Race, journalism and blogging, part 2: Becoming actors, not objects, in the media system

Kim Pearson — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:58:47 -0500

I closed last week's entry on this topic with communication theorist Oscar Gandy's charge that the media system is responsible for perpetuating "the structural influence of racism." Lisa was quick to ask what I thought of Gandy's charge and what we could do about it. My simple answers are first, I think Gandy has a point, and second, that there is a lot that we can do, both as news consumers and as bloggers.

First, let me say what I think Gandy means by his statement. He's talking about the media as a social system. The decisions that Gandy sees as perpetuating racism are not necessarily made out of racial animus. I think this is an important distinction, because, so often discussions about racism degenerate into cold wars in which people feel that their own ethics are under attack. In a social system, people function as they have been socialized to function.

For example, a classroom is a social system. We who have been socialized as modern people can walk into most classrooms any where in the world and understand the behavior expected of us. We can usually figure out who is teaching and who is the student, just by watching where the individuals in the class sit, and how they act in relation to each other. And we can also draw some conclusions about how power is exercised in the room.

In the same way, individuals function in the media system as products of our socialization. And part of that socialization involves learning to function in ways that perpetuate certain power relationships between groups in society. Gandy identifies the media as an important tool in that socialization process.

When it comes to matters of race and gender, most of us have learned since childhood to separate and classify people by racial and ethnic categories, along with whatever stereotypes our culture attaches to those categories. According to a 2002 survey, the average American journalist was born around 1961. (And since that average is a median number, half the newsroom staff was born before that.) Thatâ€™s old enough to have spent a childhood watching old cartoons with bug-eyed black cannibals and â€œIndiansâ€? that say â€œUgh!â€? and â€œHow!â€? Not to mention â€œinscrutiableâ€? Asians, â€œhot-bloodedâ€? Latins, Archie-Bunker-ignorant white working-class men, â€œman-hatingâ€? feminists,â€œtroubledâ€? young black men, black women who are â€œnaked, neutered or nobleâ€? as writer-photographer Carla Williams put it. On the flip side, someone born in 1961 has also grown up with, â€œI Have a Dream,â€? â€œYouâ€™ve Come A Long Way, Baby,â€? and â€œDo the Right Thing.â€? These embedded notions not only can affect the way we classify people and what we think of them, they can help to condition the way we view information about the behavior and life chances of members of these groups.

If that person works in a traditional news organization, the business structure of the organization can introduce further bias. For example, although newspapers technically separate their advertising and editorial operations, editors often skew their coverage toward the most affluent, advertiser-attractive readers: typically suburban, mostly white. The advertisers whom they are trying to please generally have few people of color in management, spend less on marketing to people of color, and pay lower ad rates for media targeted to people of color. In this 2004 post from my blog, I spun out the implications of this focus:

Journalism takes place in the context of a patriarchal white supremacist system of representation that was originally created to justify the existence of slavery and Jim Crow in an ostensibly democratic society. Today, it supports a marketplace ethos that assigns value to peoples' stories based largely on their pecuniary value. Nothing better exemplifies that ethos than all the trivial celebrity news that dominates our headlines, as well as the traditional way in which murder coverage is handled.

The convention of allocating little or no coverage to "small" murders is a case in point. In one way, this is is a perfectly libertarian and neutral notion to the extent that it triages coverage according to what is perceived to be readers' interests, and according to their perceived impact on the community.

However, the readers that editors have in mind are those readers thought to be advertiser-attractive. Thus, the rape and attempted murder of the Central Park jogger was considered more important than the rape, beating and hanging of a black woman in Harlem that same week (The video of this speech by former New York Daily News reporter Natalie Byfield makes that point especially well.) The brutal slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are bigger murders than any number of lesser-known people who are found shot, stabbed, garrotted and dismembered all over the country. I found it chilling and quite instructive that the Green River Killer said that he was careful to choose prostitutes as his victims because he knew no one cared about them. And in our triage system, he is absolutely right.

By the way, we had another example of that way of thinking in the arrests of two men accused of the racially-motivated rapes and attempted murders of two black women in South Carolina a few weeks ago. One of the men, Jeremy Sweat, 24, reportedly told police that he targeted black women because no one cared about them.

