11124: The Perils Of Pretty White Women.

From CNN…

We’re obsessed when it’s white women in trouble

By Lisa Bloom, Special to CNN

(CNN) -- Our country is obsessed with the perils of attractive young white women, as this week’s trio of high profile crime stories about Amanda Knox, Jodi Arias and the Cleveland kidnapping victims demonstrates. We don’t see breathless coverage of the disproportionately large number of African-American men tried for crimes in our system. We see almost no coverage of missing boys, or missing children of color, or crimes against nonwhites.

This week an African-American man in Mississippi, Willie Manning, was about to be executed, though he was denied access to DNA testing. Manning, convicted of murdering two college students in 1994, maintains his innocence and requested the scientific testing, which has exonerated many convicted murderers, including some on death row.

The Mississippi Supreme Court denied that request and ordered his execution. At the last moment, U.S. Justice Department letters tipped the balance in favor of a reprieve. Few media outlets considered the monumental constitutional issues, or even the dramatic ticking clock toward his execution, worthy of mention.

Isn’t the fact that we still execute Americans without giving them access to DNA testing a stunning, significant story? Yet it got next to no attention.

Instead, in the last week thousands of hours of attention have been devoted to every detail of just three crime stories.

In Phoenix, Arizona, Jodi Arias (whose father is Latino) was convicted Wednesday of first degree murder, after the jury unanimously found that she intentionally and with premeditation killed her former boyfriend, Travis Alexander. The trial was covered live on HLN and followed closely on social media and other television networks. The next phase of the trial is scheduled to begin May 15.

In Cleveland, Ohio, Amanda Berry reportedly screamed for help, a neighbor came to her aid, and she, her 6-year-old daughter, and two women, Gina DeJesus (who is Latina) and Michelle Knight were freed after a decade of captivity. Ariel Castro was charged today with kidnapping and rape.

Amanda Knox, the American college student who was convicted, then acquitted of the murder of her roommate in Italy, has given tearful interviews in connection with her book tour, as an Italian court has reversed again and held that she should stand trial again for the charges.

Each of these cases includes salacious allegations and high-stakes outcomes. The Cleveland victims were reportedly raped and beaten countless times over the years. Amanda Knox is accused of killing her roommate as part of a drug-fueled sex game. Jodi Arias posed nude for photos and had sex with her victim just before she murdered him.

While each of these crime stories is worthy of news coverage—especially the Cleveland story, which involved serious questions of alleged law enforcement lapses—many others are equally worthy yet receive little or no attention, even as every detail of the high-profile stories is pored over and rehashed.

Missing children websites carry pictures of many African-American and Latino kids who have disappeared, and photos of little boys who have vanished. News outlets rarely feature their stories. Their families grieve their absence and yearn for media coverage that could help find their children and energize law enforcement.

And the biggest American crime story of all receives the least mention: that we now incarcerate more of our own people than any other country on earth, or in human history, and that minority males are disproportionately policed, arrested and convicted, and sentenced to harsher sentences. African-American juveniles are six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.

In Washington, three out of every four black men can expect some time behind bars in their lifetimes. In Baltimore and Chicago, the majority of young black men are currently under the control of the criminal justice system. In sheer numbers, more African-Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved at the time of the Civil War. Our disastrous war on drugs has devastated inner-city communities, and led to large numbers of African-Americans being legally barred from voting, jury duty, public housing, food stamps, student loans, and many other civic rights and benefits, often for life.

We cannot fix these problems if we are unaware of them. We cannot get a groundswell for reform if we are distracted by titillating outlier stories.

The media choose which stories to make high profile, driven by public interest in those stories. We cannot call ourselves a nation of equals until we pay equal attention to all those in our criminal justice system whose stories merit our attention, regardless of their race or gender.

7836: Blacks Invisible In Mainstream Media…?

Excerpted from The Hinterland Gazette…

The fallout from the firing of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod and the one-year anniversary of the controversial arrest of African American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have put race back in the news of late. These high-profile stories raise a larger question: to what degree does the press cover news about the state of black America generally?

In the last year, African Americans as a group generated relatively little attention in the mainstream press—and what coverage there was focused more on specific events instead of on broader issues about race, according to a Pew Research Center study that investigated media coverage of African Americans during the first year of the Obama presidency.

The report examined more than 67,000 mainstream news stories from February 2009 through February 2010 and found that just 643 of those stories (1.9% of the newshole studied) related in a significant way to African Americans in the U.S. While relatively small, this was more coverage than was given to Hispanics (1.3%) and Asian Americans (.2%) in the same time frame.

The biggest story involving African Americans in the time period under study was the Gates incident. That story accounted for nearly four times more African American coverage than did either of the two biggest national “issue” stories—the economy and health care.

The nation’s first black president was the second-biggest story in the coverage explicitly related to African Americans in the last year. In all, nearly 18% of coverage of African Americans came through attention to the Obama Administration.

Among the key findings: Nearly a third of the coverage of Africans Americans was related in some way to President Obama. Obama made himself a central player in the Gates incident when, at a presidential press conference, he described the arrest as “stupid.” Soon thereafter the president hosted a “beer summit” at the White House with his friend Gates and the arresting officer in an effort to smooth things over.

Coverage of Obama’s involvement in the Gates controversy combined with coverage of the Obama Administration more generally accounted for almost 30% of all African American coverage during the year studied. About 9% the coverage of the Obama presidency had a substantial racial element to it.

Most of that coverage, too, was tied to specific incidents rather than broader issues, in particular Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “You Lie!” during a Presidential speech and Senator Harry Reid’s apology for comments he made about Obama’s skin color. In order to be coded as having a racial angle, at least 25% of the content of a story must deal with the topic of race or with a specific racial group. Black newsmakers drove the coverage of African Americans.

