Journalists, Scholars Argue Racial Bias in News Coverage

WASHINGTON—What role does the media play in our perception of race today? Two panels of America’s top journalists, professors, and media executives gathered together on Thursday in Washington, D.C. to confront this question.

“Race does permeate every bit of every thing” Shorenstein Fellow Deborag Mathis declared. “It’s often that race is at the bottom of the thing.”

But while panelists agreed that race permeates American society, and that the media affects public perception of race, they were deeply divided in how precisely the media is directing racial dialogue.

Sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG), the Conference on Race and the Press had two separate gatherings: “The Local Story” and “The National Story, and a keynote address by former President Bill Clinton (see related article, page 1).

As advertised, the conference’s first panel, entitled “Race and the Press: The Local Story,” only scratched the surface in the debate over the responsibility of local media in shaping public perceptions of race in its allotted hour and fifteen minutes.

Moderated by Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press Thomas Patterson, the panelists tackled issues including diversity in news organizations, proper contextualization of news stories involving race, and unbalanced crime coverage in local newscasts and newspapers.

Paul Tash, the editor and president of the St. Petersburg Times, stressed the importance of minority representation in the leadership and decsion-making of newspapers in ensuring that news coverage is balanced and fair.

“The answer to real diversity is to have enough minority journalists in a news organization so that both their similarities and differences balance out,” Tash said.

Tash’s sentiment of staff diversity was echoed by Gerald M. Boyd, deputy managing editor of news for The New York Times.

Boyd, who supervised the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning series on “How Race is Lived in America,” added that diversity must also be complemented by honest discussion of difficult issues surrounding race.

“Unless we find a way to really talk about these issues honestly, we won’t move forward,” Boyd said.

The panel also discussed how the media’s failure to contextualize race-related stories contributed to faulty coverage. Robert M. Entman, Professor and Head of Communications at North Carolina State University, specifically cited the failure of local news media to provide proper contexts in stories involving race.

“Absent proper contextualization, racial and ethnic tensions will continue,” Entman said. “Without context, false inferences are likely.”

Evidence for these false inferences was provided by Robert Blendon, a KSG professor of health policy and political analysis.

Blendon cited a recent survey about the wide separation of perceptions of the black experience by both black and white citizens and called on the media to narrow this gulf with more balanced coverage.

The second panel, on “The National Story,” was significantly divided over how race should be perceived in television and print.

John Cowles Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson stated that the most critical issue facing the media today is “the racialization of issues which are not primarily racial.”

Drawing on examples such as the Los Angeles mayoral race, the U.S. Census interpretation, and Clarence Thomas, Professor Patterson declared that the “Press is racializing an issue” because of “intellectual laziness.”

Nearly every other panelist disagreed, in varying degrees. Harvard Law Professor Christopher Edley, Jr., said “there is too little racialization.”

Carole Simpson, an Emmy Award- winning senior correspondent for ABC News, said that her experiences have taught her that “news costs too damn much.”

Since the arrival of cable television, Ms. Simpson said that the national networks were losing watchers fast, and “the bean-counters became involved.” The network programs are “now in the fight of their lives,” and because of that, they reach out to the viewers’ interests like health and aging while neglecting race.

Mathis’ recent study into the disproportionate use of minorities as experts on news talk shows was also a subject on the national panel. “Smart black people are dime-a-dozen,” Ms. Mathis said.

The so-called “Rolodex problem” was something that Simpson said she observed at ABC News and got together with others to create a list of minority experts. “Change can be affected when people of color come together,” she said.

Panelist Ray Suarez, of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, said that “we still see a white person as the default person, a regular person.”

Although disagreeing with one another, it was clear that the panelists agreed with Mathis that “When we define anything racial only on its edges, then we miss the story.”

—Staff writer Kenyon S. Weaver can be reached at kweaver@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniel E. Fernandez can be reached at dfernand@fas.harvard.edu.