News Media and Crime
In 2003, Serafín Méndez-Méndez and Diane Alverio of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists reported the following findings:
- Latino-related stories make up less than 1% of all the stories that appear on network newscasts, even though Latinos make up more than 13% of the U.S. population.
- Crime, terrorism, poverty and welfare, and illegal immigration accounted for 66% of all network stories about Latinos in 2001.
- The arrest of suspected terrorist Jose Padilla, for allegedly plotting to detonate a "dirty bomb", occupied a central role in the coverage of Latinos in 2002, with 21 network stories or 18% of all stories that aired on Latinos.
- "The number of Latino-related crime and youth gang stories in 2002 was grossly excessive when compared to statistics on crimes involving Latinos."
- "Illegal immigration continues to be an important focus of network news coverage of Latinos."
EthnicMajority.com, a minority empowerment organization, states: "Who we see, hear, and read on television, radio, newspapers, and in movies has a great deal of influence on shaping the attitudes of all Americans. How African, Hispanic (Latino), and Asian Americans are portrayed in these mediums often stereotypes and reinforces negative images of each ethnic group."
Progressive media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) points out that in contrast to the media's over-representation of minorities as criminals and drug users is their under representation as experts and analysts. FAIR's studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s documented that 92% of Nightline's U.S. guests were white, 90% of the NewsHour's guests were white, and 26 out of 27 repeat commentators on National Public Radio over a four-month period were white.
Read more about this topic: Stereotypes Of Hispanic And Latino Americans
Famous quotes containing the words news, media and/or crime:
“I don’t have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don’t think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that’s the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing.”
—David R. Gergen (b. 1942)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that specieas alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)