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[sarahnawab]

@highcaliberhoney

           Our group will be creating a Facebook banner that users can put on their profiles featuring the hashtag #ThatsNotMe and graphs that display statistical information regarding the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media. We will be sharing the banner with our friends, classmates, and social groups asking them to post the image as their Facebook cover photo during the week of November 30th to raise awareness. On December 2nd, our group will hold a kiosk in the Johnson Center for an hour-and-a-half. We are choosing the Johnson center on a weekday because we believe that this is a high traffic area, and we would thus be able to get a lot of participants. In front of the kiosk, we will have a poster board featuring the question, “Based on these pictures, who do you think was accused of burglary?” Below that, there will be two columns, each with different pictures on the top. These pictures will be retrieved from an article on the internet news media site Vox.com. The article was about two groups of individuals, who were accused on burglary on the same day, but one group was made up of young, white men, and the other was made up of young, black men. The Vox article pointed out the fact that two news media outlets, both with the same parent company, ran a story on each group of suspects, but the story about the white suspects featured their university wrestling team photos while the story about the black suspects featured their mug shots. We will ask people who approach the kiosk to place a sticker under the picture of the people that they believe were accused of burglary. The intention of this activity is for it to be a visual representation of the effect that the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media has on individual’s perceptions of African Americans. On the kiosk, we will have a tri-fold board featuring our research on the misrepresentation of African Americans on television news media. After having people partake in the poster board activity, we will share our findings with them. Then we will ask them to write anonymously on an index card what effect they believe the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media has on people’s perceptions of African Americans, and then display their index cards on one side of our tri-fold board.

           Of course, this is just one individual action that our group is taking for this particular project. Beyond this project and this class, our group and others can continue addressing the issue of the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media by engaging in informal conversations with our friends, family, and classmates whenever there is a big news story and African Americans are being portrayed in a negative or untrue way. These conversations will not be easy, but they are necessary, because racial justice cannot be achieved with silence. In order to combat it, we as a society must speak up and have an open and frank discussion about how race affects the way that people are treated in this country.

[sarahnawab]

This video describes one of the effects of the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media.

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http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/tusclab/documents/pubsSkinTone2005.pdf

           Travis L. Dixon and Keith B. Maddox conducted an experiment to determine whether or not the race and skin tone of a perpetrator portrayed in a television newscast affected viewers concerns about a crime story and their perceptions of the perpetrator and victim. Participants in the experiment self-reported the amount of television news they watched. Then, Dixon and Maddox showed the participants a number of crime-related news stories in which perpetrators ranged from White to various skin tones of black. The results were that participants who viewed a lot of television news crime stories were more likely than participants who did not view as much to feel concern about a Black, male perpetrator. Additionally, participants who viewed a lot of television news crime stories had favorable perceptions of the victim in question if the perpetrator was Black, regardless of the victim’s race. Finally, all participants, regardless of how much they watched television news crime stories, were most likely to find the perpetrator memorable when he was a Black male. The fact that participants in the experiment that heavily viewed television news crime stories were more likely than their lower-viewing counterparts to feel concern about a Black, male perpetrator shows that television news media influences people’s perceptions about race and crime. Moreover, the fact that heavy news viewers had favorable perceptions of the victim regardless of their race when the perpetrator was Black implies that society as a whole has inherent biases against African Americans when it comes to crime. The fact that all participants found the perpetrator most memorable when he was a Black male also supports this idea. Dixon and Maddox’s findings in this experiment display that the way African Americans are portrayed in the media negatively affects how they are perceived by society. This in turn often leads to injustice for African Americans in the American legal system.    

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http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/dixon/research_files/Dixon%20(2008a).pdf

               Travis L. Dixon conducted a survey of Los Angeles County adults to figure out whether or not exposure to the overrepresentation of African Americans involved in crimes on the local news, attention to crime news, and trust in the news foretold people’s perceptions about African Americans and crime. Dixon had three hypotheses: 1) all three of the above stated factors are positively related to concerns about crime, 2) all three of the above stated factors are positively related to harsher judgments of guilt of African Americans and unidentified suspects but not White suspects, and 3) all three of the above stated factors are positively related to the perception of African Americans as violent. When conducting his survey, Dixon controlled for the diversity of the participants’ neighborhoods and the crime rates of their neighborhoods. After analyzing the data collected from the survey, Dixon found that all three of his hypotheses were confirmed. Dixon’s findings reflect the fact that the misrepresentation of African Americans in the media does in fact have an effect on how people perceive African Americans. Specifically, the overrepresentation in television news of African Americans involved in crimes makes people perceive that they are more likely than people of other races to be criminals, and this negatively affects the way that African Americans are treated in the American legal system.    

