Title: Stereotyping and the Media - iResearchNet
Headings: Stereotyping and the Media
Stereotyping and the Media
Function Of Social Stereotypes
Examples Of Negative Stereotyping
Effects And Challenges
References:

Content: Television news portrayals of blacks are far more negative, over-representing black perpetrators, under-representing black victims, and over-representing white victims (Dixon & Linz 2000). News stories make associations between blacks and negative issues such as violent crime, drugs, poverty, and welfare by situating these stories alongside noticeable images of blacks (Martindale 1996; Entman & Rojecki 2000). These news stories send powerful messages to audiences that most blacks are violent, criminal, drug-addicted, and on welfare, “and because these images come from the news media, which claim to represent reality and to provide unbiased information about society, Anglos tend to believe the images are true” (Martindale 1996, 21–22). Effects And Challenges
Stereotypes in the media can impact audience opinion. For example, research on the effects of ethnic and racial stereotypes demonstrates that exposure to negative ethnic imagery in the media adversely influences later evaluations of ethnic minorities (Mastro & Tropp 2004). The simple exposure to stereotypical images of poor blacks in the media has led audiences to perceive greater disparity in socio-economic status between blacks and whites (Gandy & Baron 1998), and perceive that blacks are more economically disadvantaged than whites (Armstrong et al. 1992). Although whites’ stereotypes of blacks as poor do not match actual poverty statistics, they do closely resemble racial representations in the news media that feature blacks as poverty-stricken (Peffley et al. 1996).