Pictures and a Thousand Images

In the wake of the Los Angeles uprising, much attention focused on the role of the news media--especially television--in transmitting, live and in real-time, images of random violent events into the homes of Angelenos and the country at large. During the disturbances it was suggested that these live images may have helped speed the spread of the violence by inspiring copycats. After the fact, that same footage is being used to prosecute riot participants, with resulting questions about the role of the media in gathering information for the police.

But in all of this debate we heard very little about the less obvious long-term role that media coverage of urban minority communities played in the events leading up to the LA explosion. For at least the past 12 years, the mass-media practices of selective sensationalism and calculated neglect have resulted in a widely held image of African Americans, and especially young African-American men, as barbaric, violent, animalistic, and dangerous. On television today blacks are gangbangers and drug lords. Predominantly African-American neighborhoods are "war zones." And talk of "civil rights" is solidly identified with condoning criminal behavior.

This was the set of images planted not just in the heads of the cops who "pre-emptively" assaulted Rodney King, but also in the minds of the jurors who acquitted them. And, as self-fulfilling prophecy, in part, it was this image internalized that led some young people in South Central LA to take up looting and violence as an instant response to injustice, in place of more dignified, humane, and constructive options.

Today most white Americans have a picture of black America that is dominated by crack addiction and welfare. But only 40 percent of welfare recipients are black, and studies suggest that the majority of crack users are white and middle class. This spring a survey from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services revealed that, in fact, African Americans, in every age and gender group, have significantly lower rates of drug use than their white counterparts. This report, which spotlights the strength of traditional religious and moral values in African America, of course received only minor media play.

ACCORDING TO KIRK JOHNSON of the Institute for Health Care for the Poor and Underserved at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, "Careful examination of news coverage of the black community reveals disturbing biases and patterns of misinformation among the nation's largest and most respected print and broadcast media. Some analysts warn that the media thwarts black social advancement by conveying the illusion of impartial reporting while applying vastly different standards to news coverage of whites and blacks. Young people, both black and white, may be at particular risk of internalizing these misperceptions." Johnson goes on to suggest that this "objective" news reporting "can poison young black minds."

For the state of African-American and other minority communities and lives to change, media-made images must change. A person, or a people, cannot achieve what they cannot imagine. The lack of positive information and inspiring images stunts the imagination. And the loss of imagination and hope among a quarter or more of its young is a deficit from which no society or culture can rebound.

One reason for the stunted and distorted media picture of African America becomes clear when we look at who is making the decisions about what's news and what's not. According to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in 1985, 92 percent of 1,710 daily papers in the United States had no black persons in news executive positions. On the business side of the news business, the stats are even worse. A recent Columbia Journalism Review survey of the 15 biggest broadcasting and publishing conglomerates found that all of them had zero minority group members among their top corporate executives.

Today blacks are fairly visible in TV news. Total black TV news workers are about equal to the black population at 15 percent. But at the big three TV network news departments, there are still virtually no blacks in decision-making posts. As of 1985 the highest ranking off-camera blacks at the networks were a couple of regional bureau chiefs. Only 5 percent of the news producers at the three networks were black.

Producer jobs are considered the feeder pipeline for higher management posts. So this figure means that, despite black on-camera visibility, there will be very, very few blacks in positions of real power at the networks well into the 21st century.

Somehow, in the Reagan-Bush era the process of opening up national institutions to full participation has become stigmatized as "catering to special interests." Media institutions have mirrored this cowardly trend.

But, of course, the news media do shamelessly cater every day to "special interests" such as sports (or sports gambling) enthusiasts, high-society members, gardeners, or astrology buffs. Special interest reporting only becomes controversial when the "interest group" involved is one defined by its systematic exclusion from political and economic power.

For a deeper look at the issue of African-American images in the media, I strongly recommend the book Split Images: African-Americans in the Mass Media, edited by Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow (Howard University Press, 1991). Also of interest is the article "The Image of African Americans in the U.S. Press," by JoNina M. Abron in The Black Scholar (Vol. 21, No. 2).

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.