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. 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 amongst European and White Americans.

Racial bias against white Americans

Further information: Race censorship

Racial bias against African Americans

Traditional 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.

Research done by Dana Mastro, on racial bias in the United States reveals persistent racial prejudice among Caucasians, regarding the characterization of 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.

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.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters believes the system is racist, stating that "The color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, or receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment."

African American suspects presentation in news

A study in the article Race and Punishment 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.

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. 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. 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 fewer 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 compared with 29% of those stories about African Americans accused of crimes were less likely to allow 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.

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%

Media outlets and racial bias towards 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" says that Fox News has not hesitated to include racial overtones in their news coverage. Furthermore the article goes to show how a shooting of an Australian teen was turned into a racial hate crime by Fox News. Fox New's show On The Record With Greta Van Susteren, guest Pat Buchanan claimed that "racial hate crimes [are] 40 times more prevalent in the black community than the white community."

Media Matters for America also report another finding that says 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. 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

The ABC News station has been seen to falter within the topic of journalism and to have a certain bias that has been painted by certain third parties that swayed their certain 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, the ABC News station 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 Mumia is a political prisoner and is only in jail because of his specific views and criticisms of how the police have dealt with the black community. This case only got recognition after people continued to dispute that Mumia's trial was fair or lawful, to the extent that it reached national and international attention. 20/20 begins to tell this case as an emotional story, making people see it as if it isn't that important. Sam Donaldson starts his interviewing with the widow, Maureen Faulkner. She is seen as a damsel in distress, which makes it easier to sympathize with her. From the beginning we know the specific angle of ABC News and where the bias of Sam Donaldson comes from. ABC stated in their letter sent to the Pennsylvania prison authorities when trying to get an interview with Mumia that they were "currently working in conjunction with Maureen Faulkner and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of the Police."

Framing has a couple of meanings; the one that best describes 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 Mumia 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 are interviewed on 20/20 by Donaldson, he has to portray them as "know-nothing dupe celebrities" once they start to sound knowledgeable. Donaldson believes that the trial wasn't unfair but that Mumia was unfair to the trial. He continues to put down Mumia and those standing up for him by negatively accusing them of taking on the behavior of a religious cult.

Thomas Gardner opines 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 also states 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 Mumia, and that they wanted to keep the public unaware to make sure there would not be large numbers of people supporting his campaign.

Search engines and racial bias against African Americans

Professor Latanya Sweeney from Harvard University identified "significant discrimination" in Google search terms that included names typically associated with black people, and were more likely to yield results relating to criminal activities, which according to Prof. Sweeney, may expose "racial bias in society."

Police bias

See also: Institutional racism

The Washington Justice Department concluded that the police department of Ferguson, Missouri has been racially biased against African Americans and that the police have been routinely violating the constitutional rights of African Americans in Ferguson, following a civil rights investigation investigating the shooting of Michael Brown by the department, which sparked protests and riots in the area. Although this city is made up of 3/4 African American citizens; the police department is almost entirely all white. This city, like many other major cities has begun making changes in the past year to try to better its racial fairness.

See also

• Media bias in the United States
• Charleston church shooting
• Dylann Roof
• Race and crime in the United States
• Race censorship