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/* ---------- "Reporting Ethnoviolence " ---------- */

>From Z Magazine.  E-mail to <z-info@igc.apc.org> for more information.

@TITLE GENERIC = Media Watch

@TITLE = Reporting Ethnoviolence

@TITLE SUMMARY = Newspaper treatment of race and ethnic conflict

@AUTHOR BYLINE = By Howard J. Ehrlich

@OPENING PAR = There were four of us at the Baltimore-based National
Institute Against Prejudice and Violence who routinely handled press
inquiries. Over the past seven years, before the Institute closed,
we provided interviews and information to most of the major print
and electronic news media in the United States. My media contact log
indicates that I have spoken to over 200 reporters. My guess is that
only a few had any serious knowledge of race relations<197>or any
form of intergroup relations. My associates share my estimate.

We had another source of information not easily accessible to most
people. For five years, the Institute's press clipping service sent
us about 100-150 clips a week which they drew from close to 500 newspapers
and news magazines. They all told stories about conflict and ethnoviolence.
The clips make transparent the operation of the American newspaper.

Newspapers are the major source of news about racial, religious, and
ethnic group relations in the cities. The daily newspaper reaches
an estimated 113 million readers. Based on a nationwide poll of over
2,000 people, Michael J. Robinson and Andrew Kohut concluded, in their
<MI>Public Opinion Quarterly<D> article, that the majority of Americans
believe <169>most of what it hears, sees, or reads in the nation's
press.<170> Television is a less useful way of conveying news. There
have been 15 studies of news learning that show that newspaper readers
are more informed than TV viewers. Both of these facts are alarming.


	There are many people in the news media who believe that all they
must do is master the form. You don't need to have any special knowledge
about your subject, you just need to know how to <169>research<170>
the story and then how to present it. When I suggested in an op-ed
piece that there really is a body of social science knowledge about
prejudice and intergroup conflict that reporters should learn, the
op-ed page editor wrote me a personal note in which he called my suggestion
<169>intellectually arrogant.<170>

For most newspaper writers, research means talking to as many
<169>experts<170>
and other people as their deadline permits. Typically, the story form
becomes an interrelated set of paragraphs which are basically quotes.
When the quotes are drawn from people with differing opinions or perspectives,
the story takes on the appearance of <169>objectivity.<170>

These quotes, by the way, are important data. First, most of what
a source person tells a reporter is not printed. Second, what is printed
is used to legitimate the story being composed by the reporter or
news organization. This selective display of the source's <169>inkbites<170>
are framed by special reference to the source's credibility. The frame
takes the form of pointing to their expert status and organizational
affiliation. It is the source's status that provides the legitimacy
to the story. With a skilled journalist, the story that emerges often
appears to be constructed by the experts<197>virtually a story that
tells itself. In fact, the writer/editor have fabricated the story
through their selective choice of sources and their skillful use of
quotes. While much derision has been directed at the brevity of television
<169>soundbites,<170> the newspaper equivalents may be worse. Martin
Plissner, political director of CBS News, writes that <169>the average
inkbite in one day's political stories in [The <MI>New York Times<D>
and the<MI> Washington Post<D>]<193> was about 15 words<197>a six-second
soundbite if you read them aloud<170> (<MI>Washington Post<D>, <MI>
National Weekly Edition<D>, March 27-April 2, 1989).

For the working journalist, special knowledge or training about subjects
they are writing on is seen as irrelevant. For example, when one of
my associates asked the assistant city editor of the <MI>Miami Herald<D>
whether the reporters who were regularly assigned stories about minority
group conflict had any special training, he replied: <169>No. They
are not there to resolve conflicts; they are journalists.<170> In
calls to 14 major newspapers, we found only two instances where reporters
had received any special training. In answer to our query, several
did indicate that they were Black or Hispanic and thus, presumably,
not in need of any further training.

Probably the most knowledgeable writers on any newspaper are those
who write about sports. That's their beat and they work on it year
after year. Science is often another well-defined beat; most major
papers have a science writer. In fact, major papers have a slew of
specialized writers in music, film, cooking, business, politics, and
even local gossip.

