MEDIA BLACKFACE

"Racial profiling" in news reporting

Racial profiling - the discriminatory practice by police of treating
blackness (or brownness) as an indication of possible criminality - has
lately been the focus of frequent legal or legislative action, resulting in
a significant amount of coverage in the mainstream news media (e.g. New
York Times, 5/8/98, 5/10/98; Nightline, 5/31/98; Time, 6/15/98).

The coverage of police racial profiling has been fairly accurate and
balanced. Yet while the mainstream media continue to cover police racial
profiling, they have generally failed to acknowledge their own practice of
media racial profiling. And when they have, the result has been more
cover-up than coverage.

Issues in Blackface There is need for a broader understanding of "racial
profiling." As a general concept and not just a specific police policy,
racial profiling may best be understood as the politically acceptable and
very American practice of defining a social problems in "black-face" -
i.e., in racial terms - through indirect association. Once portrayed in
blackface, the "blackness" of the problem encourages suspicion, polarizing
antagonism, and typically leads to the targeting of the racial group for
punitive (public policy) action.

The link between the stereotypical profile and the public policy is key. In
police racial profiling it is direct: Individual officers act on racial
stereo-types against racial minorities, especially African-Americans. But
when it comes to the news media, the racial profiles projected are
indirectly related to punitive public policies, thus giving the mainstream
news media the "out" of deniability. When the news media over-represents
the number of black people in the category that is at issue, the issue
becomes "black," stigmatized, worthy of some form of always justified
political punishment and further racialized.

Examples of issues defined in blackface and subjected to a racial profile
include the black drug abuser and drug dealer, the threatening and invasive
black criminal, the black welfare cheat and queen, and the undeserving
black affirmative action recipient. The punitive actions associated with
drugs, crime welfare and affirmatieve action policy are self-evident,
involving punitive action disproportionately affecting African-American
people.

The brilliance of racial profiling as an instrument of modern, deniable
racism is that the issue - be it crime, delfare, drug abuse or what have
you - is seen by many as a real issue that is only coincidentally about
race. The trait of blackness associated with the problem is viewed as
nothing more than an unfortunate reality that is secondary to the public
hostility and the punitive measures. So it's not really racist, is it?

By looking at the ways in which the mainstream news media have covered (or
failed to cover) several recent studies/stories involving the news media
and race, we can begin to get a better understanding of this practice of
racial profiling as it relates to the news media.

Racial Profiling as the Missing Link In March 1998, two studies on U.S.
drug policy were released by two prominent groups of physicians within a
day of each other. The first study was issued by the Physician Leasdership
on National Drug Policy (PLNDP), a high-profile group of doctors, composed,
in part, of high-ranking health officials from the Reagan, Bush and Clinton
administrations. The voluminous and exhaustively documented PLNDP study
concluded that drug treatment for drug addiction was not only an effective
health measure but that it was much more cost-effective than the
criminalizing policies of the current "drug war."

One section of the study showed how, contrary to popular perception, drug
addicts are not primarrily members of minority racial and ethnic groups.
"The research we are releasing today," the PLNDP announced at its press
conference, "shows, conclusively, that drugaddiction is vcry treatable and
that it reaches across all strata of society, with affluent, educated
Caucasians being the most likelv drug users, and the most likely to be
addicted." Looking at adult drug users, the PLNDP study found that more
than half of those who admitted using heroin last year are white and 60
percent of monthly cocaine users are white. (Also, 77 percent of regular
marijuana users are white, while one in six is African-American.) Youth
drug use followed similar patterns.

Paralleling this point about the public misperception of drug use were the
results of a survey of 50 years of public opinion called the "The Public
and the War on Illicit Drugs," which were featured in the Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA) (3/11/98). The study found that
although Americans did not think the so-called "War on Drugs" was
succeeding, they did not want to abandon the criminalization approach
pushed by the government. The study also found that there was weak support
for increasing funding for drug treatment.

One of its key conclusions was that public opinion polls indicated that the
overwhelming majority of Americans had "relatively little firsthand
experience with the extent of the problems associated with drug use," and
that "the majority of Americans report getting most of their information
about the seriousness of the illicit drug problems from the news media,
mainly television." In fact, the PLNDP presented the JAMA sutudy at its
press conference to emphasize how public opinion and the judgment of
seasoned physicians were at odds with each other, and how the news media
were playing a leading role in misinforming the public about the health and
financial issues at the heart of "Drug War" policy.

The powerful findings of these two reports were not covered by any of the
three major newsweeklies (Time, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek), nor
were they covered by the New York Times or Washington Post. When the story
was covered, moreover, the dominant media focused on the disconnect between
the views of the public and the research of the physicians - but said
nothing about the role of the news media in fostering the stereotypes
fueling the bad druig policy (CNN Today, 3/17/98; Associated Press,
3/17/98; USA Today, 3/18/98).

The role of the news media in promoting racial stereotypes was the missing
link between the two studies. Even when Nightline (3/18/98) began its
coverage of the story with the acknowledgment that, when it came to the
issuses of drug addiction and drug policy in the U.S., "most Americans get
their information from the news media," the show glossed over the central
problem of news media misinformation. Nor did Nighline host Ted Koppel
refrain from reinforcing the very misconceptions his show could have been
debunking: Koppel's repeated emphasis on how "society does not want to
spend money on rehabilitation" - when a main point of the PLNDP report was
that treatment saves money - amounted to a brief for the very
media-enforced ignorance the doctors' groups sought to dispel.

Almost alone in its coverage of this story was an article by Raja Mishra
writ-ten for the Knight Ridder News Service and appearing in the Denver
Post (3/19/98). Mishra went to the heart of the story when reporting how
"the doctors said the public had been misled by media accounts." Given the
studies, an obvious conclusion. But it was not so obvious to the mainstream
press.

