This post is cross-posted with www.MissRepresentation.org, in advance of the film’s debut tonight on OWN, 9pm (8c).

In Miss Representation, actress-activist Rosario Dawson talks about how important it is for women to write their own stories. This is equally important in entertainment and in journalism alike.Yet as I discuss in the film, today’s media climate is extremely toxic for women and girls, and for people of color. That’s because the main purpose of TV programming today is not to entertain, engage or inform us. Sad but true: the purpose is generate sky-high profits for the six major conglomerates (Disney, Time Warner, NewsCorp, Viacom, CBS and General Electric) that own and control the vast majority of what we’re given to watch, see, hear and play in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, movies, billboards and video games.

As a result, women are misrepresented and marginalized as op-ed writers, front-page news sources, lead anchors, and broadcast journalism commentators… that is, when they aren’t missing entirely (as decades of research document). Scripted entertainment isn’t much better. As filmmaker Nia Vardalos wrote at WIMN’s Voices, Hollywood studios ignore data that show that audiences actually do want to support films with strong female leads, calling the success of “Sex and the City” and “Mamma Mia” “a fluke.” When Nia tried to follow up her hit “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” with a new script, studio execs pressured her to change female leads to male characters—exactly the opposite of the kind of climate Rosario Dawson is rightly calling for.

DVR Alert: Tune in to the award-winning documentary “Miss Representation” TONIGHT, Oct. 20, 9pm(8c) on OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network).

I had the honor of being an adviser on — and being interviewed in — this powerful film about women and the media. “Miss Representation” is the first mainstream film to delve into sexism in commercial media — from advertising and pop culture’s sexualization of girls, to triggering eating disorders, to media normalizing violence against women, to reality TV as anti-feminist backlash (which I discuss both in the film and Reality Bites Back), to double standards in news reporting on female politicians, to the trivialization of women who work in broadcast news, to the causal role advertising and media consolidation plays in all of this, to the need for media literacy to help youth and adults become more active, critical media consumers.

OWN will decide whether to re-air “Miss Representation” based in large part on the ratings it draws tonight. So please tune in… and ask five friends to set their DVRs as well. Tweet it, Facebook it, email people. (If for no other reason than the cognitive dissonance that results from seeing me and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agree on something!)

Are you a last-minute Christmas gift-giver? Do you owe belated Chanukah and Solstice presents? Well, take it from Feministing, Isak, Hello Ladies and Women’s Voices for Change: Reality Bites Back makes the perfect gift!

I wrote the book to spark a national conversation about the meaning and impact of reality TV on our culture, and in doing so I hoped to make media literacy not only enlightening, but fun. So, I’m really excited to see Reality Bites Back popping up on holiday gift guides by respected media outlets and blogs who seem to find the book engaging and enjoyable. I’m also gratified and flattered to see the book recommended by readers on Twitter as “The Must-Have Book This Season” and discussed as good holiday reading options on Facebook by professors who say, “I’ve read it, I’ve taught it, Jenn has been in LA to discuss it — I’m all about it. If you haven’t yet, go get it!”

At Feministing, the book tops Courtney Martin’s “Not Oprah’s Book Club: Holiday Edition” gift guide:

As a long-time media critic, I can tell you that

this is not a sentence I’m accustomed to writing: Corporate media gave me a huge gift yesterday.

As I traveled to Denver (to moderate a panel and have a wine and cheese reception for my book at the Women’s Studies Association conference), Newsweek’s Jessica Bennett reviewed Reality Bites Back in a lively feature headlined, “Everything I Learned About Women I Learned From Reality TV.” Her subhead that says it all: “Which means I must think they’re all desperate, competitive, plastic-surgery-obsessed bimbos. The problem? Today’s reality entertainment is a lot more like fiction.”

I couldn’t be happier with Benett’s take on the book and the issue of representation of women in this genre throughout the last decade. She writes:

If your main source of knowledge about women came from reality TV, this is how you’d see the world: a place where your mom is a conniving, deceitful gold digger, your sisters and girlfriends vicious and catty. You would learn that “sisterhood” is a thing of the past, as Pozner puts it—and that girl friendships are not powerful but spiteful. And you’d understand that women were put on this earth to compete for male attention—when, of course, they’re not busy pulling each other’s hair out or lounging half naked in a hot tub.

If you’ve been reading the blog recently (or media outlets from The Vancouver Sun to The Frisky), you know I launched a satirical book trailer and webisode series this week, Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn, which spoofs — and then liberates — reality TV’s stock characters through media literacy therapy.

Who’s the latest to check in for some Reality Rehab? Introducing Webisode 4: The Top Model. In this episode, The Top Model (Kendra Leigh Landon) explains just how seductive is when fashion and beauty advertisers build modeling shows around clear instructions about which makeup and clothes to wear in order to be beautiful, valuable, and successful. Through media literacy therapy, she learns how and why most women will never achieve advertisers’ definition of beauty–and how important it is to think for herself:

Like Reality Rehab’s Top Model? Blog her, tweet her, post her to Tumblr, share her on your Facebook wall — let’s make this Top Model go viral, so that all the girls who watch America’s Next Top Model can hear her speak.

What, you say you haven’t seen the previous webisodes? Well, then, as Veronica Arreola says, “you’re missing out on a world of funny.” Check out — and then share/tweet/blog about — the whole series:

On Monday, to celebrate the official publication of Reality Bites Back, I blogged the launch of Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn, a book trailer and satirical web series spoofing — and then liberating — reality TV’s stock characters through media literacy therapy.

Monday also saw the debut of Webisode 1: The Desperate Bachelorette (see below), and yesterday we met “The Angry Black Woman” in Reality Rehab Webisode 2, also below.

Today, it’s time to reveal Reality Rehab Webisode 3: The “Real” Housewife. Although she doesn’t know what “homogeneous” means, she explains — while sipping copious martinis, naturally — that her friendships are actually much more supportive than it seems on Bravo, whose producers instructed her to focus her on-air conversations on “More brand names, less deep thought!” Her media literacy therapy includes a case study in Frankenbite editing–a must-see for every reality TV fan!

Four more Reality Rehab videos will roll out over the course of the next week, including The Slutty Bitch, The Top Model, The Douchebag Dude, and The Gangsta Guy.

***

On Monday, to celebrate the official publication of Reality Bites Back, I blogged the launch of Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn, a book trailer and satirical web series spoofing — and then liberating — reality TV’s stock characters through media literacy therapy.

Today, in Reality Rehab Webisode 2, “The Angry Black Woman” starts out as a screaming, cursing, threatening mess, just as so many women of color have been framed on Flavor of Love, The Apprentice, and America’s Next Top Model. But after intensive media literacy therapy, she explains how producers manipulated her persona–turns out, she’s actually a compassionate hospice nurse who never wanted Flav in the first place!

Watch the brilliant Allison Jones unpack one of reality TV’s most insidious forms of racial typecasting:

Close to 700 people have watched the trailer in the first day and a half, and it was picked up by the Vancouver Sun and half a dozen other Canadian news outlets. Blog it, tweet it, share it

on Facebook, Tumblr… let’s spread the laughs around:

Today, in conjunction with the official release of Reality Bites Back, I’m

excited to debut a satirical book trailer and webisode series, “Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn“– where all your favorite reality TV stock characters come to get deprogrammed:

• Meet the Cast
• Meet the Production Team

In addition to the trailer, I’ll be rolling out seven webisodes, one for each character. The first webisode follows The Desperate Bachelorette (modeled after shows such as The Bachelor, Tough Love, Married By America, Joe Millionaire and more). When we first meet her, she embodies reality TV’s stereotype about single women as weepy, pathetic losers who can never possibly be happy or successful without husbands, mouthing lines pulled directly from actual quotes from some of these shows, such as “I don’t want to die alone!” and “I would be a servant to him!” By the end of the webisode, her media literacy therapy has helped her realize that, in fact, she has a full life, a great career and a lot going for her, and she can wait for a truly fulfilling relationship, rather than grasping for romance with any randy dude who’ll snog her for fifteen minutes on national TV.

Quick reminder: if you’re in New York City, Hunter College is the place to be today, as media literacy activists, media makers, youth educators, girls’ rights advocates, scholars — and, importantly, girls themselves — will be coming together for the SPARK Summit (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge).

On behalf of Women In Media & News, I’m thrilled to be presenting tomorrow during the “Shining a Light on Sexualization in the Media” workshop, along with Andrea Quijada of the Media Literacy Project, and Yana Walton and Jill

Marcellus of

the Women’s Media Center. Andrea will be conducting an interactive media literacy game, we’ll show a Spark Summit-produced video about sexualization (including many clips from reality TV shows), after which I will discuss sexualization in reality TV–in particular, stereotypes about women’s sexuality, the differences in how hypersexualization of women of color plays out, how to watch critically.

Media personalities including Geena Davis and MTV’s Amber Madison will be speaking, as will WIMN allies such as Samhita Mukhopadhyay of Feministing, sex educator and young feminist leader Shelby Knox, Emily May of HollaBack, the WMC’s Jamia Wilson, and many others.

See the SPARK Summit agenda.

There’s still time to register.

Today at ColorLines Magazine, Neelanjana Banerjee looks at race, representation and reality TV and asks, as per the story’s headline: “Is Reality TV a Revolution for Race or the New Minstrel?”

A smart, nuanced and well-reported piece, Banerjee notes that:

“A series of NAACP reports have tracked the dismal representation of African Americans and other people of color on network television for the past decade. In 2000, the NAACP called for a boycott of the four major networks because none of their 26 new shows featured an actor of color in a lead or starring role. In 2006, the NAACP reported the number of minority actors of any sort in prime-time had declined to barely 300. In its most recent report, however, the NAACP declared reality TV ‘the only bright spot’ in the industry.”

The NAACP could arrive at such a conclusion because, as Banerjee writes, “Today, the mainstream dating shows, such as ‘The Bachelor,’ primarily ignore people of color. But on competition shows and on cable networks, characters of color are much more likely to show up.”

Which