Send out a reporter who knows nothing about intergroup relations and
the results are often disastrous. One reporter, writing in the Baltimore<MI>
Sun<D>, made four errors in the lead paragraph of a story about race
relations. Among other things, he confused the distinction between
prejudice and discrimination. This is the metaphorical equivalent
of confusing Iodine with its isotope, Iodine 131. A second reporter
from the same paper was shocked to hear from us that prejudice was
not instinctive. She was so disbelieving that she argued with me and
the Institute's executive director over the assertion that <169>prejudice
is learned.<170> In writing her feature, the reporter treated the
statement in her story as if it were an idiosyncratic personal opinion
of the director.

In an extraordinary piece on <169>bias crime<170> (May 29, 1990),
Daniel Goleman, <MI>New York Times<D> science writer, contradicted
the statements of six experts he interviewed on the growth of bias
crimes, totally misconstrued the findings of the study which he made
the centerpiece of the article, reduced the causes of prejudice to
a combination of bizarre psychological processes and the state of
the economy, and concluded by resting bias crime on the backs of working
class kids and unemployment.

@HEAD 1 = Is This a Good Time to Call?

@PAR AFTER SUB = 	Most reporters who contact us start out with the
wrong questions. Asking the wrong question is the critical difference
between someone who is and someone who is not knowledgeable about
a subject. In a typical call to the Institute, reporters have a repertory
of three questions. Is the incidence of X increasing? (X could be
campus violence, housing incidents, or whatever is going on in their
city.) How many Xs occurred? And, what is the cause? This last question
is usually asked with the expectation that you will cite a single
cause, two at best. When you cite more, the reporters choose those
causes which are on their agenda.

On the matter of counting Xs, we usually tell reporters that these
are only estimates and not scientifically precise counts. The real
issue, we counter, is the tragic frequency of these incidents and
their effects on victims. Many reporters get upset with such an answer,
repeating their question as if we didn't understand it or are trying
to keep the data secret. Aggressive reporters have sometimes called
another Institute staffer in an effort to obtain these secret figures.
I have occasionally received return calls from reporters who tell
me that their editor insists that they come up with a figure.

As a result of their search for numbers, reporters have written or
asserted some strange figures. Commonly we read or hear a statement
such as, <169>According to the National Institute Against Prejudice
and Violence<193>300 racial incidents<193> have occurred on college
campuses during the past three years.<170> In fact, there are likely
over a million ethnoviolent incidents that take place<MI> <D>every
year. A knowledgeable reporter would not have made such an error.


The figure of one million campus incidents in an academic year is
our estimate based on seven years of research done by independent
investigators on many different campuses. That figure is almost never
reported.

@HEAD 1 = <169>Group Blames Reagan<170>

@PAR AFTER SUB = On May 31, 1990, we staged our first major press
conference. The Institute was releasing my report, <169>Campus Ethnoviolence
and the Policy Options.<170> There were three important things about
the report. It summarized all of the research to date on the incidence
of ethnoviolence on American campuses; it offered a detailed explanation
as to why it was occurring; and it suggested what campus administrators
could do in response.

I made up a press packet. It contained the full report, a summary
of the report, and a point-by-point outline of the remarks I was to
make (a different and shorter form of the summary). The packet also
contained biographical and institutional data. I had, in fact, done
everything but write the story for them.

