The Mountain Dew Commercial and the Intersection of News, Information, and Racial Ideology

Abstract In the context of America’s active movement toward equality and the unity of races in the post-racist era, the Mountain Dew commercial demonstrates that the media realm continues to be dominated by the biases and stereotypes of racist origin. The study aimed to examine the case study of a Mountain Dew Commercial and critically documented its racial elements which sparked widespread criticism. Using Stuart Hall’s model of Encoding/Decoding, the study disclosed both the denotative and connotative meanings contained in the most racist advertisement in the history of commercials, as called by one of the critics. It examined the commercial from the viewpoint of the different levels of meanings and investigated the relationship between the portrayal of Black people and the ideological meanings that they carry in terms of the existing stereotype and its relation to other racial minorities. Also, the viewpoints of Tyler, the Creator, and Dr. Boyce Watkins were given which presented the arguments in favor and against racial content, aired by commercial entities. The study provided insight into how the idea of a post-racial society is discussed within the Black community, where experiences, education, and class play a major part in shaping competing racial politics.