Title: Media Portrayals and Black Male Outcomes | The Opportunity Agenda
Headings: Media Portrayals and Black Male Outcomes
Media Portrayals and Black Male Outcomes
Distorted patterns of portrayal
Underrepresentation in media portrayals
Negative associations exaggerated
Positive associations limited
The “problem” frame
Missing stories
Causal link between media and public attitudes
Impacts on thinking of black males themselves
Documentations of bias — conscious and unconscious — against black males
Unconscious patterns
Automatic responses
Hostility
General negative evaluation
African Americans’ own implicit biases
Conscious patterns
Practical consequences in lives of black males
Why media patterns are distorted
Bias among producers of media
Audience preferences
Incorrect assumptions about what audiences want
Lack of input from African Americans
Political motivations to traffic in stereotypes
Mistaken understandings

Content: Entman & Rojecki, 2000, p. 82)
African Americans are disproportionately represented in news stories about poverty, and these stories tend to paint a picture that is particularly likely to reinforce stereotypes and make it hard to identify with black males. For example, low-income blacks in news stories are more likely to live in slums or urban areas, as opposed to rural areas, than real-world averages would suggest; more likely be entirely unemployed and “idle” (as opposed to working); and so forth. The idle black male on the street corner is not the “true face” of poverty in America, but he is the dominant one in media portrayal. ( Clawson & Trice, 2000, updated and confirmed in Clawson et al., 2007)
In the entertainment media as well, these and other associations continue to be systematically perpetuated. Analysts have gone into great detail about the way in which negative images of black males continue to be used for entertainment purposes, whether through traditional imagery of black inferiority (Bogle, 2003) or by using black male characters disproportionately to represent both the victims and perpetrators of violence. For example, one study examined music video violence statistically, for its impacts on adolescents: Compared with United States demographics, blacks were overrepresented as aggressors and victims, whereas whites were underrepresented.