The Impact of racial bias in the media related to crime and its consequences 

In 1989, five innocent young men went to prison and stayed between 6 to 13 years paying for a crime they did not commit. The one thing they had in common? Their race. Race is a social concept, created to control and oppress certain groups of people (Routledge, 2013). Many things in society reinforce this hierarchy and the media is definitely one of them. According to Colburn and Melander, most of us only have contact with crime through the media,  shaping in this way our perceptions of what crime is and who the criminals are (Colburn and Melander, 2018). 

In the case mentioned above, known as the Central Park Five, the media played a crucial role in their wrongful convictions by their “rush to judgement and assuming the children’s guilt” (Eteng Ettan, 2019) proving that “biased media representation significantly and continuously contributes to Black criminalization, incarceration and murder.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://innocenceproject.org/central-park-five-netflix-miniseries-announces-cast/

The effects of such bias in the media have real-life consequences on the lives of black males. According to Leigh Donaldson, “not only does the media’s reluctance to provide more balanced perspectives of our African-American male population worsen cultural division among all people, it enables judges to hand out harsher sentences, companies to deny jobs, banks to decline loans and the police to shoot indiscriminately.” (The Guardian, Leigh Donaldson). 

I spoke to African-Brazilian UN correspondent, social activist and permanent member of the Council of Civil society Luis Alvez de Lima, 48, who mentioned that in the movie “The Birth Of a Nation” (1915), “The KKK is portrayed as a heroic force, necessary to preserve American values, protect white women from black men as portrayed as animals and rapists.” This fear is reinforced by the media even today, thus using sexualized images to maintain whites on top of the hierarchical chain. He said: “what Chimamanda calls ‘Single History,’  story as a source of stereotypes: ‘show a people as one thing, as just one thing, over and over again, and that will be what they will become’.” 

Kim Morgan, Newborn Care Specialist and Parent Educator, is the mother of two black boys aged 11 and 15 years old, and told me that she fears everyday for her boys. She said, “ I chose to enroll them specifically in a uniform school so they’ll be easily identified and treated as a child, heaven forbids they have to come in encounter with the police.” Kim says she hopes for the day her children” can walk into a store and they’re not watched upon like they’re about to steal something or perceived as a threat.”

Kim is not wrong to fear the police, discourses surrounding race maintain an unequal system of power by reinforcing negative attributes for black people and making white people think they can predict behavior using this information. An example of this is the case of Tamir Rice, a twelve year-old boy who was shot and killed by the Cleveland police. The boy was holding a toy gun at a playground when an onlooker called the police to say that there was a person with a gun walking around the recreation center (NewsWeek, Zola Ray). Clearly, in this case, the biased media narrative about black boys shaped this episode. Much more so than their white counterparts, black teenagers are portrayed as dangerous adults by the media. Not coincidentally, the “concerned citizen” who saw Tamir Rice in the playground with a toy-gun immediately implied that this was a dangerous situation and called the cops. The police officers, also influenced by biased media accounts, did not think twice to fire and kill the child. 

Another consequence of the media biased in reporting crime is the disparity in wrongful convictions between white and black males. Equal Justice researches shows that “Innocent Black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people,” (Wrongful Convictions, 2022). 

 Luis Alvez adds that the consequences of the racial disparities in the USA criminal justice system does not affect only the black men, but his whole family. He mentions that 1 in 50 children in the US have fathers in jails, and the restriction of access to housing policies and financing, among others, come from stereotyping created by the media. Another exemple to these effects are the racial disparities in drug arrests and sentences. In 2016

“The risk of incarceration in the federal system for someone who uses drugs on a monthly basis and is black is more than seven times that of their white counterpart,” said Luis.

We must change this narrative and hold the news and journalists accountable. There are organizations in New York that are trying to raise awareness among journalists, teach them about racial bias, and even introduce more journalists of color to the field. Luis Alves adds that “Another point is to strengthen small channels that deal with matters of interest to minority groups. This means exchanges of experiences, economic support through project financing, scholarship.” The NAACP, Campaign Zero, and Mije are some of them. There must be a change to the racist discourse in American media which identifies black men as incorrigible criminals and contributes to their early deaths.