Racism and Race Portrayal in the News, By: Jeremy Halka

What makes one race better than another? The answer is nothing. There is no race that is better than another, every race is equal. In the past many people did not believe this. In the United States, for a long time, whites thought they were superior to blacks, they even enslaved them for a period of time. It hasn’t been that long since whites and blacks have been considered equal in the United States. There are few people even today that still believe that they are the superior race. This is terrible. Racism is one of the worst things that exists. Today, racism is much, much more subtle than it used to be, however, is still occurs. Most of today’s racism is involved with stupid jokes and stereotypes. Many people think that it is alright to crack jokes involving race or place silly stereotypes upon different races. This is not true, even though it seems like it is all just fun, it is demeaning, and it is still racist. Racism is even found in the media, which is one of the last places it should be. Racism being in the media keeps it alive and in our culture. Some television shows are absolutely horrible with how racist they are. One area of the media that seems would definitely not have racism in it is the news. But, even in the news, racism is still occurring. Television news, newspapers, and news on the internet all contain trace amounts of racism in them. At first glance you may not notice, but when you step back and really examine the news, you can find racism in it. This is a huge factor in the decline of our culture.
Racism in the news often goes unnoticed. It is so subtle that most people never pick up on it, but when you look beyond the surface and truly examine it, you will find it. A man by the name of Robert M. Entman performed an analysis on the portrayal of blacks versus whites in network news and wrote and article on his findings called “Representation and Reality in the Portrayal of Blacks on Network Television News.” In this he analyzed the popular news stations ABC, NBC, and CBS. Entman found through his analysis that “Network news appears to convey more stereotyped impressions - a narrower range of positive roles - for blacks than for whites. Representations of whites in network news are more varied and more positive than of blacks, not because of conscious bias, but because of the way conventional journalistic norms and practices interact with political and social reality.” Entman also used local television news to compare with network news in which he found that “In crime stories, local news tends to depict blacks as more dangerous than whites accused of similar crimes. In political stories, local news makes blacks appear more demanding of special government favoritism than whites.”
Network news differs slightly from local news. Network news tends to cover more political stories. However, network news does not differ from local news in the way that they portray whites different from blacks. When network news chooses to cover crime stories, the results are a bit uneasy. Entman found through his analysis that when dealing with stories of people accused of a certain crime, 77% of the stories involving blacks were crime stories, where only 42% of the stories involving whites were crime stories. The local news study results were no different-29.4% to 10.5%. Another thing to look at is the employment of blacks in news. Local news does in fact employ black news anchors, but none of the network news stations have any black news anchors. Of course, probably none of this is intentional, but regardless, there should not be such significant differences occurring. These things are influencing the people that watch news on their televisions.
Racism exists in newspapers as well as in the news on television. Just like in television, it is quite difficult to pick up on. According to Lori Dorfman and Vincent Schiraldi, “While many crime stories do not identify race, there is some evidence that newspapers are more likely to identify race in a crime story when an African American is the suspect. In nine of 12 (75%) studies, minorities were overrepresented as perpetrators of crime. Six out of seven (86%) studies that clearly identify the race of victims found more attention was paid to White victims than to Black victims.” There are tons of people that read the newspaper, so things like this could easily influence them without them even realizing. This is one reason why one of the worst places for racism to be is in the news.
The disaster of Hurricane Katrina brought with it a lot of news coverage. There has been a lot of controversy dealing with the portrayal of whites versus blacks in the Katrina news coverage, especially with the news on the internet. In one news story by “Yahoo News” concerning Hurricane Katrina, many people found the photo captions to be racially biased, or in some cases, racist. “The captions on two photos from flood victims show very clearly the sinister and subtle ways that racism thrives in this country. The caption next to a photo of a young black man reads, "A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleanson Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005." Whereas, the caption aside a photo of two young white people reads, "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana." What's the difference between "looting" and "finding?"Apparently it's as simple as the color of your skin” (Wheeland). Although this quote may seem a little exaggerated, when you really look at the pictures and think about it, Wheeland is right. The people in both of these pictures appear to be doing the exact same thing, so what makes the black person a looter and the white people just finders? This definitely appears to be racially biased, perhaps even racist. These little things influence the people that read the news on the internet.
Racism exists in the media whether people like it or not, and even though it really seems like the last area of the media that it would be is the news, it is still there. The news is one of the worst places for it to be because everyone in the world gets their information about what is happening in the world from the news. The people that watch news on television, read it in the newspapers, or look it up on the internet are all influenced by what they see. So when there is racism in the news reports that they are watching or reading, it influences them. It has been proven that there is some racism in every form of news. Racism is such a terrible thing and for it to be kept alive like this is extremely detrimental to the human race. Racism needs to be taken out of every form of media, starting with the news.






Works Cited

Dorfman, Lori and Vincent Schiraldi. “Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News.” Building Blocks for Youth. April 2001. http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/media/media.pdf

Entman, Robert M. “Representation and Reality in the Portrayal of Blacks on Network Television News.” Journalism Quarterly. Autumn 1994. 509-520 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication 1994 http://people.stu.ca/~mccormic/3263/articles/Entman1994.pdf

Wheeland, Matthew. “Racism on Yahoo News.” AlterNet. August 31, 2005. http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/24863/

“Dark-skinned Man Photograph.” Associated Press. 2005 http://www.resonant.org/20050903-racism-in-news-coverage

“Light-skinned People Photograph.” Agence France Presse, 2005 http://www.resonant.org/20050903-racism-in-news-coverage