4 in 5 Black adults see racist depictions in news, study says

Pew’s first broad look at attitudes since Floyd death

NEW YORK — In a new study, Black Americans expressed broad concerns about how they are depicted in the news media, with majorities saying they see racist or negative depictions and a lack of effort to cover broad segments of their community.

Four in five Black adults say they see racist or racially insensitive depictions of their race in the news either often or sometimes, according to the Pew Research Center.

Three years after George Floyd’s killing triggered a racial reckoning in the news media, Pew took its first broad-based look at Black attitudes toward the media with a survey of nearly 5,000 Black adults this past winter and follow-up focus groups.

The survey found 63 percent of respondents saying news about Black people is often more negative than it is toward other racial or ethnic groups, with 28 percent saying it is about equal.

“It’s not surprising at all,” said Charles Whitaker, dean of the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University. “We’ve known both anecdotally, and through my personal experience with the Black press, that Blacks have long been dissatisfied with their coverage.

“There’s a feeling that Black Americans are often depicted as perpetrators or victims of crime, and there are no nuances in the coverage,” Whitaker said.

That attitude is reflected in the Pew study’s finding that 57 percent of respondents say the media only covers certain segments of Black communities, compared with 9 percent who say that a wide variety is depicted.

“They should put a lot more effort into providing context,” said Richard Prince, a columnist for the Journal-isms newsletter, which covers diversity issues. “They should realize that Blacks and other people of color want to be portrayed as having the same concerns as everybody else, in addition to hearing news about African American concerns.”

Advertising actually does a much better job of showing Black people in situations common to everybody, raising families or deciding where to go for dinner, he said.

Prince said he’s frequently heard concerns about Black crime victims being treated like suspects in news coverage, down to the use of police mug shots as illustrations. He recently convened a journalist’s roundtable to discuss the lingering, notorious issue of five Black men who were exonerated after being accused of attacking a white jogger in New York’s Central Park in the 1980s.

During a time of sharp partisan differences, the study found virtually no difference in attitudes toward news coverage between Black Democrats and Republicans, said Katerina Eva Matsa, director of news and information research at Pew.

For example, 46 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say that news coverage largely stereotyped Black people, Pew said.

Negative attitudes toward the press tended to increase with income and education levels, Matsa said. While 57 percent of those in lower income levels said news coverage about Black people was more negative than it was about other groups. That number jumped to 75 percent of wealthier respondents, the study found.

A large majority of those surveyed, young and old, expressed little confidence that things would improve much in their lifetime.

While 40 percent of survey participants said it was important to see Black journalists report on issues about race and racial inequality, the race of journalists wasn’t that important about general news.