Coloring Public Opinion
YAGODA, BEN
Coloring Public Opinion The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America By Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki Chicago. 292 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Ben Yagoda Author, "About...
...Nor is it going out on a limb to say that the perception-reality gap has a negative effect on race relations in this country...
...population was 30 per cent...
...associate professor of English, University of Delaware Consider the following sets of facts...
...Where an accused criminal was black, he was shown in physical custody 38 per cent of the time, compared to 15 per cent of the time for whites...
...One could go on for some time listing such discrepancies...
...The authors get into still deeper trouble when they put forth their solutions to the perception-reality gap...
...As far as gender goes, the overwhelming majority of newspeople either are married to women or are women themselves, and so would be much more inclined to view blacks as the "other" threatening to steal away jobs...
...one survey found that only 20 per cent were unequivocally opposed...
...Take those lily-white Time covers...
...It would strike most journalists worthy of the designation as a good story, and many have done it...
...Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not maintain that level of argument and analysis...
...In reporting former District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry's troubles, for example, it should have been acknowledged that so much attention was being paid to him "because his story was sensational, not because his story offered any basis for generalizing about black mayors...
...In the first task they are moderately successful...
...Over an eight-month period in 1999, for instance, Time magazine ran 30 cover stories on general topics like "Too Much Homework" and "Taking Care of Our Parents...
...The book's best chapter focuses on the news media's coverage of the aff irmarive action debate in the mid-1990s...
...Reviewed by Ben Yagoda Author, "About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made...
...Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki's The Black Image in the White Mind does promise something new...
...And every time a black crime is reported, the media should repeat the "mantra" that the crime rates of employed black and white adults are the same...
...Contributing factors include the journalists' propensity for simplicity and conflict, and the fact that high-visibility politicians—from whom the press consistently takes its cues—were framing the issue in those terms for reasons of their own...
...The truth is a lot more powerful than government panels and pie-in-the-sky wish lists...
...They would have the government and foundations fund panels to study the representation of race in the media...
...2) The FBI estimates that 41 per cent of those arrested for violent crime in 1997 were black...
...Ironically, the authors could have done a lot more good by eschewing the industry analysis and the solutions and expanding their content analysis...
...The authors are prone to oversimplification, and their understanding of the way the news, television, film, and advertising industries work is often unsophisticated...
...In every case, the "prototypical" American(s) depicted on the cover was Caucasian...
...Perhaps most famously, conventional wisdom wrongly has more blacks than whites receiving welfare benefits...
...Similarly, in talking about the lack of news reports on the contexts and causes of crime, the authors write, "The idea of an in-depth report on the upbringing and experiences of even one criminal defendant, let alone on most of them, would strike most journalists as inappropriate...
...In their study of local TV news coverage in Chicago, the authors found that, in defiance of reality, whites were depicted as the victims of crimes more often than blacks...
...In the second they almost completely fail...
...The authors convincingly demonstrate that the press depicted the situation as much more polarized than it actually was...
...Yet the press pounded the divisiveness dram: A sampling discovered that 71 per cent of the whites quoted on the subject in articles and television reports were against affirmative action...
...As an academic discipline, communication studies has made its mark with "content analysis"—a rigorous digestion of the messages and images the media put out—and it is here that this book is strongest...
...These proposals would give utopianism a bad name...
...In addition, the press consistently presented the issue as a zero-sum conflict between blacks and whites even though white women, according to the authors, have been beneficiaries...
...That's plain wrong...
...Entman and Rojecki do not seem to realize how critical a selling tool a magazine cover is, and that even a drop of a few percentage points in newsstand sales can have serious financial consequences...
...Moreover, if a story with a black victim was aired, an average of 105 seconds were devoted to it, compared to 185 seconds if the victim was white...
...None of this is new information, though...
...The authors, professors respectively of communication and journalism, propose to chart with precision and completeness how the media—here including television entertainment programs and television advertising—not only perpetuate but create racial misinformation and stereotypes...
...2a) Respondents to a national survey estimated that 60 per cent of those arrested for violent crimes were black...
...In this case, at least, Entman and Rojecki present a solid explanation of the disconnect...
...1 a) In a survey of white Indianapolis residents, the average estimate of the percentage of African-Americans in the U.S...
...Even when they do appear in ads, blacks are subtly made to disappear: They hardly ever speak to another black character, while whites are shown talking to each other at a 10 times higher rate...
...When a work similar to Entman and Rojecki's came to the attention of Allen Neuharth, the founding editor of USA Today, he decided to do something about media underrepresentation of blacks who weren't athletes, entertainers or defendants...
...That's why when you look at those silly little graphics in USA Today, you will find blacks illustrated in them at a rate equal to or greater than their proportion of the population...
...1) African-Americans represent about 12 per cent of the United States population...
...They also put forth suggestions for changing the regrettable status quo...
...National polls revealed that whites did not consider affirmative action a particularly pressing issue, and in any event were highly ambivalent...
...They further urge that the news media present reflexive commentaries on itself...
...It is wrong, too, about the crime rate among employed persons of both races, which is roughly equal...
...An examinationof television commercials for "luxury/fantasy products" (perfume, cars, credit cards), turned up 385 with all white actors and only six with all black actors...
...It may not have been a profound change, but it was a change, and that is no small thing...
...If Time's target audience is 90 per cent white, it is a regrettable truth that the use of a black model on the cover may cause just such a dip, and it is hard to blame the editors forresisting what would be a laudable step...
...Drawing on their own research and that of a wide array of other scholars, Entman and Rojecki present a great deal of provocative data showing a general tendency to devalue blacks or force them into stock categories...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