We held the conference at the National Press Club in downtown Washington,
DC. The president of our board of directors, former Indiana Senator
Birch Bayh, was featured following my presentation of the report.
Most of the major newspaper and radio groups came; only CNN among
the television outlets taped the proceedings. The only major newspaper
that didn't show up was the<MI> Washington Post<D>. Apparently they
could spare only one reporter at the Press Club that morning, and
he went down the hall to cover the National Water Coolers Association
press conference. With few exceptions, the reporters all pulled out
one or two points that became the pegs for their stories. The best
of these, oddly enough given their time limitations, were National
Public Radio's <169>All Things Considered<170> and Pacifica National
News. The worst was the Associated Press. The story that made the
wire was that the Institute had indicted Ronald Reagan as the cause
of campus ethnoviolence. (I had asserted that civil rights had been
devalued under the Reagan administration, and that the President's
actions had served to delegitimize the issue. My assertion was obviously
not newsworthy. The reporter ended his story with a disclaimer from
a Reagan spokesperson, Mark Weinberg, who declared, <169>To Ronald
Reagan there is no greater sin than prejudice.<170> Many Indiana papers
used the wire service report to bash Senator Bayh, whose liberalism
had always been an anathema and whose son, Evan Bayh, is now the state's
governor. By and large the major policy recommendations of the report
received no coverage in the major newspapers, and the small conservative
papers had a field day with their versions and response to the AP
story. After all, who was more credible<197>a Reagan spokesperson
or, as the <MI>Phoenix Gazette<D> labeled us, <169>a five-year old
fringe group?<170>

@HEAD 1 = Implicit Theories

@PAR AFTER SUB = 	Reporters, like most people in this society, have
an implicit theory of prejudice and group relations. Through their
own reading and life experiences they have come to formulate some
ideas about race, about ethnicity, about how and why people are prejudiced,
and so on. It would be naive to expect that journalists, by virtue
of their job, should be much different from anyone else. The issue,
however, is not that some journalists have an <169>implicit theory<170>
that is false. The issue is that news operatives, because of their
job, are expected to <169>set aside<170> their preconceived ideas,
at least when they write a straight news story. For me, there is a
fairly simple test of how well reporters have been able to do this.
Tell them something they don't want to hear, something that is outside
their preconceived mind set and see whether it makes its way into
print.

Sometimes editorial theory and fantasy result in the reorganization
of facts. On Monday, August 8, 1988, the Baltimore <MI>Evening Sun<D>
ran this headlined story: <169>Poll: Many feel racism abating.<170>
The same set of facts ran the next morning in the<MI> New York Times<D>:
<169>Poll Finds Majority Believe Race Prejudice is Still Strong.<170>
The stories were almost the same, but the <MI>Evening Sun<D> had placed
the only <169>positive<170> finding of the survey in the two lead
paragraphs and headline. The<MI> Times<D>, in contrast, provided a
cryptic but more accurate representation of the actual poll. The<MI>
Times<D>, however, like all newspapers, is not beyond putting a distorted
frame around such stories. <169>Blacks Found Lagging Despite Gains,<170>
was one of their headlines on July 28, 1989. The thrust of the article
was that <169>the status of blacks relative to whites has stagnated
or regressed since the early 1970s.<170> The <169>gains<170> cited
in the headline occurred between 1945 and 1970.

There is an <169>official consensus<170> among editors and writers.
Some people are positive authorities and some are not; some explanations
are acceptable and some are not; and some subjects are acceptable
and some are not. The newspaper, after all, is a major corporate enterprise.
<169>Freedom of the press,<170> Robert Maxwell told us after purchasing
the New York<MI> Daily News<D>, <169>cannot be maintained if you don't
make a profit.<170> That newspapers defend this political economic
system which enables its writers, stockholders and managers to accumulate
wealth and the resources of power, surely, should not be a surprise.
Yet, I think, it continues to surprise people. There are many reasons
why. One is that the news media maintain a constant campaign to socially
reinforce their image as <169>objective<170> that is, as presenting
all sides fully. <169>Objectivity<170> has achieved mystical status
in professional journalism. Even the appearance of bias may be sanctioned.
Some newspaper managers consider it inappropriate for their reporters
to be active in civic associations including such groups as the PTA.
Of course, such restrictions serve a dual purpose. They display reporters
as people with no allegiances and at the same time they help isolate
the reporter from a community of conscience.

A second reason is that reporters who move beyond the official consensus
and who attempt to criticize the structure of elite privilege and
power are discharged, often publicly, for their poor judgment or lack
of objectivity. Critical reporting of elite corruption or scandals
is permissible, but criticism of the underlying political and economic
structure seems allowable only in some papers on some Sundays on the
op-ed page.

Third, on issues which are of little consequence to the news organization,
a wider range of people and ideas is permitted in the news. This,
of course, helps provide a view of the media as being open and objective.