The press coverage that did emerge in the time frame studied tended to be a reaction to events involving black newsmakers rather than to issues relating to African Americans more generally. The arrest of Gates, the Obama presidency, the death of Michael Jackson and the attempted Northwest Airlines terrorist attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab accounted for nearly half (46%) of all coverage that had a substantial mention of African Americans during this time period.

Cable, talk shows mentioned African Americans most. The media sectors studied differed in the degree to which they focused on African Americans in their coverage over the course of the year and in the angles they pursued. Cable TV and talk radio came in at the top, with 2.5% and 2.4%, respectively, of time studied on their programs containing significant mention of African Americans. The bulk of this time was spent assessing political implications of actions by or to black figures. African American press focused more on issues than incidents.

A separate analysis of three African American newspapers reveals a very different approach to the coverage of the Gates incident. While the mainstream media largely assessed political implications for President Obama, the commentary in the black press considered the arrest itself and the broader question of race relations in the U.S.

These are some of the findings of a study that examined coverage of African Americans in the press from February 16, 2009, through February 15, 2010, in different mainstream media outlets including newspapers, cable and network television, radio and news websites.

The study also included a separate analysis of how the Gates controversy was treated in the three highest circulation African American newspapers in the country—The New York Amsterdam News, The Afro-American and the Philadelphia Tribune. This study was designed and produced by jointly by The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Social and Demographic Trends Project. The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan and nonpolitical fact tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Essay 4660

From The Chicago Tribune…

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A FALSE TALE OF 2 DISASTERS

Race as a burning issue

In media coverage of wildfires and Katrina, bias glows under surface

By Anthony Stanford

The wildfires that raged through Southern California, taking lives, burning homes and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, were this country’s most devastating natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina, another reminder that we mortals are at nature’s mercy. The victims, like those of Katrina, will suffer the firestorm’s effects for years.

But based on the media coverage of the two tragedies, the similarities end there.

Following their biased and racially divisive reporting on Katrina, the national media took it upon themselves to soothe America's collective psyche.

Perhaps some reporting was a good-faith effort to illustrate improvements in preparedness, coordination and leadership since Katrina. But amid the constant emphasis on order and humanity’s softer side, it’s hard not to sense that race and class biases played a role in the media’s portrayal.

The implication was that the socioeconomic standing of the California wildfire victims made the disaster response and evacuation effort easier. But that ignores how different the two disasters were.

Victims of the fires were distinguished in every possible way from Katrina’s victims. The media enthusiastically reported that unprecedented cooperation and coordination existed at every level of California’s disaster effort. Information about problems typically associated with a large-scale evacuation, such as food and water shortages, transportation headaches and unruly evacuees, was noticeably scant.

Some media outlets made direct comparisons with Katrina regarding crime. Besides reporting that an arsonist may have started some fires and a few non-specific mentions of “spotty looting,” the media rarely mentioned the ugly side of human nature.

Whereas media coverage of Katrina shocked America’s heartland with its exhaustive examination of human desperation, network news stations led their wildfires coverage with images of President Bush, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and federal and local officials working in concert to save American lives and property. Everyone on the Terminator’s team was in lock step. There were no media reports of defectors or inept bureaucrats, no accounts of finger-pointing for bungled tasks.

If Katrina coverage was defined by the almost constant harping on the negative, which presented an unreal portrait, the California coverage was marked by the almost complete absence of anything negative. That, too, presented an unreal portrait.

San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium would come to represent everything the New Orleans Superdome had not, ignoring the fact that, unlike the Superdome, Qualcomm had been prepared for the evacuees and staffed by trained professionals.

In television interviews, evacuees described the stadium as a sanctuary. Disaster victims came off like actors in a vignette, expressing appreciation for all that had been done for them. Broadcast after broadcast showed evacuees in an almost festive mood, with an abundance of food and water. There was no need for a lock-and-load order at Qualcomm Stadium.

Even the problem that received such intense media attention during the Gulf Coast crisis was easily resolved. “What to do with the pets?” Well, it turns out that in sunny Southern California, there is a home for every pet.

California’s convicts also got in on the Golden State’s Good Neighbor Fest when their help was requested to battle the inferno. This is in sharp contrast with Gulf Coast inmates, who were described as law enforcement’s top concern.

Night after night during Katrina, outraged viewers watched in horror as the networks aired lurid reports, true or not, of criminals roaming the landscape raping and pillaging in the storm’s aftermath. Compare this with one San Diego news report that described the convicts this way: “They may have stolen cars, used drugs or forged checks, but when California is burning, they fight fires.”

Airing side-by-side images of Katrina victims and those in California sent warped messages about then and now, right and wrong, order and chaos. And add to that the language used.

When Katrina’s victims fled the storm’s rage, the media described them as refugees. Two years later, surreal images of Californians motoring to refuge did not prompt negative labeling: The people were instead, rightly, referred to as disaster victims.

Instead of using the recent successes in California to illustrate improvements in governmental response and coordination, Bush administration officials got in on the spin, reaching back to criticize Louisiana’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

To be fair, New Orleans and Louisiana officials faced much greater challenges. And when they held news conferences, they had to think on their feet while sometimes standing in several feet of water.

Two years after the disaster, the temptation to point fingers remains hard to resist. But even harder for administration officials, it seems, is keeping the promises it made to America’s Gulf Coast victims.

Those who suffered at the hands of Katrina were done a disservice by the media coverage of the storm and the governmental response to it. Why they paid such a price, and continue to pay such a high price, is a question even more troubling given the events in California.

[Anthony Stanford is a Chicago-area writer and contributor to Chicago Public Radio.]