Race and News

Critical Perspectives

Christopher P. Campbell, Kim M. LeDuff, Cheryl D. Jenkins, Rockell A. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415800976
• eBook ISBN: 9781135967208
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The history of American journalism is marked by disturbing representations of people and communities of color, from the disgraceful stereotypes of pre-civil rights America, to the more subtle myths that are reflected in routine coverage by journalists all over the country. Race and News: Critical Perspectives aims to examine these journalistic representations of race, and in doing so to question whether or not we are living in a post-racial world. By looking at national coverage of stories like the Don Imus controversy, Hurricane Katrina, Barak Obama's presidential candidacy, and even the Virginia Tech shootings, readers are given an opportunity to gain insight into both subtle and overt forms of racism in the newsroom and in national dialogue.

The book itself is divided into two sections, with the first examining the journalistic routine and the decisions that go into covering a story with, or without, relation to race. The second section, comprised of case studies, explores the coverage of national stories and how they have impacted the dialogue on race and racism in the United States. As a whole, the collection of essays and studies also reflects a variety of research approaches. With a goal of contributing to the discussion about race and its place in American journalism, this broad examination makes Race and News an ideal text for courses on cultural diversity and the media, as well as making it valuable to professional journalists and journalism students who seek to improve their approach to coverage of diverse communities.

^PART 1

Race and the Journalistic Routine

^CHAPTER 1

Yes We Did?

Race, Myth and the News Revisited

CHRISTOPHER P. CAMPBELL, KIM M. LEDUFF AND
ROCKELL A. BROWN

The editorial cartoon in the January 19, 2009, edition of The Clarion-Ledger, the daily newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, featured a drawing of “History's Calendar,” with Monday, January 19, identified as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and these words: “Yes we can.” Tuesday, January 20, was identified as Inauguration Day and read, “Yes we did.” The cartoon was drawn by Pulitzer Prize-nominee Marshall Ramsey, whose common-sense understanding of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States was reflected in news coverage from all over the country that day: That the inauguration of the country's first African-American president was evidence of the fulfillment of Dr. King's dream.

Such “common sense” has been evident in news coverage of King Day ever since 1986, when the third Monday in January was first celebrated as a national holiday. Christopher Campbell, whose 1995 book Race, Myth and the News examined coverage of the holiday in 29 American cities, described the typical coverage of King Day as a reflection of a “myth of assimilation.” He argued:

The ultimate message of nearly all of the coverage of the King holiday ... was that American racism was a thing of the past. The occasional contradiction of that notion was overshadowed by the dominant theme of storytelling and imagery that testified to America as a melting pot. In its coverage of King Day, local television journalism constructed a world in which The American Dream lives, a parallel world to that of nightly network sitcoms, the world of the (Cosby Show's) Huxtable family.

(p. 111)

That cartoonist Marshall Ramsey, as well as journalists all over the country, would use the inauguration of President Obama to illustrate the country's triumph over racism is precisely consistent with the message that Campbell identified in 1995 and that the authors of this chapter recognized when they examined coverage of the holiday a decade later (Brown, Campbell, & LeDuff, 2005). Did the election of Barack Obama mean that American racism was a thing of the past? Consider this: Only 11 percent of the white voters in Mississippi backed Obama (Tilove, November 8, 2008). That's the same state in which Ramsey's cartoon declared the triumph of racial harmony in the state's largest newspaper. Next door, only 10 percent of Alabama's white voters supported Obama. To the west, 14 percent of white Louisianians voted Obama. A common argument from Southern whites after the election was that many white voters opposed Obama because of his politics, not because of his race. However, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 won more than twice as many white votes as Obama in their election bids in those states. Whites were willing to support the politics of Kerry and Gore, but their politics somehow changed when confronted with a black Democratic candidate. Yes we did? Maybe not.

The myth of assimilation lingers when it comes to news coverage of King Day and other events that news organizations use to demonstrate American racial harmony. We believe that that myth and others that Campbell identified in his examination of local television news remain a significant part of American culture. In this chapter, we will revisit the myths that he described in 1995 in the context of news coverage that aired on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in 2009.