No Surprise Another study, "Crime in Black and White: The Violent, Scary
World of Local News" appeared in the academic journal Press/Politics
(Spring/96). Although appearing in a scholarly journal on journalism, this
study received almost no attention in the media, except for coverage in the
Washington Post (4/'28/97) by its media correspondent, Howard Kurtz.

Done by UCLA professors Franklin Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar, "Crime in
Black and White" found through a content analysis of local television
station KABC in Los Angeles that coverage of crime featured two important
cues: "crime is violent and criminals are non-white." The real revelation
was that television viewers were so accustomed to seeing African-American
crime suspects on the local news that even when the race of a suspect was
not specified, viewers tended to remember seeing a black suspect. Moreover,
when researchers used digital technology to change the race of certain
suspects as they appeared on the screen, a little over half of those who
saw the "white" perpetrator recalled his race, but two-thirds did when the
criminal was depicted as black. "Ninety percent of the false recognitions
involved African-Americans and Hispanics," Gilliam said.

To his credit, Kurtz acknowledged the public policy implications of the
study when he stated that "support for punitive law enforcement policies
was highest when the stories featured black suspects or provided no
information about race and was lowest when the suspects were white." But
his response to the "riveting" findings was fatalistic: "This is not the
first complaint about coverage of minorities and crime, and most local
stations have not seen fit to change their approach," he wrote. And when he
said that the study placed a "surprisingly harsh light on television and
racial attitudes," one might ask: To whom should this be surprising?

When, a few months later, Kurtz addressed another study of racism in the
news media, he again expressed surprise. The study by Yale University
professor Martin Gilens, entitled "Race and Poverty in America: Public
Misperceptions and the American News Media," was published in Public
Opinion Quarterly (vol.6, 1996) and found that while African-Americans make
up 29 percent of the nation's poor, they constitute 62 percent of the
images of the poor in the leading news magazines, and 65 percent of the
images of the poor on the leading network television news programs. And not
only were the poor disproportion-ately portrayed as black, but they were
also portrayed in the most unsympathetic fashion. The most sympathetic
groups of the poor - i.e., the elderly and the working poor - were
under-represented and the least sympathetic group - unemployed working-age
adults - was over-represented.

Kurtz, who did not discuss these findings in the Washington Post, was part
of a discussion of the study on the CNN "media watch" program Reliable
Sources (8/24/97). "Who Put The Black Face on Poverty," the show asked.
Well, the mainstream media "whiteout" of the story provides a clue. Gilens'
study specifically looked at the coverage of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News
World Report and ABC, NBC and CBS news. Unsurprisingly, none of these big
media outlets covered the release of the study results. Neither did the New
York Times. USA Today (8/9/97) and the Washington Post (5/15/97) covered in
a mere paragraph or two.

It was left to the Associated Press (8/18/97) and CNN's Reliable Sources
(8/24/97) to really cover the story. AP's coverage stood out because it
addressed Gilens' point about the news - media perpetuating racist
misperceptions of the poor that are associated - with greater opposition to
welfare policy among whites.

But in "Who Put the Black Face Poverty," CNN's Reliable Sourcess succeeded
in avoiding this point altogether - and in denying that racism was reason
the "black face" was on poverty in the first place. The problem, according
to Kurtz, was one of "video wall paper" - "the pictures that automatic get
thrown up" when big city media outlets use photos from, well, big cities
with inner cities populated by high concentrations of poor black people.

The fact that Gilens explicitly addressed and refuted this claim in study
never came up. Also unmentioned was Gilens' point about how "apparently
well-meaning, racially liberal news professionals generate images of the
social world that consistently misrepresent both black Americans and poor
people in destructive ways." Surprised?

Spooking the Public

Given the prevalence of racial profiling documented here and elsewhere,
only makes sense that a recent survey among young people found that they
not recognized that racial stereotyping was rampant on television, but that
news was a worse perpetrator of racial stereotyping than TV's entertainment
programming.

The poll, sponsored by the advocacy group Children Now, interviewed 1,200
boys and girls aged l0-17 with 300 children coming from each the four
largest racial groups. White and African-American children said they see
people of their own race on television, while Latino and Asian children
were much less likely to see their race represented.

Across all races, children are more likely to associate positive
characteristics with white characters and negative characteristics with
minority characters. "A Different World: Children's Perceptions of Race and
Class in the Media" reported that "children of all races agree that the
news media tend to portray African-American and Latino people more
negatively than white and Asian people, particularly when the news is about
young people." In addition, "large majorities of African-American (71
percent), Latino (63 percent) and Asian (51 percent) children feel there
should be more people of their race as newscasters, while most white
children feel there are enough white newscasters (76 percent)."

Again, there was a virtually complete news media white-out of this critical
finding. All CNN Newsnight (5/7/98) could say was that the study found that
children were "influenced by television news." The Associated Press
(5/6/98) did no better.

On a Nightline (5/6/98) program about the study, guests complained of
disproportionately negative images of people of color. The children said
they wanted to see television to reflect the "realities of their lives," to
"feature more teenagers," to be "real," and most importantly, to show more
people of all races interacting with each other. The Nightline guests
echoed this sense. In response, Nightline host Ted Koppel asked if it was
the function of the media to present things "as it is or as we think it
should be?"

The children's perception that the news media were the worst perpetrators
of racial stereotyping was mentioned but not really addressed in the show.
Clearly, then, news media are not presenting things as they are - but
rather as racial fears project them to be. And a racialized policy agenda
is being served. The news media's practice of racial profiling gives the
news consumer no real choice: Too often, we don't get the reality of what
really is, or the dream of what should be, but an imaginary nightmare in
blackface.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski