African Americans and Media Bias

Introduction

Racial biases of African Americans in the media is something of intense study in the 21st century. It is easy to feel as if we are over the racial divide at times, but recently racial tensions have been brewing. The idea that implicit racism is systemic and in media may seem surprising to some, but for others it has always been there. The thesis of this paper is that the media disproportionately reports on African American crime thus supplanting a bias that has negative effects on the target of the bias. First, the bias is likely caused by the unequal reporting of black crime (Dixon 2000) in the news. Secondly, this bias causes unconscious biases that come out when time sensitive processes are involved, like not getting that referral to a specialist in a busy doctor’s office you need (Stepanikova 2012). Or perhaps just being mistaken as being armed in the street (Correll 2001).

This paper proposes that there is a media bias against blacks and that bias is likely causing negative results. The cost of this bias on the victim and the society at large is not cheap, and hopefully bringing it to more of a public light, it can be solved. It is not proposed that the media or other institutions in this paper are actively racist, although it is possibly unconsciously racist, it is proposed that the media is just covering crime in a majorly African American centric narrative.

The material on media bias on minorities, especially African Americans is quite extensive and conclusive. The scope of this paper is to demonstrate how the bias is overblown by the media, which propagates into society, and how the perception of this slanted norm turns into behavior among the populace (Sparkman 2017). The effects of unfair bias are also fairly well researched, unbalanced biased news typically lead to a feeling of alienation and hinders integration (Tsfati 2007).

To set this paper up, let’s look at types of biases. Biases are a way to triage the world quickly. It is much easier to divide the world into a small number of categories and throw everything into those categories than it is to asses each item and place it into a more defined category. We must consider the biases at work here. The first bias is availability bias. This bias is the result of assessing a situation based off what information you most recently had contact with. For example, if there was a news article about a 40-car pileup, you might opt to take the train to work, even though this is not a choice made from the actual stats about safety. This fits into this paper because when African Americans are unequally represented in the media, this bias is more available to everyone, thus it populates more into the public mind at large. To avoid this bias, we must make sure our statements map onto the reality and consider all relevant points, not just the most recent trend we have seen.

The next bias that is at work is the representation bias. This bias occurs when a person associates a person as like a group they share some trait with. If a person is part of group we have an internal image of, we associate them with the group and make assumptions about that person’s character. For instance, associating all old women with being a grandmother is a bias, because not all old women are grandmothers. For this study, associating a black person as being the “violent criminal” because black people are criminals, is a bias. These biases lead to a confirmation bias, interpreting information as a confirmation of that bias.

Body

The first premise is that the media overrepresents blacks as criminals. And to even get this paper off the ground we need unmistakable evidence of the media over representing African Americans as criminals. This article showed how Californian news overrepresented Latinos and African American males as perpetrators of crimes and underrepresented their roles as police (Dixion 2000). The study randomly selected news blocks that aired in California and had coders analyze the representation of whites, Latinos, and blacks. Whites, as hypothesized, were overrepresented as defenders of crime, I.E. police officers. The study compared the employment numbers of the local police to the reported “defenders of crime” in the media. The study coded for violent crimes such as arson, murder, robbery. The study found that indeed these minority groups were overrepresented as perpetrators in news when compared to arrest rates. Some of the limiting factors of this study was that news could follow celebrities that were a part of a specific minority, so that minority groups that had higher percentages of celebrities that were arrested at the time were at a higher chance of being reported on. Also using arrest rates is limiting in that it is not the actual number of crimes committed, some people escape before being arrested. This leads to more reporting and lower arrest rate to compare to.

An argument that arises here is that this does not demonstrate systemic media bias. This study examines 2 other studies that examined other cities. Two studies further examined in this study are (Turk 1989) which examined Albuquerque and San Antonio newspapers and (Entman 1994) which examined Chicago papers. Both studies show comparable results of over representing African Americans as criminals (Dixon 2000). It is not proposed the media is actively and consciously biased against black Americans, the theory proposed is that they are unconsciously making decisions to further other goals (ratings Etc.) as opposed to being entirely fair.

