After tracking the crime sections of news cast I was not surprised. It really did not seem to be anything strange about the way the stories were being displayed. I saw no correlation between the anchor of a crime story and the offender. I also saw no correlation between the race of an victim to the race of the offender. Most of the time the race of the victims were not obvious.
The main things that I noticed were that most crimes that were being seen on the newscast were done by people who were not white. I don't know if this says that white people do not commit crimes but it does seem to subtly give that impression. This seems makes me wonder why it seemed that most criminals were not white. I know that people do not want to see people that are similar to them being portrayed in a negative light and if the majority of a news audience is a certain race then maybe they are less likely to cover those stories in their newscasts. If so, this is not right but it would help in making the audience favor their news over other news channels.
Do minorities tend to do more crimes than whites? Are the only news worthy crimes being done by minorities? These are questions that need to be answered in order to figure out if the news fair and balanced. If this is not what statistics show about crimes in a certain area then more accuracy need to be displayed in the news. Fair and balanced news goes beyond whether or not both sides of a story are being covered. It needs to illustrate all standpoints of society. If their is proof on whether a certain race does more crimes than the other then that can be displayed in the news, if not then whatever the crime trend is should be reflected in the news.
1 comment:
I agree in what you initially saw. After taking notice of the majority of crime portrayed on the news and how much more crime is reflected through minorities rather than whites, I carried this reminder as I watched other clips and reality TV. I wanted to see if there was any correlation with the analysis through other programs.
I found that there were. I turned the channel to the TV show, “Cops.” Nine out of the 10 times, it was a minority creating crime or causing havoc upon the neighborhood peace. I watched a full episode and though there were cops who were minorities ( a few black policemen) almost every time it was a minority that was being arrested. Again, it makes you wonder what is entirely reality and fictional on how each episode is being “spun” every week.
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