Black, White, and Read all Over: Exploring Racial Bias in Print media Coverage of Serial Rape Cases

• Author: Lauren E. Wright,Stephen J. Watts
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/07340168221088573
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Black, White, and Read all

Over: Exploring Racial Bias

in Print media Coverage of

Serial Rape Cases

Lauren E. Wright

1

and Stephen J. Watts

2

Abstract

The discussion of race and crime has been a long-standing interest of researchers, with statistics

consistently showing an overrepresentation of non-white offenders compared to their white coun-

terparts –specif‌ically in relation to violent crimes such as murder and rape. Prior research has

found that about 46 percent of identif‌ied serial rapists are black, which correlates with other sen-

sationalized violent crimes such as mass murder and serial murder (Wright, Vander Ven, & Fesmire;

2016). The news media are the primary sources of this kind of information for the general public,

with previous studies acknowledging that the media primarily focus on discussing non-white offend-

ers in their crime-based news stories. With the majori ty of Americans receiving their information

about crime from the news media, it is important to increase our understanding of how they pre-

sent crime information. The current study explores the print media representations of serial rapists,

from 1940–2010, from f‌ive prominent newspapers: The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times,

The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. A content analysis was con-

ducted on 524 articles covering 297 serial rape offenders from the data compiled by Wright and

colleagues (2016) in which race of the offender was known. Results suggest that while newspapers

dehumanize both white and non-white offenders, white offenders tend to have their behavior neu-

tralized using techniques to garner more sympathy, while these same neutralization techniques are

not generally applied to non-white offenders, thus potentially increasing racial and ethnic bias.

Keywords

race, media, serial rape, content analysis, qualitative methods

News media; print, television, and electronic sources, offer millions of individuals around the world a

glimpse into a world that is often different than their own. Being able to read stories about horrif‌ic

crimes that are happening in other places provides participants a break from their boring and

1

Department of Sociology and Political Science, Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, TN

2

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN

Corresponding Author:

Lauren E. Wright, Department of Sociology and Political Science, Tennessee Tech University, Matthews-Daniels Room 309,

Cookeville, TN, 38505.

Email: lewright@tntech.edu

Article

Criminal Justice Review

2022, Vol. 47(4) 434-444

© 2022 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/07340168221088573

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