Effects of Representation in Media on Race Perceptions

This study examined the impact that television platforms have on perpetuating the stereotypes assigned to minority groups by majority groups, specifically among young adult populations. Previous studies have focused on the impact of misrepresentation in the media on individuals that identify with minority groups. However, this study assessed the impact of television platforms on minority groups’ internalized perceptions of self. It also assessed the impact of television platforms on majority groups’ implicit bias based on the quality and quantity of representation consumed. We hypothesized that the more exposure people have to positive representation, the less implicit biases they will have against minority groups. Online surveys were sent to students at multiple universities in the Northwest Indiana region. Students watching habits were compared to both implicit bias and internal perception of self. This study has important implications on how racial biases are formed and how more positive and accurate portrayals of minority groups on television platforms have the potential to shape better race relations in the future

Reinventing Black Womanhood: Alternative Media and Identity Discourse in the 2019 Chicago Mayoral Race

This paper examines how a Chicago-based alternative medium covered the 2019 Chicago’s mayoral race. The study uses critical discourse analysis and the theory of Black feminism to argue for the need to examine the multiple identities of Black women and how such identities determine their representation in socio-cultural and political spaces. The findings from this study show that agency is a major part of media coverage and that the identities of Black women are better represented when the women are portrayed as agents in their own stories. These findings provide an alternative narrative to the discourse of Black womanhood which has been racialized and perverted

In the Eye of the Colonizer: The White Racial Frame of Media Coverage on Hurricane Maria

Hurricane Maria emphasized the need for journalism. It also demonstrated potential biases present in journalism. At the time that Hurricane Maria made landfall in 2017, I had worked as News Editor for my school\u27s newspaper and interned at a business newspaper in Puerto Rico. The one thing consistently reiterated over and over again? Objective reporting. Nationally, there is a lot of conversation of what counts as fake news, a term made infamous by President Donald Trump. The implication in that conversation is that good media is unbiased media and therefore any media outlet that has bias is disregarded as fake news. This form of thinking reveals that what journalism wants all reporters to aspire to and all readers to expect is unbiased reporting. The biases journalists carry, especially when they are dangerously ignorant of such biases, influence the way they present information, impact the tone or tenor of a piece, and affect their word choice(s) (Feagin 2010, Ortega and Feagin 2013, Alamo-Pastrana and Hoynes 2018). Media, specifically news, has the ability to establish what is important; perhaps more importantly, the news media has the ability to advance racist stereotypes, which sustains power dynamics. The impact news media has on daily lives and their ability to influence perceptions of self and others is consistent: we read the news, we watch the news, the news is pushed to our phones, it invades social media. This space, one that engages with unacknowledged biases also creates an overabundance of news, while silencing and erasing the voices of those who are marginalized. I situate my thesis in this space, one of hyper-visibility and invisibility, of cacophony and silence. This project interrogates journalistic frames and narratives that explicitly and implicitly engage racialization and racist frames. A central goal is to illuminate the effects of such discourse and to theorize its affects and effects on the idea of Puerto Rico and its citizens

Where is the risk? Inter-reality comparison study of multiple-perpetrator rape assailants in Spain

This research paper aims to shed a critical light on the moral panic surrounding multiple-perpetrator rape (MPR) in Spain, by exploring the interplay between official statistics of this type of crime, and the depiction in the media. The concordance between media representation and the statistical reality of crime raises questions: (1) how multiple perpetrator assault and its assailants are represented in media narratives (content analysis) is examined, including the content, framing, and underlying themes within the media coverage, with a particular emphasis on the role of nationality, and (2) this representation is compared to official crime statistics (Ministry of Home Affairs report on crimes against sexual freedom and indemnity in Spain (detentions/accused) and the statistics of the sentences passed by various Spanish Provincial Courts between 2005 and 2020 from criminal justice data), and to what extent, they align. If they do not align, do news portrayals influence a moral panic? In conclusion, the idea of tabloid justice (Fox et al., 2001) is not present in the three largest Spanish daily newspapers from 2005 to 2021. There is a misrepresentation of non-Spanish nationalities having the highest rates, Romanians being underrepresented and the French being overrepresented. Media coverage perceives tourists as a certain danger, and is questioning the idea of certain non-Spanish immigrants as ‘folk devils.

