Racial bias in criminal news in the United States
Racial biases are a form of implicit bias, which refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect an individual's understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass unfavorable assessments, are often activated involuntarily and without the awareness or intentional control of the individual. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Police officers come from all walks of life and they too have implicit bias, regardless of their ethnicity. Racial bias in criminal news reporting in the United States is a manifestation of this bias.
Racial bias in U.S. criminal news
Racial bias has been recorded in criminal news reporting from the United States, particularly with regard to African American individuals, and a perceived fear of African Americans among European and White Americans.Racial bias against African Americans
Historical racism towards African Americans consists of beliefs about African American intelligence, ambition, honesty and other stereotyped characteristics, as well as support for segregation and support for acts of open discrimination.Dana Mastro's research on racial bias in the United States reveals persistent racial prejudice among Caucasians, characterizing African Americans as violent and aggressive. These beliefs have been found to manifest in a heightened fear among Caucasians of victimization at the hands of racial minorities, specifically African American males. Both theory and empirical evidence indicate that media exposure contributes to the construction and perpetuation of these perceptions by disproportionately depicting racial/ethnic minorities as criminal suspects and Caucasians as victims in television news. Further consuming these messages has been shown to provoke prejudicial responses among Caucasian viewers.
Robert Entman suggests that today's media environment suggests that old-fashioned racial images are socially undesirable and stereotyping is now subtler and stereotyped thinking is reinforced at levels likely to remain below conscious awareness. Rather than grossly demeaning distortions of yesterday's stereotyping now there is a grey area allowing for denial of the racial component. The phrase "threatening black male" allows for a negative attribute rather than an attack on racial identity.
Twitter, one of the more widely used forms of social media, with over 271 million active users, is the choice of the Millennial generation to get breaking news. Using hashtags, such as #michaelbrown, when they post allows for individuals to find information in a simpler manner.
The study conducted in the article Race and Punishment states that current crime coverage strategies aim to increase in the importance of a crime, thus distorting the public sense of who commits crimes, and leads to biased reactions. By over-representing Caucasians as victims of crimes perpetrated by people of color it exaggerates crimes committed by African Americans and downplays victimization of African Americans. For example, the majority of US homicides are intra-racial, but media accounts often portray a world in which African American male offenders are overrepresented.
African American suspects presentation in news
A study by the Sentencing Project reports that African American crime suspects were presented in more threatening contexts than Caucasians; to specify, African American suspects were more often left unnamed and were more likely to be shown as threatening by being depicted in physical custody of the police.Analyses of television news consistently indicate that African American males are overrepresented as perpetrators and underrepresented as victims, compared to both their Caucasian male counterparts on TV as well as real-world Department of Justice arrest reports. In these news stories, African American suspects are more likely than Caucasians to be portrayed as nameless, menacing, and in the grasp of the police. Some evidence also suggests that audiences know the news they watch misrepresents the reality of race and crime in the United States, and that news executives know their broadcasts scare their audiences.
Dana Mastro reports that African Americans are nearly four times more likely to be represented as criminals than police officers on television news—a proportion inconsistent with U.S. Department of Labor statistics. Alongside their overrepresentation as criminals in the news, African Americans also are underrepresented as victims compared with their on-air counterparts. Another study by Dixon and Williams had also concluded that is still the case in cable news channels with one difference. African American homicide victims being may be more likely shown on cable networks than on television networks when national stories like the Trayvon Martin Fatal Shooting receive constant coverage on news cycles, thus receiving more airtime on cable owned twenty four hour run programing. This particular study also came to the conclusion that when studying this bias they would need to include a larger population of programs with more "polarizing on-air" personality, and across different parts of the country with different age groups.
Further, the text of crime-related news stories also has been found to vary depending on the race of the perpetrator. For example, Dixon and Linz's research reveals that statements containing prejudicial information about criminal suspects, such as prior arrests, were significantly more likely to be associated with African Americans as opposed to Caucasians defendants, particularly in cases involving Caucasian victims. Exposure to biased messages has consequences. When the public consistently consumes the persistent overrepresentation of African American males in crime-related news stories it strengthens their cognitive association between Blacks and criminality in their mind such as the connection "Blacks and crime" and thus becomes chronically accessible for use in race-related evaluations such as: higher support for the death penalty because crime is more associated as a black problem that people need protection from and; that laziness is the only road black to success for people of color.. Notably, as the research on media priming illustrates, even a single exposure to these unfavorable characterizations can produce stereotype-based responses.
| Accused of Crimes in Selected Visual Depictions for all Crimes | African Americans | Caucasian |
| Accused named in still photo | 48.9% | 65.3% |
| Accused not named in still photo | 51.1% | 34.7% |
| Accused shown in motion | 52.3% | 66.3% |
| Accused not shown in motion | 47.7% | 33.7% |
| Accused well dressed | 45.6% | 69.4% |
| Accused poorly dressed | 54.4% | 30.6% |
| Accused physically held | 37.6% | 17.6% |
| Accused not physically held | 62.2% | 82.4% |
Journalistic practices
Studies conducted by The Sentencing Project found that journalists gravitated towards cases where Caucasians were the victims and cases where the assailant was African American. Studies drew the conclusion that newsworthiness is not a product of how representative or novel a crime is, but rather how well it can be "scripted using stereotypes grounded in racism and fear of African American crime." Robert Entman believes it is crucial to understand that journalists may not support modern racism. The news personnel shape reports in accordance with professional norms and conventions rather than their own perspective. Furthermore, journalistic practices yield to dialogue that fit audience stereotypes. For example, select sound bites for a story about African American political activity will often choose those that convey trauma and conflict. Entman suggests that African American leaders produced ample supply of such quotes because the structure of social political power often maximizes them.The table done by Robert Entman in his article Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change shows that 11% of the stories about African Americans accused of crimes compared with 29% of Caucasians allowed them or their defenders to present information in their own voices. This suggests that African Americans are treated less humanely and in a less individualistic way than Caucasians.
