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Network news similarly misrepresents the victims of poverty by using more images of blacks than whites in its segments. Viewers in a study were left believing African Americans were the majority of the unemployed and poor, rather than seeing the problem as one faced by many races.
Travis L. Dixon. 2008. “Network News and Racial Beliefs: Exploring the Connection between National Television News Exposure and Stereotypical Perceptions of African Americans,”
Journal of Communication 58, No. 2: 321–337. The misrepresentation of race is not limited to news coverage, however. A study of images printed in national magazines, like
Time and
Newsweek , found they also misrepresented race and poverty. The magazines were more likely to show images of young African Americans when discussing poverty and excluded the elderly and the young, as well as whites and Latinos, which is the true picture of poverty.
Martin Gilens. 1996. “Race and Poverty in America: Public Misperceptions and the American News Media,”
Public Opinion Quarterly 60, No. 4: 515–541.
Racial framing, even if unintentional, affects perceptions and policies. If viewers are continually presented with images of African Americans as criminals, there is an increased chance they will perceive members of this group as violent or aggressive.
Dixon. “Crime News and Racialized Beliefs.” The perception that most recipients of welfare are working-age African Americans may have led some citizens to vote for candidates who promised to reduce welfare benefits.
Gilens. “Race and Poverty in America.” When survey respondents were shown a story of a white unemployed individual, 71 percent listed unemployment as one of the top three problems facing the United States, while only 53 percent did so if the story was about an unemployed African American.
Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder. 1987.
News That Matters . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Word choice may also have a priming effect. News organizations like the
Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press no longer use the phrase “illegal immigrant” to describe undocumented residents. This may be due to the desire to create a “sympathetic” frame for the immigration situation rather than a “threat” frame.
Daniel C. Hallin. 2015. “The Dynamics of Immigration Coverage in Comparative Perspective,”
American Behavioral Scientist 59, No. 7: 876–885.
Media coverage of women has been similarly biased. Most journalists in the early 1900s were male, and women’s issues were not part of the newsroom discussion. As journalist Kay
Mills put it, the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was about raising awareness of the problems of equality, but writing about rallies “was like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
Kay Mills. 1996. “What Difference Do Women Journalists Make?” In
Women, the Media and Politics , ed. Pippa Norris. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 43. Most politicians, business leaders, and other authority figures were male, and editors’ reactions to the stories were lukewarm. The lack of women in the newsroom, politics, and corporate leadership encouraged silence.
Kim Fridkin Kahn and Edie N. Goldenberg. 1997. “The Media: Obstacle or Ally of Feminists?” In
Do the Media Govern? eds. Shanto Iyengar and Richard Reeves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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