Colour component in the semantics of ethnophobic terms (the case of non-standard American English)

The study aimed to identify the semantic and structural characteristics of ethnophobic terms with a colour component, as well as the conceptual basis and extralinguistic factors that have a role in their formation. Ethnophobic terms tend to emerge in the non-standard language, with slang making its core. Although often marked as derogatory or impolite, ethnicity-laden slang expressions form a dynamic and productive part of non-standard vocabulary, largely due to their pragmatic power. Ethnophobic terms used with reference to the largest ethnic minorities in the USA (Black, Latin and Native Americans) became the focus of our research. Given their prototypical nature and a wide spectrum of connotations, basic colour terms have shown the highest potential for integration with the ethnicity concept: an overwhelming number of ethnophobic terms contain explicit or implicit colour components in their semantic structure encoding the following colour categories: black, brown, red, yellow, and white. We have also suggested that in American ethnophobic slang, the universal opposition of black and white may have transformed into a conceptual opposition of "white" vs. "non-white" that has a variety of verbal representations. In addition, semantic configuration and evaluative power of colour categories are determined by the speaker’s point of reference affected by the stereotypes dominating their ethnic groups. Data analysis has shown that the morphological means of word formation typical of ethnophobic terms, including suffixation, compounding, blending, and abbreviation, are mainly combined with metonymy, metaphor, or both

How Perpetrator Identity (Sometimes) Influences Media Framing Attacks as “Terrorism” or “Mental Illness”

Do media frame attacks with Muslim perpetrators as “terrorism” and attacks with White perpetrators as the result of “mental illness”? Despite public speculation and limited academic work with relatively small subsets of cases, there have been no systematic analyses of potential biases in how media frame terrorism. We addressed this gap by examining the text of print news coverage of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015. Controlling for fatalities, affiliation with a group, and existing mental illness, the odds that an article references terrorism are approximately five times greater for a Muslim versus a non-Muslim perpetrator. In contrast, the odds that an article references mental illness do not significantly differ between White and non-White perpetrators. Results partially confirm public speculation and are robust against numerous alternative explanations. Differences in media framing can influence public (mis)perceptions of violence and threats, and ultimately harm counterterrorism policy

Constructing Social Media, Constructing Fear: A Research Proposal

As the amount of social media users increase, upwards of 66% of US adults in 2017, it can be expected that media corporations will follow. (Shearer and Gottfried 2017) Social media accounts for 35% of pathway to news (Mitchell et al. 2017) and considering 66% of online news content developers are owned by media conglomerates, it is likely to believe that many of the stories seen by users are recycled and reinforced. The relevance of this becomes clearer once noting that 33% of news is strictly crime focused. (Callanan 2012) Not only does social media provide users with content that has traditionally influenced a tinted sense of reality, but it also provides ample opportunities for follow-up actions. With 53% of social media news receiving a follow-up actions of sorts, it is likely to believe that follow-up actions may also be influential to a person’s sense of crime. (Mitchell et al. 2017) Furthermore, the increase in access to news is accompanied with an increase in access to “fake news.” 64% of US adults agree that fake news can cause great confusion, yet only 16% realizing the falsity of the news after sharing. (Barthel et al. 2016) In other words, misleading news stories have the potential to cause much harm by going unnoticed, thus the need for understanding the relationship of news and social media becomes that much more relevant. The purpose of this literature review is to address the following themes: the cognitive impact of news, crime, and social media usage, the symbolic underpinnings of news and crime, and the sociological impact of news and crime. After addressing all major exports of the literature, I will be connecting the dots in order to address the potential social impacts of crime infotainment and news through social media

Biased Coverage of Bias Crime: Examining Differences in Media Coverage of Hate Crimes and Terrorism

News media differentially cover violence based on social identity. How does media bias apply to terrorist attacks—typically “upward crimes” where perpetrators hold less power than targets—that are also hate crimes—typically “downward crimes”? We compare coverage of incidents that are both terrorist attacks and hate crimes to coverage of incidents that are just terrorism in the U.S. from 2006 to 2015. Attacks that are also hate crimes receive less media attention. Articles are more likely to reference hate crimes when the perpetrator is unknown and more likely to reference terrorism when the perpetrator is non-white in some models

Intersections of nationality, gender, race and crime in news reporting: the case of Oscar Pistorius – Olympian and murderer

Taking as the starting point the importance of adopting an intersectional approach to studying mediatised representations, this study focuses on media construals of the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius. Spanning a range of intersecting identities - he is white, male, disabled, a sports champion and a convicted murderer - Pistorius presents an important case to study. In this paper, we focus on the period from his success in the 2012 London Olympics to his 'fall from grace' after fatally shooting his girlfriend in 2013. We use a combination of corpus linguistic tools and methods, and Critical Discourse Analysis, to interrogate corpora of press articles published in major British and South African newspapers. Investigating collocational patterns surrounding Pistorius, we show how media ‘mix and match’ aspects of his identity to construct a particular kind of persona. Whereas his disability and (trans)national identity are foregrounded in constructing him as a sports hero, his new emotionality and mental vulnerability are emphasized through gendered representations in the UK while a largely individual representation dominates in South Africa, where he is referred to overwhelmingly by name and in terms of his crime as an amputee, and only obliquely as white and male. At the theoretical level, our study adds to the body of research which challenges the notion that individual experience can be understood by categorising people in terms of one identity component (gender, race, ethnicity). More importantly, it shows that different aspects of identities are foregrounded or backgrounded to navigate shifts in salience in sometimes conflicting identity/ies, and that this is accomplished differently in two different media traditions. At the methodological level, this study shows the potential of a diachronic collocational analysis to unravel patterns of intersectionality in mediatised identity constructions