Photo Courtesy: Paul Weiskel

Once again we find ourselves caught short. Why did it take news media across the country a couple of weeks to notice that a black teenager had been shot by a vigilante in a gated community? In our sometimes clumsy efforts to catch up (see NBC’s hideous editing error), some accuse the media of hyping the racial element.

That’s absurd, and here’s why. When three-quarters of black people surveyed consider racial bias a factor in the killing and in the non-arrest of the shooter, you’d better believe race is important to this story. It’s no secret that black parents fear for their children, knowing that suspicion routinely follows young males with black skin, wherever they are.  In a study of unconscious racial reactions, experimental psychologists found people of all backgrounds more likely to “see” a weapon in a black person’s hand when it’s actually a harmless object like a can of soda.

Distressingly, our own work is part of the reason why.  Decades ago, communication theorist George Gerbner first described the “Mean World Syndrome.” In his studies, he discovered that people exposed to heavy doses of violence on television developed an overblown sense of danger and fear about the world around them. Despite our best intentions, we’re part of that picture.

In the crime stories so favored by the local news, multiple studies have found that race plays a predictable but inaccurate role. White people disproportionately play the victim. People with darker skin disproportionately flash on the screen as suspects. News audiences have become so conditioned that even when no suspect is shown at all, viewers assume one — and he is black.

In one influential study, Frank Gilliam of UCLA and Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University altered the suspect’s race in crime news clips that they showed to about 2,300 participants. In the test group whose clip included no suspect at all, 44 percent recalled seeing a black perpetrator. Regular news watching also increased audiences’ support for punitive remedies to crime.

Separately, researcher Travis Dixon, now also at UCLA, found that African Americans are consistently overrepresented as perpetrators in local crime news. Not surprisingly, he also found that regular crime news watchers tended to perceive black people as violent.

Photo Courtesy: Paul Weiskel

In this moment, it’s important for the news media to step up to our responsibility to cover and spur conversation about America’s racial climate. Let’s also use this moment to consider hard questions about how we help to create it.

Digging Deeper into a Story

Some things you can do, based on experimental psychology research and other sources:

• Avoid snap judgments in your reporting; that’s when reactive biases are most likely to emerge.
• Form anti-bias strategies, like consciously pursuing stories about young African American men who are heroes or protectors of safety.
• Evaluate crime stories by the level of community impact, and place them in social context of root causes and potential solutions.
• Cross-check victim/perpetrator ratios by race within your own news reports. Do they reflect actual police statistics?
• Check your sources. Are you including perspectives across the fault lines of race, gender and age? Who is the affected community? Is there more than one?

Sally Lehrman is a member of the SPJ Diversity Committee. She holds Santa Clara University’s Knight Ridder — San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest. Sally is also an author and independent journalist who specializes in covering identity, race relations and gender within the context of medicine and science.

The New York Times recently produced several excellent, well-reported articles exploring residents’ concerns about crime and alcohol on Indian reservations. But for those who don’t get their Native news elsewhere, these are fine but dangerously finite offerings.

The strong dose of negativity drew a sobering response from 19-year-old Willow Pingree, who wrote in a comment on one article:

“I have lived on the reservation since I was born. I will be only twenty in July, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve seen my share of good and bad things on this reservation. Not EVERTHING about this reservation is bad. Sure there is a huge problem with domestic violence and alcoholism, but we try to work together as a community to fight it. We have not given up. … It is a sad thing that people are quick to judge about a place where they have not lived.”

Indeed, it’s far too easy for most of us to be quick to judge. Unless we’re American Indian ourselves, it’s quite likely that all we know or read about Indian nations points to hard times and hard lives.

News Only Focuses on the Negative

The “Indians, American” section in Times topics, plus a quick search on Lexis-Nexis for good measure, reveals a dearth of stories about anything other than troubling topics. Besides the crime and alcohol stories, so far this year readers have learned about a violent tribal power struggle, a cigarette tax fight, and a New York legislator who got into a fight in a casino. To be fair, a Mar. 14 Style piece discussed cultural appropriation and a January piece highlighted the Makah Indian Nation’s efforts to draw tourists to a their home, where the wind is “brutal” and the rain, ”relentless.”

Perhaps it’s unjust to pick on the New York Times. Native Americans rarely make it into the news anywhere other than the Native press, and when they do, the story is usually the same: crime, violence, alcohol.

Improve Your Coverage of Native Americans:  List of Sources

We can all do a better job filling out a more balanced picture. For some leads and ideas, check out these news sites and blogs:

Indian Country Today

News From Indian Country

Reznet

Native Legal Update

Turtle Talk

Tsalagi Think Tank

NARF News

Julia Good Fox

Sally Lehrman is a member of the SPJ Diversity Committee. She holds Santa Clara University’s Knight Ridder — San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest.  Sally is also an author and independent journalist who specializes in covering identity, race relations and gender within the context of medicine and science.

On the 44th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., CNN, aired the latest installment in its ongoing look at “Kids and Race.”

The report that aired tonight on Anderson Cooper 360 was just a part of a much larger presentation on the topic of race that can be found on the AC360 web site.

There, you can download a full 17-page report of the study with details and citations to the other research on this topic.

Academics like myself will want to look deeper at the methods used in this latest project.

But for the general public, which has seen a national conversation about race re-ignited in the recent Trayvon Martin case, tonight’s CNN report re-focuses our attention on where we are when it comes to teaching our youngest residents about interacting with those from other racial backgrounds.

Courtesy: CNN

In this latest study lead by Psychologist Melanie Killen, six-year-olds were shown an ambiguous picture of children of different races ‘(see above) and then asked to describe what was happening.

The black first-graders had far more positive interpretations of the images than white first-graders.

Killen drew some conclusions about the role of parents.

“African American parents … are very early on preparing their children for the world of diversity and also for the world of potential discrimination,” said Killen. “They’re certainly talking about issues of race and what it means to be a different race and when it matters and when it doesn’t matter.”

Also in the study, 13-year-olds were shown a different ambiguous picture, prompting some of the students to recount their own experiences of being bullied because of their racial background.

Courtesy: CNN

The study found that whether or not the school was majority white, majority black or racially diverse makes a difference.  This was especially true with white children.

Tonight’s extended report included soundbites from the students’ reaction at several grade levels.

A Two-Year Follow-up

In 2010, Cooper was the lead anchor presenting the results of  another CNN-commissioned  study that showed black and white children are biased toward lighter skin.

The test then was aimed at re-creating the landmark Doll Test from 1940s.

Those tests, conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were designed to measure how segregation affected African-American children.

Is It Still Just Black and White?

I couldn’t help but wonder where are the Hispanic kids in this discussion?  Most of the clips in tonight’s study were depicting the same black vs. white discussion.

That black vs. white discussion was what was on the minds of Americans who were alive on April 4, 1968 when shots rang out at  Memphis’ Lorraine Motel and the nation’s most famous civil rights leader lay in a pool of blood.

But, I wonder what would Dr. King say today if he heard the results of this CNN study almost a half-century after his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” in August 1963.

Yes, black vs. white is still a relevant discussion in 2012.

But, so is the discussion about what Hispanics, now our nation’s largest racial minority group, encounter, especially given the recent debates over immigration reform.

We should applaud CNN for starting a discussion, but also ask that the producers in future installments in the “Kids and Race” series to  broaden the dialogue beyond just black-and-white.

George L. Daniels, Ph.D.  is an associate professor of journalism at the The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and member of the SPJ National Board of Directors.  He is a past chair of the SPJ Diversity Committee. Read more of his thoughts at bamaproducer.wordpress.com