I found George Gerbner and associates' ideas of cultivation theory very interesting. His research found that people who frequently watched television overestimated the amount of violence there was in the world. I'd like to try this concept of cultivation theory on another frequent complaint of television, that it under-represents and stereotypes minorities.
To test this would require a random sampling of participants, surveyed on how much television they watched. Then they could be tested by asking them to estimate the percentages of minorities constituted the population at the local, state, and country level. I suspect that while their estimations at the local level would not be thrown off by the relative "whiteness" of television at the local levels, at the country level heavier television watchers would tend toward underestimating the relative abundance of minorities.
I have frequently seen content analysis of network television of how often minorities are actually recurring or cast characters (and in what professions they are shown).
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