Finally, we need to recall that the elites themselves are at times
in conflict on major issues. When that occurs the newspaper can reflect
that range of difference. The range is highly limited, yet it is often
enough to provide the appearance of diversity. W.L. Bennett, writing
in the <MI>Journal of Communication<D>, noted that when the level
of elite opposition to an administration policy goes up, so does the
proportion of opposing stories and op-ed page opinion.

	There is a cultural pattern of denial that characterizes the American
perception of intergroup relations, especially Black-White relations.
Like all cultural patterns it is transmitted across people and authorized
and maintained by the legitimate authorities of society. Elite denial
is President Reagan declaring that civil rights leaders exaggerate
racial problems, or Presidents Bush and Clinton refusing to engage
in political dialogue over the four days of intergroup violence which
occurred in Los Angeles during their political campaign. Certainly,
if issues are not mentioned, they do not become part of the public
agenda.

The denial of problems of group relations has permeated American thought
and policy. For example, national polls reveal that more than one
out of every two White Americans believe that Blacks are as well off
or have the same life chances as do Whites.

This denial has also characterized the newsroom. The consequence is
that most reporters and editors do not want to hear about the pervasiveness
of racism and ethnoviolence. The most facile technique for maintaining
this denial is simply not covering the story.

At a media panel convened by the Institute, the panelists all agreed
that poverty, racism, and the pathologies of everyday life were not
news. The panel included representatives of the Mutual Broadcasting
System, <MI>Baltimore<D> <MI>Evening Sun, Los Angeles Times,<D> and
the<MI> Washington Journalism Review<D>.

Yet another dimension of denial is the manner in which the news organization
defines <169>news.<170> Joann Byrd, <MI>The Washington<D> <MI> Post<D>
ombudsman [sic], wrote in her column of March 28, 1993, <169>One way
of viewing `news' is as today's status report on our commonly held
values.<170> Byrd presumably means the values of <MI>Post <D>editors
and writers. What of a lack of agreement on basic values or genuine
conflict rooted in value differences?

@HEAD 1 = Techniques of Distortion

@PAR AFTER SUB = 	Newspaper executives have frequently expressed their
perceived obligation to protect the public from unworthy news. For
example, Katherine Graham, owner of the <MI>Washington Post<D> and
<MI>Newsweek, <D>asserted: <169>There are some things the general
public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes
when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets
and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows<170>
(Cited in <MI>Regardies<D> magazine, April 4-10, 1990).

Among the values which editors bring to this protective custody, is
an absence of concern for open-mindedness. Certainly when a person's
statement is deliberately distorted, we can infer a propagandistic
intent on the part of an editor. My associate, Robert Purvis, documented
this transparent distortion in a letter he wrote to the editor. The
letter was not answered.

<169>Recently the <MI>Evening Sun<D> carried a <MI>New York Times<D>
news service report about welfare mothers' struggle to gain employment
and break free of welfare. The original report included a case study
of a particular woman's struggle, coupled with substantial information
about the national scope of the problem. The<MI> Evening Sun's<D>
edited version served to trivialize the issue by eliminating the national
perspective and focusing solely on the limited, anecdotal case study.

<169>One pernicious piece of editing in this piece is worth mentioning.
At one point the report focused on the mother's inability to provide
adequate day care for her children while she worked. In the original
report, the mother `shrugged helplessly' in response to this dilemma.
In the<MI> Evening Sun<D>, she merely `shrugged.' The former description
conveys the mother's anguish, while the edited version equally suggests
indifference. If you doubt that many of your readers will incorrectly
infer the mother's indifference from your edited version, then you
are seriously out of touch with some of the most powerful forces at
work in our society today.<170>

	There is another dimension to what gets reported and to how well
it is reported. Assigning a story to a reporter who has no knowledge
of the subject is a political decision, a decision that says that
this story doesn't warrant any special concern. When the policies
of a newspaper do not give priority to multicultural issues or ethnoviolence,
the result is a lack of commitment to provide the necessary training
for reporters who cover these stories. A self-perpetuating cycle of
incompetence results.

