The video talks about the importance of unbiased news stories related to crime. It reminds me of one unforgettable conversation last year. I once wanted to take a short trip to St. Louis. The taxi driver told me not to go to the east part of St. Louis. I asked him why. “It is dangerous because there are a lot of black people there,” he said. I did not think deeper into this statement at first. But after I got off the taxi, I kept thinking and asked myself, “Does the high rate of crime in a certain area result from black people?”
There may be implicit bias in people’s understanding of the connection between crime and certain races. Media plays an important role in building up an image of criminals, which will lead to stereotypes towards certain groups of people among the public. “A 2002 study found that people estimated that 40% of those who committed violent crimes were African American when the actual rate was 29%,” Nazgol Ghandnoosh, research analyst at The Sentencing Project, said in an interview of On the Media, a weekly radio program. When talking about crime stories, journalists tend to overstate black participation in crimes. In addition, according to the article of the Center for American Progress, the news media also tend to present black crime suspects as more threatening than their white counterparts. For instance, they may be more likely to depict black suspects in police custody.
In order to talk about this issue in newsroom practice, I want to use one of the news stories I covered during the summer as an example. The police asked the public to find another suspect related to this gunshot case. There was the information of the second suspect in its news release, including his race, height and weight. But the editor told me that we should not include the suspect’s race in my brief. He told me that they do not identify the suspect by race or anything that can be changed. They used to include this sort of information. However, when they described the suspect as a black male based on the police’s news releases in the past, it usually turned out that the suspect was not black in the end. Therefore, journalists at Missourian are cautious about identifying a suspect by race. I think all journalists should take a lesson from this.
Reference:
Comments