Television has also been responsible for strengthening our cross-cultural misconceptions through use of fictional characters portraying stereotypes to illustrate coming from a different culture.
The text on media representation of race, for example, shows that groups still tend to be represented in a stereotypical form. Stereotyping constitutes a representational practice which reduces people to a few, simple, essential characteristics which are deemed to be unchanging. To claim that stereotypes of ethnic groups are the norm in the media implies that complex differences are ignored. .
Although this does not imply that audience accepts this kind of representation as a preferred reading, there is enough support to claim that dominant representations play a significant role in influencing people's perceptions of minority groups and that dominant news frameworks in particular help to structure perception of the key issues in race relations.
Internationally Australians are represented as masculine, democratic, rational, moral, dynamic and progressive. Such patterns of description are illustrated with reference to an enormous diversity of Australian representations (Steve Erwin, Russell Crowe, Paul Hogan, etc) .
Thus, the literature on media representation shows that a racialized regime of representation can still be identified, but coexist with representations which dispute old stereotypes. The result is that representations of the non-stereotypes are the cause of cultural struggles over meaning rather than the fixing of definitive meanings for the audience.
Society has been giving increasing attention to what were once marginal themes: celebrities and reality television.
The celebrities of television are the icons of the present age in which money, looks, fame and success influence the ideals and goals of the younger generation.
People orient themselves towards celebrity narratives, whether for their quality with questions of personal identity or as sources of commentary on social or political issues.