In his 1995 study, Campbell identified patterns of stories in local television news coverage that reinforced three cultural myths. In identifying a “myth of marginality,” he argued that people of color are ignored and therefore less significant and marginalized in news coverage. He first cited the general “invisibility” of people of color in the news, noting the under-representation of minority news sources and the lack of coverage of minority communities in the newscasts he reviewed, including newscasts from cities with large minority populations. Additionally, he cited other studies (including Entman, 1990, 1992; Gist, 1990; Pease, 1989) that provided evidence of the under-representation and stereotypical portrayal of minorities in all forms of daily news coverage. Campbell also analyzed coverage from two cities that he argued provided evidence of lingering “traditional” or “old fashioned” racism—the kind of racism that most Americans believe to be a thing of the past. The first analysis, in which a TV station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, followed a brief story on the local celebration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday with a more detailed story about a local tribute to Robert E. Lee, questioned the curious juxtaposition of the stories as well as the symbolic nature of that juxtaposition. He also examined a story from Minneapolis about a fishing rights controversy that pitted white sportsmen against a regional Indian tribe; the coverage was dominated by the opinions of the sportsmen (led by Minnesota sports legend Bud Grant) and failed to include the perception of the tribe. Campbell argued that the two stories represented “a persistence of racial insensitivity that—when compounded by the news media's general under-representation of minority life—can contribute to a dangerous ignorance about people of color and a continuance of discrimination and injustice” (p. 57).

Second, he identified a “myth of difference,” arguing that in local TV newscasts people of color are routinely portrayed, in a number of ways, differently than white people. He argued that many stories on local television news continued to reinforce historical stereotypes about people of color, including “positive” (his quotation marks) stereotypes of successful African-American athletes and entertainers as well as the negative stereotypes of people of color (especially African-American and Hispanic men) as violent criminals. Campbell cited other studies (most importantly Gray, 1991) that also found such stereotypes to be the dominant representation of African-American men in mainstream media. Campbell closely analyzed several stories that reflected a pattern of subtle racial biases in the newsroom, and he argued that “however well intended they might be, journalists (and audience members) are likely unaware of the biases and stereotypical thinking that are deeply rooted” in the cognitive and cultural processes in a society that is dominated by white, middle-class perceptions (p. 82).

Finally, Campbell identified a “myth of assimilation.” In his analysis of local television news coverage of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, he described a cherished newsroom myth that portrays people of color, especially African Americans, as having overcome racism and fully assimilated into the American mainstream, where equality has been achieved. Campbell found that stories about the King holiday were dominated by a theme of racial harmony, despite the evidence of lingering racial hostility in many of the cities that adopted that theme. As he wrote:

That King Day was covered the way it was is not surprising. The social and professional processes that dictate how news is covered are based on an implicit common sense, a common sense that may have more to do with stereotyped notions about the world than with a true understanding of it. Most Americans would like to believe that their country is a tolerant and fair one, that discrimination does not exist, that equal opportunity is there for all. But what we would like to believe and what actually exists are clearly at odds.

(p. 111)

Campbell expressed specific concern about news organizations creating a mythical world in which racial harmony is the norm when seen in the broader context of newscasts that routinely include images of people of color as suspects in stories related to violent crime. In reflecting on the work of Gray (1986, 1991) and Jhally and Lewis (1992), Campbell expressed this concern: “If our society is the just and fair one that was portrayed on King Day, the constant barrage of menacing images of minorities that more commonly appear on local TV news will undoubtedly fuel racist attitudes” (p. 111).

Since the publication of Race, Myth and the News in 1995, researchers have continued to identify problems with the portrayal of race in the news media. Some of that research argues that journalism often misrepresents crime as a larger problem than it actually is, with people of color as the most common perpetrators (Dixon 2004; Dixon & Linz, 2000). Heider (2002) found that outside of prime-time programming, people of color were most often seen on television in the context of news reports about crime. When it comes to images of African Americans in violent crimes, most (Dixon & Linz, 2000; Entman & Rojecki, 2000; Gilliam & Iyengar, 2000; Romer et al., 1998) found that African Americans are shown more often than whites as suspects. Dixon (2004) found that African Americans were more likely to appear as perpetrators than as anchors and reporters, but the opposite was true for whites. Dixon (2004) argued that in local television news “the message here appears to be whites are the authoritative voice of reason, whereas blacks are the source of crime and chaos” (p. 137). LeDuff (2009), who examined newscasts in Indianapolis and New Orleans, found that there was an over-emphasis in those cities on blacks as criminal suspects and that African-American murder was over-reported when compared to local police crime reports.