When reporters write about ethnoviolent conflict, it is seldom placed
in any social context. Why? Because to place it in its social context
means doing research and looking carefully at complex social trends,
which requires a fair level of knowledge and sophistication. It also
requires time for research. Perhaps, more important, if issues of
minority disparities or intergroup conflict were placed in their social
context, the reporter would transgress the paper's official consensus.

I don't want to overstate the case. Stories about ethnoviolence are
often easy to get at, and if they challenge any official consensus,
it is one that says let's not report anything which may rock the boat.
Any enterprising reporter can go to the official records of the police
department or human relations commission to see what's happening.
Two researchers at Northwestern, David L. Protess and James S. Ettema,
did just that. They went to the records of bias crimes reported to
the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and to the reports of these
events in Chicago's weekly and daily newspapers. They looked at a
one-year period from mid-1988 to mid-1989. They found that only 9
percent of the bias crimes reported to the Commission were mentioned
in the press.

The incidents selected for coverage were most likely to be the more
serious crimes. It was the spectacular character or the
<169>newsworthiness<170>
of the incident rather than the pervasiveness of ethnoviolence that
framed the story. The report noted that during the year only two stories
<169>offered a glimpse of the big picture.<170> These stories, which
appeared in the <MI>Tribune<D> and the <MI>Sun-Times<D> the day after
the mayoral election, were hung on a news peg of bias crimes which
took place during the campaign.

Following the model of the Northwestern researchers, I compared the
<MI>Sunpapers<D> coverage of Maryland bias incidents over the past
three and one-half years with reports made to the state Human Relations
Commission by local police departments. I found that for every 82
incidents only one appeared in either of the <MI>Sunpapers.<D> There
were no <169>big picture<170> stories in the entire period which covered
January 1990 through July 1993.

	The fragmentation of stories is another way of masking the explicit
bias of the news organization. Take the case of the Stockton, California
elementary school shootings. On January 18, 1989, Patrick Edward Purdy
entered the Cleveland Elementary schoolyard in Stockton, California.
He let loose with more than 100 rounds of ammunition from a semiautomatic
assault rifle at 300 youngsters, most of whom were the children of
Southeast Asian refugees. Five students were killed; 29 students and
one teacher were injured. Newspapers across the country gave the story
front-page coverage.

Purdy killed himself before he was caught, and he left behind no letter
or explicit statement of his motives. Was this just another random
act of violence or was it an act of ethnoviolence deliberately directed
at Asian Americans? Because of the ambiguity and political pressure,
the California Attorney General, John Van de Kamp, initiated an investigation.
In early October of the same year, Van de Kamp issued a report stating
that <169>Purdy attacked Southeast Asian immigrants out of a festering
sense of racial resentment and hatred.<170> This conclusion to the
event appeared as a three-inch story in the back pages of the <MI>Washington
Post<D> and was not reported by many papers which had featured the
event as front-page news earlier in the year. 	

This fragmentation of news, that is the reporting of events without
a context or without an ending, is ultimately confusing. Even the
careful reader becomes unable to complete stories or establish some
understanding of discrete events.

Stories can be fragmented internally, although I don't think this
is very common. Here is how the <MI>Baltimore Sun<D> fragmented a
story that they would not normally run. On March 13, 1990, toward
the end of an analytic piece by Ron Harris of the<MI> Los Angeles
Times<D>, the editor inserted four paragraphs of local commentary
designed clearly to neutralize Harris's main points. This story-within-a-story
is certainly a novel technique of media control. It may be a new form
of journalistic distortion.

The <169>peg<170> of Harris's story was the Howard University student
protest that forced the resignation of then Republican Party National
Chair Lee Atwater from the university's board of trustees. On his
peg the writer hung three observations. One was that there is a rising
level of Black pride and militancy, not just on campuses but everywhere.
Harris wrote: <169>It was evident in their dress, their music, their
conversation and their attitude.<170> The second observation was on
the incidence of Black poverty, unemployment, crime, and other pathologies
of racism. The third observation was stated in a quote from Walter
Allen, a well-known African-American sociologist. Commenting on the
state of intergroup relations, Allen said, <169>what we have is a
kettle that is on the verge of boiling over, an explosion waiting
to happen.<170>

That was Harris's story, but it was not the story the<MI> Sun<D> normally
prints. Why did they print it? I don't know. But what they did do,
following the Allen quotation, was to add four paragraphs of local
quotes all denying the points made by the<MI> Los Angeles Times<D>
writer.