Also, we must address the fact that the rate of violent crimes for African Americans is higher than whites, however this can be explained by relative poverty (not covered in this paper). But the fact of the matter is that the media is still overrepresenting black crime, which enflames the bias that blacks are largely criminals and exacerbates biases against blacks.

What can this unfair reporting do to the targets of the biased reporting? This study looks at how negative media coverage of Arabs in Israel furthered the alienation of the Arabs (minority group) (Tsfati 2007). The thesis is exactly that: how the perception of biased media causes feelings of alienation, and the study found support for this thesis. The population was nearly 1000 random Arab households in Israel. The study asked questions that had a scale of strongly disagree to strongly agree. The questions were about the person’s perception of how the media was covering the Israeli Arabs and their feelings of alienation. The model explains 48.5% of the variance in the perceived image of Arabs, 57.9% of the variance in alienation, this is statistically significant. The article states that negative media coverage reinforces the minority’s feeling that they don’t belong in the society they are living in. Also, the media is seen as the majority opinion, so negative attitudes represented in the media may feel as if society has a negative view towards the minorities. This article suggests that for integration purposes, minority groups should receive fair media access and not feel ostracized or attacked in the media. The study also generalizes from other studies that this kind feeling of being attacked by the majority raises support for illegal protest, and thus have implications for integration.

There are some limitations here in application, showing the Israeli bias towards Palestinian people is obviously not a 1:1 comparison to black bias in American media. This study is more demonstrative of how media can influence negative perceptions when it is perceived as being unfair — which, statistically speaking American media is unfair towards blacks (Dixon 2000). Thus, it would appear that the effects of alienation are most certainly felt among blacks in America.

One example of what unconscious bias can do to the perceptions of minorities is shown is a 2001 study. A group of undergraduates participated in a study where they were instructed to press a button to “shoot” armed targets and to press another button to not shoot unarmed targets. The participants were instructed to respond with a button within 850 milliseconds. The study found that the participants decided to shoot armed African American targets (images) faster than armed white targets (Joshua Correll 2001). White unarmed targets were decided by the participants to be unarmed faster than black unarmed targets. The study proposes that when a schema exists, the schema here is the idea that blacks are more aggressive than whites, it affects the decision to shoot or not shoot. For instance, when the shooter notices that the target is black, the schema is unconsciously rendered in the shooter’s mind, and then less evidence is needed for the shooter to “confirm” this schema and shoot.

With this kind of bias pervading college students, it would seem unlikely to say that this bias is not carried among officers. This not only has implications for police officers, but the fact that the schema is there in the first place implies that it is unconsciously carried and considered in most everyone. A counter to this point is that the schemas would not be considered if the participants had more time to respond, that the schemas are only biasing black people because it is a quick life or death decision that is not applicable to other scenarios. Which, we do see evidence in this in our next study (Stepanikova 2012). However, it remains that the bias is alive and well when it comes to this life and death scenario, and this is one of the biggest problems in media over representing black violence, it likely contributes to the shooting of African Americans.

In another study (Stepanikova 2012) we can see this implicit bias come to the light with another time sensitive activity. This study looked at the quality of healthcare among race. It found that white patients received much higher referrals to specialists when compared to blacks:

“Building on van Ryn and Fu (2003) and Kposowa and Tsunokai (2002), I argue that time pressure can drive racial-ethnic inequalities by making it more likely that racial-ethnic biases will affect medical decision making. This is because time pressure is one notable example of a situation that depletes the supply of free cognitive resources. Under time pressure and in other stressful situations, individuals tend to resort to stereotypes that serve as heuristics and free up the much needed cognitive energy (Allport 1954; Macrae, Milne, and Bodenhausen 1994)” (Stepanikova 2012).

