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: Tucker, 2007, p. 69)
More subtly, as Entman and Rojecki (2000) point out, even in the cases when blacks appear in the media as sympathetic and competent figures, they tend not to be “relatable” figures with whom the audience is asked to truly identify. They may not have names (black crime victims are often unnamed, as opposed to their white counterparts who are named); they may lack visible family lives (there are many fewer competent and successful black male fiction characters, compared with white characters); and so forth. In the world as portrayed by the media, life is lived primarily by white (or other non-black) people, with black males, more or less sympathetic, in the background. ( See also Bogle, 2003.) Negative associations exaggerated
While many aspects of black males’ real lived experience tend to be missing from the collective media portrayal, some aspects are very much present, and are, in fact, exaggerated. Perhaps the most-discussed pattern is the association between black males and criminality, particularly in television news — where they are not only likely to appear as criminals, but likely to be shown in ways that make them seem particularly threatening (compared with white criminals, for instance). Blacks are overrepresented as perpetrators of violent crime when news coverage is compared with arrest rates [but are underrepresented in the more sympathetic roles of victim, law enforcer]. ( Entman & Gross, 2008, p. 98, citing Travis L. Dixon & Daniel Linz, 2000)
… [in a small sample of local Chicago TV news from 1993-1994] stories about Blacks were four times more likely to include mug shots [than stories about Whites accused of crimes]. (