@HEAD 1 = Violations of Civility

@PAR AFTER SUB = 	There is a difference between Black crime and White
crime. The pathologies of White America are underreported. In simple
numbers, alcoholism, crime, drugs, poverty, homelessness, welfare,
child abuse, and teenage pregnancy<197>virtually the range of recognized
social pathologies<197>occur more often among Whites. The news media
focus quite clearly on their manifestations among Blacks and on rates.
Differences in rates are not unimportant, if you are an epidemiologist
or a community organizer. Teenage pregnancy, for example, is important,
and Black women have a higher rate. But how many people know that
two-thirds of teenage mothers are White? Or, take the case of drug
use: how clear is it from news media depictions that White users outnumber
Black users by almost 5 to 1?

Such subtle stereotyping occurs with all groups. Take the repeated
media depiction of the affluence of Asian Americans. How many people
are aware of the high levels of poverty among the recent immigrants
from Southeast Asia?

By overstating pathology in one case and affluence in the other, the
media misdirects public attention, adding to the general confusion
about social policy.

Prejudice often leads reporters to emphasize Black separatism and
anger. The selective focus on Black anger often conveys an imagery
threatening to Whites and it distracts the reader from the events
which caused the anger. The focus on the psychological state of Black
bystanders or demonstrators may reflect bad reporting and bad editing,
rather than the underlying prejudice of the reporter. I think not.
You can see the same pattern of reporting in class-based disputes.
Workers on strike are always depicted as angry, while the psychological
states of managers are never portrayed. When strikes become rancorous,
the conflict becomes the story not the conditions of work that led
to the strike. The same is true in prison protests. The conditions
of prison life and the specific demands of the inmates are always
secondary to the spectacle of protest. There is an underlying principle
here: if you focus on the anger of those at the bottom, you distract
the reader from a social critique.

@HEAD 1 = Newspapers as Perpetrators

@PAR AFTER SUB = 	In our effort to look for external and structural
reasons for media bias and neglect we certainly shouldn't overlook
the fact that some forms of bias reflect institutional discrimination.
Complaints of discrimination have been filed against newspapers across
the country, from the<MI> Sacramento Bee<D>, the flagship paper of
the McClatchy chain, to the elite<MI> Washington Post<D>. The <MI>Washington
Post<D> may be a good example. In mid-1988, the Newspaper Guild filed
a class-action suit against the <MI>Post<D> charging systematic discrimination
against women, Blacks, Hispanics, other minority groups, and employees
over the age of 40. In 1987, the paper was boycotted by Black community
leaders in protest over the <MI>Post<D>'s stereotyping and their neglect
of Black issues. Jill Nelson, a<MI> Post<D> reporter for four and
one-half years and a central figure in the Guild's class action suit,
wrote of her experience: <169>When it comes to Black folks, we exist
mostly as potential sociological, pathological, or scatological slices
of life waiting to be chewed, digested, and excreted into the requisite
number of column inches in the paper<170> (<MI>Volunteer Slavery:
My Authentic Negro Experience<D>, Noble Press, 1993).

Although the <MI>Post's <D>recent coverage of Black-White issues seems
improved, an astounding myopia still obscures their editorial views.
Their editorial on the Supreme Court's decision on statutes which
enhance penalties for crimes motivated by bias is an example (June
14, 1993). The editorial asserts: <169>The justices unanimously cite
the reasoning of the Wisconsin legislature that penalties should be
greater for hate crimes because `this conduct is thought to inflict
greater individual and societal harm<193>provoke retaliatory crimes<193>and
incite community unrest.' This is speculative at best.<170> Considering
that numerous <MI>amicus<D> briefs presented to the Court cited specific
evidence that bias-motivated crimes did inflict greater harm, the
editorial can be characterized as misguided at best.

