Media Portrayal Of Black America Essay

The most stunning indictment of the media’s portrayal of black America came when someone pointed out the bias in reporting during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press published two photos. One showed a group of white people, wading through the water and pushing some items that they’d taken from a store. The other photo showed a group of black people, wading through the water and pushing some items that they’d from a store. The white people were described as “finding food”. The black people were described as “looting”. To me, the second most stunning indictment of the media’s portrayal of black America came when “The Cosby Show” reached its peak of popularity. The news media loudly protested that there couldn’t possibly
There have, however, been a number of studies of minorities in the news that have some relevance to the current project. The most common such studies have examined the proportion of ethnic or racial minorities appearing in news coverage and have consistently found that blacks are underrepresented in the American news media, whether it be television (Baran 1973), newspapers (Chaudhary 1980), or newsmagazines (Lester and Smith 1990; Stempel 1971). The underrepresentation of African Americans has decreased over time, however. Lester and Smith (1990) , for example, found that only 1.3 percent of the pictures in Time and Newsweek during the 1950s were of blacks, compared with 3.1 percent in the 1960s and 7.5 percent in the 1980s. Another study looked at the representation of African Americans in newsmagazine advertisements (Humphrey and Schuman 1984). Advertisements, of course, constitute a very different subject matter from news content, and we would not expect to find many poor people in advertisements. Nevertheless, 10 percent of the blacks in advertisement in Time magazine in 1980 were either Africans or Americans in poverty, while none of the whites in these ads were shown as