NEWS ABOUT MURDER IN AN AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWSPAPER: Effects of Relative Frequency and Race and Gender Typifications

Previous scholarly research on selection bias in news about murder indicates that race and gender stereotypes and, to a much lesser extent, the relative frequency of particular murders explain why some homicides are made into news and others are not. However, previous research has directed nearly exclusive attention to white newspapers. The present research remedies this omission by directing attention to the factors that shape selection bias in news about murder in a big-city African American newspaper. The results indicate that the relative frequency dimension of newsworthiness is a weak and inconsistent explanation of selection bias in news about murder in the black newspaper examined. Race, however, has profoundly different effects in white and African American newspapers. Whereas white newspapers use long-standing race stereotypes to filter news about murder, the data from the African American newspaper signal a firm rejection of the black image in the white mind (Entman and Rojecki 2000). Newspaper images of women and men are another matter. In both black and white newspapers, gender stereotypes uniformly filter news about murder and fundamentally distort gender effects. The implications of these findings are discussed including the clear need and ample scholarly room for replicative analyses of news about murder in other African American newspapers, with a keen eye on both "raced ways of seeing" (Hunt 1999, pp. 181–215) and gendered ways of seeing.