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Especially outside the US, I notice since a lot of films, TV and other media are set in New York and Southern California/the greater LA area, characters or themes including say Jewish American characters, or Catholics, say Italians, are more common. I've nothing against these groups, but I'm wondering if it makes seem the US more Catholic/Jewish than it is? When I was younger I thought there were a lot more Jews in the US than there are, but outside the Northeast, LA, and a few other scattered regions, there are hardly any Jewish people in the US. Italians aren't really common outside the Northeast, some major Midwestern cities or San Francisco either.
The rest of the U.S. outside of the East Coast and West Coast is sometimes referred to in a disparaging way as "the flyover states". So yeah, the concentration of the mass media in those two places makes them pretty narrow-minded and self-absorbed when they decide what to write about or film. There aren't a whole lot of tv shows or movies that take place outside of NYC or southern California. And when they do show the rest of the U.S., it's almost always in a rural context. You'd never know there were big cities in the Midwest, the Plains, the Southwest, etc.....
The Catholic church is the largest single church in the US, well the world - so it's an easy default. A lot of urban areas east of the Mississippi have high populations of Jews.
Catholics are by far the largest Christian denomination in the US. Yes it is the overwhelming majority religion in the Northeast and S. California; but those aren't the only areas that are heavily Catholic. Most of the midwest, especially around the Great Lakes, is Catholic as well. The only other geographic "concentrations" of particular religions/denominations are Baptists throughout the South and Mormans in Utah. Then you have the many other protestant denominations scattered all over the place. Catholics are still the largest though; and they are growing in huge numbers. This is especially true in the South and West with the large growing hispanic populations there.
I think so. I am originally from the Midwest (Nebraska and South Dakota) and now live in Seattle, and I have yet to ever even meet a Jewish person. So it always seems pretty foreign to see them represented in movies or shows as if they are a large segment of the population. And I know some Catholics, but even they are not in huge numbers in the places I have lived.
Heck yeah! I don't know about Catholics, but it seems like if you just depended on the t.v. to determine demographics you would assume that about 20% of Americans were Jewish, but in actuality they make up less than 3% of the population. I actually have tons of Jewish friends, but I live in Florida.
I always thought Protestants were overrepresented-but then again I'm from Philadelphia-where there are more white Catholics and Jews than white Protestants.
If religion/prayers/church are shown on TV it is almost always Protestant-I remember being confused when I was a kid why nobody ever said the Catholic blessing before meals on TV haha. Italian, Irish, Hispanic Catholics and Jews are often stereotyped it seems. The biggest and easiest example I can think of now is The Simpsons where just about everyone is Protestant and there are several jokes toward Catholicism and Family Guy- which is rare that it shows a Catholic family but they are crude and dysfunctional and the show has several crude jokes directed toward Jews.
I believe Catholics are the largest single Christian denomination in the country.
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So yeah, the concentration of the mass media in those two places makes them pretty narrow-minded and self-absorbed when they decide what to write about or film. There aren't a whole lot of tv shows or movies that take place outside of NYC or southern California. And when they do show the rest of the U.S., it's almost always in a rural context. You'd never know there were big cities in the Midwest, the Plains, the Southwest, etc.....
