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Child advocacy study says public is misinformed about the nature of crime and minority teens
Tuesday, April 10, 2001
By Rachel Smolkin, Post-Gazette Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- News organizations exaggerate the proportion of minorities and young people who commit crimes, "profoundly" misinforming the public, according to a new study.
"Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News" concludes that if news audiences take crime coverage at face value, they are likely to believe -- falsely -- that most crime is extremely violent and that perpetrators are black, victims are white and young people are dangerous.
The study was commissioned by Building Blocks for Youth, a coalition of child advocacy groups, and was prepared by the Berkeley Media Studies Group and the Justice Policy Institute.
"It is not just that African Americans are over-represented as criminals and under-represented as victims, or that young people are over-represented as criminals, or that violent crime itself is given undue coverage," the study concludes. "It is that all three occur together, combining forces to produce a terribly unfair and inaccurate overall image of crime in America."
Homicide coverage on network news increased a striking 473 percent from 1990 to 1998 while homicides dropped 33 percent, the report found, stressing that minorities, especially blacks, are disproportionately portrayed as perpetrators of crime.
"The news media's routine portrayal of African Americans and people of color as criminals is an outrage," said Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP.
Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, said the study provided "important food for thought. It reflects statistically what many of us have been concerned about."
The study found that public perceptions of crime are inaccurate. Despite a 68 percent decline in homicides committed by youth from 1993 to 1999, 62 percent of the public reported believing that youth crime was rising.
The misperceptions extend to school violence. Seventy-one percent of respondents to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll felt that a school shooting was likely to occur in their community.
Despite a spate of high-profile school killings, students during the 1998-99 school year had less than a one in 2 million chance of being killed in a U.S. school. Sixteen students died last year as a result of school violence, compared with about 100 people who die every year from lightning strikes.
Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, defended the media, saying the widespread coverage of the shooting at Columbine High School helped increase public awareness of warning signs in troubled teen-agers.
"The point that this coverage doesn't present the norm kind of overlooks what the definition of news is," she said. "News is the unusual."
The study found that many whites harbor misperceptions about potential attackers. Twice as many white Americans believe they are more likely to be victimized by a minority than by a white person, but whites actually are three times more likely to be victimized by whites than by minorities.
The report also highlighted disproportionate media coverage of white crime victims, finding that white homicide victims prompted more stories and longer articles than black homicide victims.
In a series of reports issued during the past year, Building Blocks for Youths has documented disparities in the way the justice system treats minorities. One study reported that minority youth are treated more severely than white youth at each stage of the justice system, even when charged with the same offenses.
The latest study notes that "in an environment in which fear of youth crime and actual youth crime are so out of sync, policies affecting young people are bound to be impacted." Since 1992, 47 states have made their juvenile justice systems more punitive by eroding confidentiality protections or making it easier to try juveniles as adults.
The study recommends that media place crime reporting into context, providing data on crime rates and outlining factors that contribute to youth crime. The study also encourages news outlets to balance youth-crime stories with reports about youth accomplishments and urges media to conduct voluntary, periodic audits of news content and share results with audiences.