964, Malcolm X stood before a crowd in New York City’s Audubon Ballroom where he once said, “This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. The media is the most powerful entity on earth, because they control the minds of the masses.” In depth, what Malcolm X means by this is that people will often listen to anything and everything the media says without hesitation. I believe that what he was trying to tell us is that you should not just listen to what the media says, but you should also do your own

Stereotypes are preconceived assumptions based upon the characteristics and behaviors of all members of a particular group. These assumptions are often commonly held beliefs that are thought to be true by many people in the population (Power, Murphy, Coover, 1996). On August 9, 2014, an unarmed teenager, Michael brown was gunned down by a Caucasian police officer in Ferguson. Some of the media showed pictures of him smiling in his graduation cap and gown, but the majority of the media portrayed him as a “thug”. The picture which later became the focal point on every news outlet, called people to question if Michael Brown was so innocent as the people who knew him said he was. The picture in question was a picture of him in a red jersey throwing up what media called a gang sign, but was said to be a peace sign by his peers. How many times have we as young people taken questionable pictures or pictures that were of the latest trend… most if not all of us. But this simple picture that the news outlets used later became a picture that would determine how the whole world viewed him. Some experts said that the picture the media portrayed revealed a pattern of criminalizing black bodies in the U.S. media. Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, which is a group aimed to strengthening black Americans stated that, “criminalization