This is the kind of bias not thought about when the word “racism” comes to mind. These doctors are not consciously racist, they are pushed to extreme time crunches and start using heuristics to work faster, and that is where the bias comes in. There is not really a significant difference when there is no time crunch, but when it is added in we see a bias. In a time sensitive environment, these physicians offered referrals to 94% of the whites but only 48% of the blacks. (Stepanikova 2012)

It can be pointed out that referral does not actually indicate higher quality care. This is only true to the extent in which we know if the referral was justified. In these cases, they were cardiovascular referrals, and considering how non-whites have lower cardiovascular health (Stepanikova 2012) it is reasonable to say that the whites were likely offered more care than needed and the blacks were likely offered less care than needed. It is also not to be assumed these physicians are racist, because there are hardly grounds for culpability when these are unconscious actions. More so, these physicians are victims themselves in having a schema supplanted into them that they are likely not aware. The biases at work here are that blacks are poor and can’t afford higher quality healthcare than whites. It is shown in this recent study that blacks are largely overrepresented as poor in the media (Dixon 2017). It makes sense that with this bias in mind, you would not recommend a black person to a more expensive doctor.

To show that possessing this bias can influence behavior, we need to look at how norms affect behavior. In a recent study, when something is seen as being the norm, then behavior is altered to respond to that (Sparkman 2017). In the study two of the things that the participants were informed of was the dynamic norm was people are conserving water more and people are eating less meat. The questions were scored as 1 being low and 7 being high. The participants were also asked questions about norms such as reducing meat consumption, such as: “how hard do you think people try to eat less meat? Do you think people will make more of an effort in the future?” The results are clear, the study was able to double the number of people who went meatless for lunch, and decreased laundry loads by 30% over 3 weeks. This illustrates how behavior and the perception of the norm work.

This puts to work how these biases are put to behavior, if you are hearing from the media that most blacks are poor, criminal and violent, then it is obvious how you might respond differently in dealing with a violent criminal as opposed to a random stranger.

In describing how this bias is carried, we must understand priming, or the process of being exposed to a stimulus that will later affect the way you respond to stimulus. In (Dixion 2007) it is explained:

“We believe that these effects are driven by the priming of the Black criminal stereotype (Bargh et al., 1996; Henderson-King & Nisbett, 1996; Hewstone, 1990; Higgins, 2000; Pettigrew, 1979). Higgins (2000), Fiske and Taylor (1991), and Devine (1989) suggest that frequent activation of a stereotype might lead to chronic activation over time (e.g., automatic use of the stereotype). It follows then that multiple exposure to Black criminals in the news leads to repeated cognitive activation of the stereotype which in turn strengthens its use in perceptions of race and crime over time.”

This presents a model that explains how repeated negative news reports can supplant a bias and reinforce both representative bias and availability bias. With this information we can see how biases are created with unequal media reporting, placed into the heads of the viewers, and changes their behaviors based on this inaccurate version of the perceived norm. This also alienates the victim of this bias. The narrative of the “criminal black man” seems to be seeping from the media to perceptions to actions.

Conclusions

The thesis of this paper is that African Americans are overrepresented in the media, thus inflating the bias held by society, and the result is that black are victims of implicit bias that negatively affects the healthcare they receive (Stepanikova 2012), puts them in danger of due to the violent stigma (Correll 2001), and ultimately imposes a feeling of alienation on them (Tsfati 2007).

The intended audience is anyone who is skeptical of current biases happening right now on the topic of race. We are still a long way off from living in a completely racially just world. It is a time for skeptics to remain vigilant of the race game some are still playing, implicitly or otherwise, especially since today we are moving towards a more sterile public language (not many people are openly racist today). Ethical outrages should be numerous in the medical world. If there was ever a system that should put health and safety above all and to all, regardless of any factor, it should be health care. The media should also feel the rational appeal to accurate reporting and an ethical appeal to not inflating problems.

Future studies should try to quantify the extent to which the media is creating these overblown racist stereotypes. How much of these biases are from the media strictly?

We must want to move towards a less racist society and therefore I am appealing to the hard facts of the case: blacks are still overrepresented in the media as criminal, poor, and violent, still receive worse healthcare, still are represented in the media as being more violent than whites and are alienated as a result. Recognizing and acknowledging this bias and talking openly and honestly about it is the only way to start a conversation and start a change.

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Originally published at brandondot.wordpress.com on April 25, 2018.