Poll confirms perception of racist US news coverage by Black Americans

By James On Sep 28, 2023

In a new survey, Black Americans expressed widespread concern about the way they are portrayed in the news media, with the majority saying they see racist or negative images and a lack of efforts to reach broad swaths of their community.

According to the Pew Research Center, four in five Black adults say they often or sometimes see racist or racially insensitive depictions of their race in the news.

Three years after the killing of George Floyd sparked racist reckonings in the news media, Pew took its first broad look at Black attitudes toward the media last winter with a survey of nearly 5,000 Black adults and subsequent focus groups.

The survey found that 63% of respondents say news about Black people is often more negative than about other racial or ethnic groups, while 28% say it’s about the same.

“It’s not surprising at all,” said Charles Whitaker, dean of the Medill Journalism School at Northwestern University. “We know both anecdotally and through my personal experience with the black press that blacks have long been dissatisfied with their reporting.

“There is a sense that Black Americans are often portrayed as perpetrators or victims of crime, and there is no nuance in the reporting,” Mr. Whitaker said.

That attitude is reflected in the Pew survey’s finding that 57% of respondents say the media covers only certain segments of Black communities, compared to 9% who say it portrays a wide diversity.

“They should make a lot more effort to provide context,” said Richard Prince, a columnist for the Journal-isms newsletter, which covers diversity issues. “They should realize that blacks and other people of color want to be portrayed as having the same concerns as everyone else, in addition to hearing news about African American concerns.”

Advertisements actually do a much better job of showing black people in situations everyone knows, raising families or deciding where to eat, he said.

Mr Prince said he often heard concerns about victims of black crimes being treated as suspects in reporting, down to the use of police mugshots as illustrations. He recently convened a roundtable for journalists to discuss the long-running, infamous case of five black men who were acquitted after being accused of attacking a white jogger in New York’s Central Park in the 1980s.

At a time of sharp party divides, the survey found virtually no difference in attitudes toward reporting between black Democrats and Republicans, said Katerina Eva Matsa, director of news and information research at Pew.

For example, 46% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats say reporting largely stereotypes black people, Pew said.

Negative attitudes toward the press tended to increase with income and education levels, Ms. Matsa said. While 57% of those with lower incomes said coverage of Black people was more negative than other groups, that number rose to 75% of wealthier respondents, the survey found.

A large majority of respondents, young and old, expressed little confidence that things would improve much in their lifetimes.

While 40% of survey participants said it was important to see Black journalists reporting on issues of race and racial inequality, journalists’ race was not as important in general news.

Mr. Prince said it is important for journalists to know the history; he wrote Monday about the idea of a government shutdown that emerged in 1879 when former allies in Congress wanted to deny funding to protect black people at the ballot box, and how the filibuster began to prevent civil rights legislation.