TV news and minority lawbreakers

TV news and minority lawbreakers

ANN ARBOR—A new University of Michigan study not only corroborates prior research that African Americans are more likely than whites to be portrayed as criminals on television news, it also surprisingly reveals that Latinos are less likely to be depicted as perpetrators—when compared with actual crime statistics.

Although both Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to be shown as lawbreakers than as law defenders (i.e., police officers) in television news reports, Latinos—like whites—are, in fact, underrepresented as criminals while Blacks are overrepresented as lawbreakers.

“If the perpetrators of crime on television news are largely people of color and guardians of law usually white, then viewers of news programs may come to the conclusion that people of color are evil-doers who must be subdued,” says Travis L. Dixon, U-M assistant professor of communication studies. “The presumption is that viewers embrace the version of the social world cultivated by television news and incorporate it into their view of social reality.”

Dixon and Daniel Linz, a professor of communication, law and society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conducted a content analysis of 116 “breaking” news programs on seven commercial television stations covering Los Angeles and Orange counties during an eight-month period in 1995-96.

According to the study, which appears in the spring issue of the Journal of Communication, nearly 73 percent more African Americans and about 38 percent more Latinos than whites were portrayed as criminals. Also, Blacks were about 2.5 times more likely and Latinos almost twice as likely as whites to be depicted as felons (e.g., murderers, rapists, armed thieves, arsonists, etc.).

Furthermore, both African Americans and Latinos were about four times more likely to be shown as lawbreakers than as police officers, while more than twice as many whites were depicted as law defenders than as criminals. The ratio was even greater (more than 3.5 times) for white police vs. white felons.

In comparing television news reports with actual crime statistics from the California Department of Justice, Dixon and Linz found that African Americans were clearly overrepresented as perpetrators—37 percent of all criminals on the news were Black vs. 21 percent in reality. The distortion was even greater among Black felons—44 percent on the news vs. 25 percent in reality.

Interestingly, Latinos, like whites, were less likely to be portrayed as criminals on television news (29 percent) than to be arrested in reality (47 percent). For whites, the numbers were 21 percent and 28 percent, respectively.

“Perhaps the lack of focus on Latino perpetration results from Latinos being framed as a ‘problem’ people in other areas besides crime—for example, immigration,” Dixon says. “It is more plausible, however, that structural limitations of the news media may contribute to the absence of Latinos on television news by discouraging journalists from overcoming language and cultural boundaries to the Latino community.”

Likewise, just as Latinos were underrepresented as lawbreakers on television news than in reality, the study found that they also were underrepresented as law defenders (10 percent) in news reports. In fact, employment records from Los Angeles and Orange counties show that about 25 percent of police officers were Latino.

African Americans were about equally represented as officers on television news compared with reality (14 percent vs. 11 percent), while whites were overrepresented as law defenders (69 percent on television news vs. 59 percent in reality).

Overall, Dixon and Linz say that the misrepresentation of Black and Latino criminals and police on television news can, in part, be explained by an “ethnic blame discourse,” which depicts crimes and other problem behavior committed by minorities as inter-group conflict with harmful effects on whites.

Ethnic discourse, they add, is an outgrowth of stereotyping—mere exposure to African Americans and Latinos unconsciously and automatically arouse stereotypical associations.

“News editors and reporters are not exempt from these phenomena,” Dixon says. “As a result, they may make decisions about the newsworthiness of events based on a discourse rooted in unconscious stereotypical assumptions. Under such circumstances, Black perpetration of crime, particularly if whites are victims, may be deemed highly newsworthy by news gatherers who may unconsciously conform to these ethnocentric discursive practices.”

However, ethnic blame discourse cannot fully explain the underrepresentation of Latinos as both lawbreakers and law defenders, the researchers say. Instead, structural constraints placed on news reporters may be another force at work.

The “structural limitations” perspective claims that language barriers contribute to Latino underrepresentation; that a focus on blue-collar crime (murder, rape, robbery, arson)—rather than economic, white-collar crime (bribery, embezzlement, fraud)—contributes to Black overrepresentation as criminals; and that demographics and a reliance on high-ranking official sources who are more apt to be white contribute to white overrepresentation as police officers.

“Although an ethnic blame discourse based on stereotypes about [minority] groups may affect what is aired on television news, structural limitations or institutional biases may also shape mass media depictions of race and crime,” Dixon says. “The structural limitations process essentially posits that the news-gathering process has an effect on the way messages are framed. It is possible that both of these forces work together to produce the portrayals uncovered in this study.”

Travis L. DixonDaniel LinzJournal of CommunicationCalifornia Department of JusticeNews and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan