In whose image?

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: Media stereotypes of minorities - Column

IF YOU HAVE watched, listened to, and read media all of your life, you probably have filed these images into your thinking process: African-Americans are mostly rap stars, drug addicts, welfare mothers, criminals, and/or murderers. Latinos are illegal aliens, ignorant immigrants who take, but give little back to the country and can't even speak the language, or drug-crazed thugs who have no respect for law or order. Asian-Americans are either weak, model citizens or inscrutable, manipulative, uncaring invaders of business, especially in the U.S. Native Americans are illiterate, drunken Indians who hate all Caucasians and sleep away their lives.

If you are like most middle-class Americans, most of what you know about members of other races or religions comes from what you read in the paper, hear on radio, or see on television. When you ignore all of the self-righteous posturing of the media, it is easy to see that racial and ethnic stereotypes still dominate much of reporting today.

A good deal of the problem has to do with the definition of what is news. If much of today's TV news, for example, is defined as crime stories, a number of the pieces presented may seem derogatory toward people of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds because many of the crimes are committed by poor people with little to lose, and many poor people are members of racial and ethnic minorities. Since all viewers and readers get is a steady stream of minority-dominated crime, the impression left is clear: Racial and ethnic minorities, in the descriptive phrase of the president of the National Association of Black Journalists, usually have a criminal face.

In today's media, African-Americans, Lations, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans either are treated as invisible or the source of a particular problem: crime, immigration, the economy. Much of this coverage is documented in a San Francisco State University study that dissected how these stereotypes are perpetuated in photos, headlines, and news footage. These derogatory images are so ingrained in the minds of those who deliver Americans their news that most newspeople fail to realize how out of touch the media are in reflecting the community they serve.

No one wants to be called a racist. When you ask people why they think African-Americans are on a crime spree, Latinos are flooding the country with drugs, or Asian-Americans are banding together to put "real Americans"--read whites--out of business, they will...