CalPundit informs us that Fox television is bringing us a new television show about where he lives - the lovely Orange County, CA.
Now, one doesn´t quite have all the information yet (Full Site Coming Soon!), but it´s pretty clear that Fox has done to Orange County what Friends did to New York City - covered it in gallons and gallons of bleach.
It might come as a bit of a surprise to most people that 29.9% of Orange County residents (As of the 2000 census) are foreign born (compared with 11.1% nationally, and 35.9% in New York City). Holy crap that´s a big number. 36% or so of those are from Asia, and most of the rest are from Latin America.
Orange County is only 64.8% white, and that falls down to 51.3% "white-but-not-of-Latino origin." True, OC isn´t a place where too many African-Americans call home, but my guess is that the Asian and Latino populations won´t exactly get much camera time.
The disturbing thing about the media´s portrayal of places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and yes, even Orange County, isn´t just that they often don´t have enough non-white main characters - it´s that they totally whitewash the background characters as well. The extras are overwhelmingly non-representative of the local populations.
