Muslims Overrepresented In Crime News, UIUC Study Reports
Using media archives from the University of California at Los Angeles from 2008 to 2012, University of Illinois professor Travis Dixon found that breaking news on cable and national network news often disproportionately broadcast stories that portrayed terrorists as Muslim and immigrants accused of crimes as Latino, but also underrepresented African-Americans as both victims and perpetrators of crime.
“The reality is that the news doesn’t always give us this picture of the way the world should be or is,” he says. “Talk about crime in a way that is accurate. You can’t make those determinations as a citizenry unless you have good information.”
Among his findings were that 81 percent of terrorists in news reports were Muslim, compared to 6 percent in FBI reports, and 97 percent of immigrants in the country illegally accused of crimes were Latino. However, about 60 percent of undocumented immigrants are Latino, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
African-Americans were significantly underrepresented in televised news reports as perpetrators and crime victims. African- Americans were 48 percent of victims in national crime reports compared to 22 percent of victims in news accounts. While 39 percent of perpetrators arrested between 2008 and 2012 were African-American, they were 19 percent of offenders in TV news. Those findings contradict previous research, even some of Dixon’s own. He says that one possible explanation is that analysis indicates that African-Americans are also underrepresented on television news in other ways, such as among experts or spokespeople.
As an African-American growing up as a Star Trek geek, Dixon says he was very conscious of the role that societal pre-conceptions played in his everyday life. “People made a lot of different assumptions about me. I realized early on that those reactions … sort of crystallized how powerful the media was,” he says. Those early experiences, he says, helped drive his interest to determine how different races were represented in news reports. “I wasn’t a criminal, I wasn’t an athlete, I wasn’t unintelligent,” he says. “As a black man there are certain kinds of assumptions that exist that we are always trying to navigate and it’s part of our experience.”
He says that these skewed representations are roadblocks to progress. “What it does from a policy position is that it obscures our ability to devise solutions to problems. If we think that all of the criminals are black or all the victims are white, we are not able to talk about victims in a broad way that addresses it for all the communities involved.”
Source: WUIS