The media system can perpetuate bias even when reporters and editors are striving to use the most objective methods available to journalists â€“ the social science techniques known as precision journalism. Precision journalists use the scientific method of observation, hypothesis formation and testing, modeling and theorizing. Gandy identified several ways in which this bias occurs in this 2001 paper on the use of race-related statistics by journalists and public intellectuals. Iâ€™ll cite a few examples briefly.

The first is the use of unrepresentative subjects as examples to illustrate a story. For example, Gandy cites studies revealing that news stories about poverty disproportionately feature interviews with or anecdotes about poor black people:

In addition, the images that were used tended to under-represent African Americans among the so-called â€œdeservingâ€? or sympathetic poor, such as the elderly, and the physically handicapped. The African Americans used to illustrate stories about poverty seemed to be able bodies, and such representations invite victim-blaming attributions of responsibility.

Gandy is also concerned that journalists and news consumers may not have the tools needed to critically evaluate the articles of â€œIntelligent Bayesians.â€? As Jody Armour explained in this 2005 article for the Loyola Law Review explains, an â€œIntelligent Bayesianâ€? believes in â€œrational discrimination.â€?

Defenders of racial profiling (e.g., economist Walter Williams, columnist Richard Cohen, pundit Dinesh D'Souza) [FN1] contend that, given statistics demonstrating Blacks' disproportionate engagement in street crime, it is reasonable to perceive a greater threat from someone Black than someone White. Walter Williams, a conservative Black economist, refers to someone who does so as an "Intelligent Bayesian," named for Sir Thomas Bayes, the father of statistics. [FN2] â€¦ The "Bayesian's" argument is simple: "As much as I regret it, I must act differently toward Blacks because it is logical to do so." According to the Bayesian, because race is statistically related to the risk of crime a person poses, it is rational to discriminate on the basis of race when making such assessments. "Rational discrimination" is his watchword. And he admonishes us not to equate rational discrimination with racism, which is commonly understood as irrational animus toward another group

The problem with this argument, of course, is the statistics that it is based on are for arrests and convictions. But it stands to reason that if blacks are more likely to be the targets of racial profiling, they are more likely to be arrested. Indeed, Gandy acknowledges that racial profiling one of the areas in which journalists have helped to highlight discrimination, noting:

Of course, it was investigative journalists who helped to put the problem of racial profiling on the national agenda. What these journalists claimed was that driving, walking, or even flying while Black, could be hazardous to oneâ€™s health, or at the very least, to oneâ€™s self-esteem (Harris, 1999).

In one story, reporters for an Atlanta television station followed up on a tip that suggested that Customs officials at the Atlanta airport had been systematically targeting African Americans for intrusive body searches for drugs (Russell & Larcom, 2000). Initially, the reporters came to doubt the accuracy of the initial claim because when they examined the official records of the Customs office, they found that actually, more Whites than African Americans were being searched. However, when they re-examined the data taking into account the ways in which the decision to search had been made a more striking disparity emerged.

It seems that when drug-sniffing dogs indicated a target, they tended to point to Whites, and the dogs were almost never wrong. However, when the invasive searches were initiated in response to a human agentâ€™s call, two out of every three passengers tapped for a search were African Americans. Yet, 99% of those searches failed to produce any contraband. When the most invasive searches (those requiring the help of a hospital) were requested, 90% of the people searched were African American. And despite the inconvenience, embarrassment, and actual risk involved in conducting these searches, only 20% of the people examined were found
to be concealing drugs.

Gandy has a great deal more to say, and while heâ€™s a challenging read, heâ€™s worth studying. Clearly he wants us all to be more aware of the degree to which seemingly neutral data and reporting techniques can either lead us astray or help us see the truth more plainly. In my next post in this series, I want to focus on bloggers who are particularly helpful in providing useful data and media analysis on race and gender issues. In particular, Iâ€™ll be taking a look at Rachelâ€™s Tavern, Blackprof.com, and WIMNâ€™s Voices.

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Race, journalism and blogging, part 2: Becoming actors, not objects, in the media system