News Media Encourage Racial Stereotyping

Newswise — In today's society, racial stereotypes can run rampant in the workplace, at home and in the media. When journalists cover stories involving a suspect in violent crimes, the reporters might be painting a picture of racial prejudice. A new study by a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher found that viewers of a television crime news story are quicker to judge suspects who are African-American than white when the suspect's mug shot without a name is displayed or when the suspect is shown wearing handcuffs.

"Journalists may suggest that they have little control over certain depiction styles," said Glenn Leshner, MU associate professor of journalism, who conducted the study. "If one assumes that television journalists have some level of control over the content of their pictures, even whether or not to show a suspect in handcuffs and grasped by authorities, then these findings ought to be at least part of the newsgathering and editing process."

Leshner's study consisted of participants viewing six violent crime news stories, three involving African-American suspects and three involving white suspects. The images in the stories were divided into two main categories: dehumanizing and non-dehumanizing. There were three types of dehumanizing images: a suspect's mug shot without his name displayed, a suspect shown in freeze frame rather than in motion, and a suspect shown in handcuffs.

Leshner based the conclusions on the amount of time it took for a participant to judge the suspect on a series of positive and negative attributes. He found that people were quickest to judge white suspects and slowest to judge African-American suspects when they were depicted in a non-dehumanizing way. Most importantly, Leshner said, participants were quicker to judge an African American suspected of a serious crime in a television story when he was shown in a dehumanizing way. These results, Leshner believes, suggest that the dehumanizing depiction encouraged participants to rely more on cultural stereotypes when making evaluations than the non-dehumanizing depictions.

Participants also were asked to evaluate the credibility of each story. The results showed that the least credible stories were the non-dehumanized stories involving African-American suspects, while the most credible stories were the non-dehumanized stories involving white suspects.

"Perhaps journalists can view their role, in part, as de-conditioning cultural stereotypes in the media by presenting less inflammatory images in their newscasts, even at the risk of losing credibility," Leshner said.

Leshner's study will be published as a book chapter in the soon-to-be-released Multidisciplinary Approaches to Communication Law Research.