According to an American Newspaper Publisher's Association report,
in June 1990, 64 percent of daily newspapers had no active affirmative
action plan. Their employee survey indicated that 90 percent of all
news and editorial personnel were White. The American Society of Newspaper
Editors annual newsroom survey, released in March 1993, reports a
10 percent level of minorities in the newsroom. Their survey, however,
indicates that approximately 45 percent of all newspapers do not have
any minorities on staff.

Although increasing the numbers of minority journalists may have some
impact on news coverage and on news sources, the complexion of the
newsroom may have no impact on the underlying social functions of
the newspaper. There is an explicit argument being made in some minority
journalist circles that newspapers are losing ground because they
have failed to adapt their coverage to their changing readership.
(Some newspapers have attempted to adapt by changing their readership.
This has been accomplished by paying telemarketers lower royalties
on subscriptions in poor or Black neighborhoods or by offering special
subscription rates in more affluent neighborhoods. This was a core
issue in the case of the <169>Gazette 7,<170> seven marketing employees
who took on the <MI>Arkansas Gazette<D> in Little Rock in 1988-89.)

<169>Once Hispanics start appearing in the newsroom,<170> wrote Michelle
Heller in the November 1992 magazine, <MI>Hispanic<D>, <169>perhaps
the Hispanic community will start appearing in the paper.<170> Perhaps
it will. But Heller, like so many others, confuses the issue by viewing
coverage of minority middle-class affairs along with a de-emphasis
on crime and conflict news as an end in itself. One can look, for
example, at the<MI> Miami Herald<D> with its 35 percent minority-staffed
newsroom and find little difference between it and other large dailies
in their reports on matters of social justice and group conflict.

There is one way in which changing the ethnicity of the newsroom population
may change newspaper coverage. Erna Smith, a journalism professor
at San Francisco State University, reports in her study of Bay area
news media that stories by minority writers were more likely than
stories written by Whites to use minority news sources. She writes:
<169>Most of the stories (90 percent) reported by Blacks used minority
news sources.<170>

What is missing in the focus on numbers is the sociological perspective
that tells you that the news of race and ethnic affairs is reported
so as to validate the power relations among groups in society. Within
the context of the large corporate newspaper, you will not achieve
tenure as a reporter if you challenge the existing structure of power.
Even among columnists, and certainly among those widely syndicated,
the advocacy of genuine social reform is rare. David Croteau and William
Hoynes concluded their study of columnists: <169>The political tilt
of the most widely distributed columnists is clearly to the right,
articulating a consistent conservative perspective while providing
only fragments of a liberal position. First-rate political analysis
from a consistent progressive position is entirely absent<170> (<MI>EXTRA!<D>,
June 1992).

There are clear class interests involved. The average editor of a
major metropolitan newspaper is earning around $265,000 a year. A
beginning reporter for a major newspaper can start at $50,000. Half
of all families in the United States don't make that much money even
with two incomes. Since crude economics may not be sufficient to channel
the social motives of reporters, management has begun to screen out
the potential rebels. Ben Bagdikian writing in <MI>Mother Jones<D>
(May-June 1992), describes this recruitment: <169>More than ever before,
major news corporations are conducting systematic screenings of new
reporters to keep out journalists who might not readily comply with
company wishes or who might join newsroom unions. Some major news
companies, including the nation's second-largest newspaper chain,
Knight-Ridder, do the screening through mandatory, lengthy psychological
questionnaires of all potential new reporters. Others, including some
papers in the largest newspaper chain, Gannett, order editors to be
deliberately blunt in interviews so that applicants know the company
wants only `team players' who will not rock the boat and are not in
favor of unions.<170>	

@HEAD 1 = <MI>The Pictures Lost

@PAR AFTER SUB = 	Critical aspects of ethnoviolent incidents are never
reported. Sometimes the missing details are substantive. For example,
only a handful of stories about the problem of ethnoviolence have
paid serious attention to the victims. Only a few reporters have ever
asked, or printed when my associates and I have prompted them, the
story of the effects of prejudice-motivated violence on people. That
may appear odd since reporters often dwell embarrassingly on victim
suffering, especially, it seems, on television. But our experience
has been that most reporters don't recognize the psychological devastation
that ethnoviolence causes, and so only victims of extreme personal
violence or property damage are given serious attention. Further,
from an elite standpoint, since most victims of ethnoviolence are
unworthy victims, their trauma is also not worthy of news coverage.