| Number of pro-defense sound bites | African American Accused of Crime | Caucasian Accused of Crime |
| - | 88.8% | 70.6% |
| One | 9.0% | 18.6% |
| Two or more | 2.2% | 10.8% |
| Race of Police Speaking On Screen | African American Accused of Crime | Caucasian Accused of Crime |
| African American Police Official | 32.3% | 4.0% |
| Caucasian Police Official | 48.4% | 94.7% |
| Both African & Caucasian Police Official | 19.4% | 1.3% |
A smaller study delved a bit deeper into the tendency of journalistic racial bias by moving from data, to analyzing reporters. An article written by Emily Drew In Critical Studies in Media Communication journal published in 2011 reviewed data from the interviews of 31 reporters from 28 major newspapers across the U.S. Each major newspaper had at one time published a series of articles covering race relations lasting from one month to a year. Through out the different series a common theme kept emerging, they questioned why “race relations appeared to be worsening – and racial disparities increasing”.
During the interviews, the journalists analyze why the media did not help in race relations when they held the power to do so “ just by choosing which stories to cover”. They started to investigate their own bias. They realized that two of the reasons bias most often happens in journalism is because privilege is not recognized and is due to a lack of diversity either on staff or in the city that they live and work. The journalists interviewed also recognized that this bias does not end with white reporters. One journalist was quoted, “Black folks are not immune to it either. If you get writing for a white newspaper for long enough, you start to write and even think in a white voice.”. Some short lived efforts of this study included programs aimed at hiring more people of color to staff these papers and for reporters to start becoming a part of the actual communities they were coving.
Media outlets and racial bias against African Americans
Fox News
Media Matters for America, a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media" is an outspoken critic of Fox News, frequently accusing the channel of including racial overtones in news coverage. Furthermore, an MMFA article claims that a shooting of an Australian teen was labelled a racial hate crime by Fox News. MMFA was particularly outraged over an incident where Fox News' show On The Record With Greta Van Susteren, guest Pat Buchanan claimed that "racial hate crimes 40 times more prevalent in the black community than the white community."Media Matters for America also asserted that the March 12 edition of Fox & Friends, regarding the case of the Ferguson shootings, reporter Peter Doocy described the DOJ's finding of racial bias, emphasizing that Attorney General Eric Holder "floated the possibility" of dissolving the Ferguson police department as a result, while co-host Steve Doocy linked the DOJ report and Holder's response to the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson. Holder, at a press conference stated it was revenue rather than law enforcement that drove officers to target African-Americans in the community. Doocy described the shooting, saying, "a new wave of violence comes one week after Attorney General Eric Holder vowed to dismantle that city's police department", and questioned whether it was "what he wanted."
ABC News
has been seen to falter within the topic of journalism and to have a certain bias that has been painted by third parties that swayed their viewpoint. In the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia journalist and activist who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981 for the murder of a police officer, ABC News formed a specific argument for their audience to see. Tom Gardner, a professor at Westfield State University, decided to look deeper into this case and saw many valuations within the trial that needed to be reassessed. The Media Education Foundation took this case under their wings and decided to tell the story of this controversial case with Gardner and asked "important questions about the responsibility that journalists have when it comes to issues of life and death."The documentary Framing an Execution: The Media & Mumia Abu-Jamal looks at the way Sam Donaldson from the ABC program 20/20 covered the case. Many scholars believe that Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner and is only in jail because of his specific views and criticisms of how police have dealt with the black community. This case only got recognition after people continued to dispute that Abu-Jamal's trial was fair or lawful, to the extent that it reached national and international attention. 20/20 told this case as an emotional story, minimalizing its importance. Sam Donaldson began his interviews with the widow, Maureen Faulkner. She was portrayed as a damsel in distress, making her a more sympathetic figure. From the beginning the specific angle of ABC News and the direction of Sam Donaldson's bias could be seen. ABC stated in their letter sent to the Pennsylvania prison authorities when trying to get an interview with Abu-Jamal that they were "currently working in conjunction with Maureen Faulkner and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of the Police."
Framing has a couple of meanings; to the filmmakers, the one that best described the behavior of 20/20 is "to falsely set someone up to look as though they are guilty." Because of the unfairness of the trial proceedings, many have argued that it is impossible for anyone to know if Abu-Jamal is guilty or not, but the way the media has framed his trial says otherwise. Mike Farrell believes that it is important to look at "the political context, the tone of the time in Philadelphia, at that period before and after to understand the context of this trial." When Mike Farrell and Ed Asner were interviewed on 20/20 by Donaldson, he had to portray them as "know-nothing dupe celebrities" once they started to sound knowledgeable. Donaldson believed that the trial wasn't unfair but that Mumia was unfair to the trial. He continues to put down Abu-Jamal and those standing up for him by negatively accusing them of taking on the behavior of a religious cult.
Thomas Gardner opined that the 20/20 program "was never really journalism to start with. It was an exercise in persuasion, in rhetoric, really unadulterated propaganda masquerading as journalism." Amnesty International stated that "numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings", and "believes that the interest of the justice would best be served by the granting of a new trial of Mumia Abu Jamal." Angela Davis, an activist, scholar, and author believes that the media purposely prevented people from understanding the case of Abu-Jamal, and that they wanted to keep the public unaware to make sure there would not be large numbers of people supporting his campaign.