Although the United States elected an African-American president in 2008, we remain concerned that mythological notions about race in news coverage persist. Next, we will consider that persistence as we examine coverage from King Day, 2009, the day that preceded Barack Obama's inauguration.

Analyzing News as Myth

In his seminal work Mythologies (1957/1972), Roland Barthes described his efforts to examine French popular culture through the prism of cultural myths:

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history. ... I hate seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.

(p. 11)

Barthes was concerned with the way artifacts of popular culture—advertising, photojournalism, studio wrestling and others—can reflect a kind of groupthink that doesn't allow for more complicated interpretations of events. Similarly, the work of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, especially his essay “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” is often cited in critical examinations of journalism. Geertz (1983) argued,

As a frame for thought, and a species of it, common sense is as totalizing as any other: no religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy more general. Its tonalities are different, and so are the arguments to which it appeals, but like them—and like art and like ideology—it pretends to reach past illusion to truth, to, as we say, things as they are.

(p. 84)

News coverage routinely reflects mythical common sense about the events of the day. Fiske and Hartley (1978) identified “myth chains” as one of the ways in which journalistic storytelling embeds ideological understandings, and they pointed out that “news reporting and fiction use similar signs because they naturally refer to the same myths in our culture” (p. 65). Himmelstein (1984) identified the “myth of the puritan ethic” (p. 205) in news coverage that routinely extolled the values of hard work and middle-class life while implicitly questioning the values of the underclass. Richard Campbell (1991a, 1991b) in describing the myth-making capacity of journalism suggested that the notion of “balance” was itself a “code word for ... middle American values.” He continues,

These values are encoded into mainstream journalism—how it selects the news, where it places its beat reporters, who and how it promotes, how it critically reports and thereby naively supports government positions.

(Campbell, 1991a, p. 75)

In describing his approach to myth analysis in Race, Myth and the News, Campbell wrote, “The danger of the common-sense claim to truth is in its exclusion of those who live outside the familiar world it represents” (1995, p. 18). His study found the racial mythology embedded in broadcasts across the United States represented “a hegemonic consensus about race and class that sustains myths about life outside of white, ‘mainstream’ America” (p. 132). Do those myths persist in the twenty-first century? The rest of this chapter will examine that question.

Race, Myth and 2009 King Day Coverage

On January 19 and 20 of 2009 (the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday and the day after), we examined the Web sites of television news organizations in ten of the cities that Campbell included in his 1995 study: Columbus (Ohio), Detroit, Hattiesburg (Mississippi), Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Norfolk, Phoenix, St. Louis and Syracuse. At those sites, we viewed the top stories that had been posted, stories that had also been broadcast on the day's newscasts. We identified two clear patterns in the coverage, patterns that were similar to the findings in Campbell's 1995 study and to the findings in a follow-up study we completed in 2005 (Brown, Campbell, & LeDuff, 2005). The first pattern was in how coverage of King Day—especially the King Day that coincided with the inauguration of President Barack Obama—continued to mythologize the end of racism and the successful assimilation of African Americans into American society. The second pattern was of the continued obsession of local television news to cover stories that disproportionately portray African-American men as violent criminals.

Those patterns were most clearly apparent in the news carried on Phoenix's KTVK-TV that day in its coverage of the King Day holiday and of a peculiar hostage case in which two black men were arrested. The myth-making at work in those stories was like that in much of the coverage that we observed in the ten cities we observed for this study, not to mention the coverage routinely viewed by local TV news audiences across the U.S. Our concern is that the coverage reinforces common-sense notions about race that are inaccurate and less useful in explaining the complexities of race in America. What follows is a myth analysis—similar to qualitative research approaches known as textual analysis or close reading—that will examine stories that audiences of KTVK viewed on King Day in 2009. The analysis will first examine the coverage at a denotative level; that is, we will discuss a first-level reading of the stories and the meanings that were likely intended by the journalists who produced them. Stuart Hall (1980) would describe ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• PART 1 Race and the Journalistic Routine
• PART 2 Covering Race: Contemporary Case Studies
• Afterword: Rethinking the News: How American Journalism Can Improve Coverage of Race and Racism
• About the Authors
• Index