The news media also frequently lose sight of underlying issues. For
instance, few stories have considered how unprepared most community
agencies have been to deal with the high levels of immigration of
foreign-born nationals. This past decade has been the second largest
period of immigration in American history. Yet, neither the issues
of acculturation, nor the capacity of communities to absorb new cultural
groups, nor the inevitable conflicts and ethnoviolence that follow
rapid immigration, have been appropriately planned for in most cities.


Often what doesn't get reported does not get put on the public agenda.
The mainstream news organizations have to be viewed as agents of social
control. Routine acts of bigotry are assumed by the journalist to
be glitches in the normally smooth operation of a just and consensual
system. A <169>responsible press<170> keeps the coverage within the
boundaries of legitimate political discourse. To be sure, the boundaries
shift marginally in response to external crises, and sometimes the
political elites themselves become divided. Such crises and divisions
are what allows other groups to force themselves on to the agenda.

Since everyday ethnoviolence is perceived generally as glitch and
not newsworthy, why is it covered at all? There are two reasons. One
is that the story itself is often cast as a representation of how
well the <169>system<170> is operating. That is, people care and the
perpetrators are stigmatized. The second is that these reports keep
the victims in their place. That is, the reporting of routine ethnoviolence
is a social reminder that group conflict persists and that the dominant
participants are still dominant. And probably deserve to be.

The underlying effect of the newspaper reporting of prejudice, group
conflict, and ethnoviolence is to reaffirm the subordinate status
of women, of the <169>traditional<170> minorities, and of political
and cultural dissidents. In doing so, it fragments and distorts the
news of intergroup problems and generally alienates the underrepresented,
minorities, and those members of the dominant groups who are genuinely
civicly concerned.

The most insidious form of news control is silence. Silence is a form
of rewriting history; it transforms events into nonevents. Consider
the case of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 and the Baltimore<MI>
Sunpapers<D>. On April 23, 1990, President Bush signed this act into
law. Under this new law, the Justice Department was charged with collecting
and publishing statistics on crimes motivated by prejudice based on
race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

The story was newsworthy for two major reasons: (1) it was the first
federal law of its kind, and (2) it was the first time that <169>sexual
orientation<170> had been included in a federal civil rights law.
There were several other reasons why this law was newsworthy: it's
a new law; it was signed by the President in a White House ceremony;
it was the first civil rights bill signed by him after repeated opposition
to more substantial bills; it was likely the first time that gay and
lesbian activists were invited to a White House ceremony; it was the
outcome of the work of an extraordinary coalition of national organizations.
In Baltimore, there were even local angles that gave the story a higher
priority. For example, Maryland was the first state to enact a local
hate crimes statistics act, and several Marylanders testified at the
original Congressional hearings in support of the bill's passage.

	The <MI>New York Times<D> gave the story 15-column inches. The
<MI>Washington
Post<D> gave the story 10-column inches and a 2-column photo. <MI>USA
Today<D> gave the story 15-column inches and a 1-column photo.

The Baltimore <MI>Sun<D> and the <MI>Evening Sun<D> both gave the
story zero inches. For the people of Baltimore, it was a non-event.
Both <MI>Sunpapers<D> editors made the decision not to report this
event. Both editors did not respond to my inquiries about their decision.

Given the wrong information, including no information, people can't
think very constructively about the issues of race and ethnicity.
Given the wrong information, people are often left with the illusions
of knowledge. Those media-generated illusions do not lead to knowing.
<BUS>Z



@COMINGNEXT = Howard Ehrlich is the co-founder of The Prejudice Institute
(Center for the Applied Study of Prejudice and Ethnoviolence), and
the author of seven books including co-editor of the forthcoming anthology
<M>Contending Views on Prejudice and Ethnoviolence <D>(Westview Press,
1994).