Prominence of Characters on Television Program Websites

Abstract

This study investigated the general distribution of gender, ethnicity, and age on broadcast TV networks' web pages and compared the distribution with on-air promotion of programs, and where possible, to U.S. Census. It also modified and tested a salience index, up to now used mainly for measuring the effectiveness of over-the-air television promotion, as a measure of character prominence on the web. As expected, images of prime-time characters on websites were predominantly male and White but somewhat less male and White than in on-air television overall. Frequency counts of images showed that websites foregrounded settled-adult characters more than younger characters, but applying an index of promotional salience revealed that extra visual attention was given to teens. In other words, determining which characters are featured depends on which image attributes are evaluated. These findings suggest that the salience index measures subtle attributes of prominence useful for assessing differential promotion.

KEYTERMS:

• character salience
• promotional websites
• television websites

Notes

^a Primetime only; some categories collapsed.

Note. χ² = 248.4, p < .001.

^a Based on a tertiary split of the data, low = 0 to 9, mid = 10 to 16, high (most salient) = 17 to 186.

“Sport” was originally included as a genre, but dropped when only UPN's WWE Smackdown had a network website among the prime-time sites. WWE Smackdown was classified as reality programming for the purposes of this study. (Clicking on Monday Night Football referred the user to ESPN's NFL site.) Subsequent analysis was conducted by genre but did not elicit any interesting or unpredictable results.

Following Neuendorf (2002), tests accounting for chance were judged inappropriate for two-coder measurements of such obvious physical characteristics as gender and race/ethnicity, and for age where many cases were revised based on group discussion, but they were deemed appropriate for enumerations and for salience characteristics because multiple options had about equal chance of being selected.