[sarahnawab]

These 2 sets of pictures are everything you need to know about race, crime, and media bias

Negative images have real consequences.

           This article, written by Jenée Desmond-Harris for the media website Vox, is about two news stories published earlier this year by sister news sites hegazette.com and KCRG.com. Both news sites are owned by the same organization. On the same day, one site published a story about a group of young white men who were suspected of committing a burglary, while the other site published a story about a group of young black men who were suspected committing burglary. The difference was that the story about the white suspects’ used their university wrestling team photos while the story about the black suspects used their mug shot photos. The publication claimed that this occurred because the site publishing the story had to use the best photos available, and at the time of publication, the only photos available of the white suspects were their university wrestling team photos; in other words, the mug shot photos for the white suspects were not available when the story was published.

           Desmond-Harris asserts that the contrast of the two sets of pictures is important because it is a visual representation of the much bigger issue of media bias against African Americans. She then goes on to quote Rashad Robinson, an executive director of the of the civil rights group ColorOfChange.org, who says, “This type of overrepresentation [of African Americans committing crimes] sends a message that it's okay and it's justified to fear black folks. It sends a message about who black people are that is harmful and hurtful.”        

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           The hashtag we selected is #ThatsNotMe. We selected this hashtag in the hope that, when African American folks see the way that they are misrepresented in the television news media, they will think, “that’s not me,” rather than allowing those misrepresentations to dictate their identity or allow others to make assumptions about them. The other hope is that African Americans and others will be able to use the hashtag as a means to remind people not to make generalizations about an entire race based on the way that race is represented by television news media. Through this project, we hope to spread social awareness about the fact that African Americans are often misrepresented in television news media and also the fact that these misrepresentations affect their lives in negative ways. We plan on achieving this goal by holding an event on campus later in the semester in which we present our findings about the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media and the adverse effects that they have and then facilitating a conversation about possible causes and solutions. We plan to invite as many people as possible from as many different racial and ethnic backgrounds possible in order to ensure that multiple perspectives are presented at the event.  

[sarahnawab]

That’s Not Me

           The hashtag that we came up with for our project is #ThatsNotMe. We chose this because our project is about the misrepresentation of African Americans in television news media. The idea is that when members of the African American community see the way that they are portrayed in TV news stories, they might think, “That’s not me!” The hashtag is a way to remind people that not everything they see on TV news media is necessarily true, and that it is important not to jump to conclusions or make generalizations about a particular group of people based on skewed media depictions. Although this is the purpose of the hashtag, people outside the African American community who have preconceived notions about African Americans based on what they see in the media might perceive the use of the hashtag as people simply being cantankerous, rather than seeing it as the educational tool it is meant to be. On a more positive note, other minority groups may be able to adopt the hashtag when TV news media misrepresents them.

[sarahnawab]

For our racial justice project, we will be addressing the misrepresentation of African Americans in the media. Specifically, we will focus on the fact that African Americans tend to be portrayed negatively in TV news media. This is a problem because the media affects people’s perceptions about the real world, and if people’s main exposure to African Americans is seeing them portrayed negatively in the media, they will have negative opinions about African Americans in real life. The graphic here for example, displays the fact that on average, between the years 2010 and 2013, only 54% of arrested murder suspects were African American, and yet 74% of TV murder suspect reports in August of 2014 alone were about African Americans. What is more is that this graphic does not even include information about who was actually convicted. The graphic displays similar statistics regarding suspect reports about theft and assault. The fact that TV news media outlets disproportionately report on African Americans being accused of crimes gives the public a very skewed and negative perception about African Americans, and this often leads to them being treated negatively in society. This negative treatment includes injustices such as an institutionally racist court system, racial profiling by police and, as has been brought to light more recently, police brutality.