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Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2662
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - 01:31 pm: | 
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Comments are interesting as well:
Full story--http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/18/media
The Northern Illinois attack was immediately the lead story on national Web sites and broadcasts, and it was on front pages across the country Friday morning. Still, it was hard not to notice some differences in coverage. By 11 p.m. eastern time Thursday, most television stations had gone back to regular programming. In the days after the shooting, morning show anchors weren’t doing live shots from the quad. Newspapers in some areas carried just one or two stories — markedly different from the explosion of reporting from Blacksburg, Va.
Yet it was also hard not to notice how much more coverage the Northern Illinois case received than did an attack that took place less than a week earlier at Louisiana Technical College’s Baton Rouge campus, in which a student killed two others in front of a class of about 20 students. The national media gave that story some initial coverage but largely relegated it to inside pages in the days to follow. (Inside Higher Ed wrote a short item based on media accounts the morning after the Louisiana shooting, and didn’t write a subsequent story. The Northern Illinois attack was the lead story on our site Friday and spawned two articles today.)
All this raises the question that’s been asked for years in college journalism courses: What plays into coverage of violence, both on campus and elsewhere? The answer, most experts agree, is a confluence of factors.
...Then there’s the issue of race. The three Louisiana students were black; the shooter at Northern Illinois was white and from the Chicago suburbs, as were most of his victims. The alleged media bias in cases of violence goes something like this: Shootings happen so often in the black community that they are more newsworthy when victims are white.
...The race factor, many observers say, is much clearer in cases in which young women have gone missing. When Latasha Norman, a black student at Jackson State University, went missing in November (she was later found dead and her ex-boyfriend has been charged with killing her), many commentators pointed out that there was not the same level of attention paid to the case as there is typically when a white woman is at the center.
“It’s a weird and sort of vicious cycle of the missing person stories that we seem to hold the lives of pretty young women above all others,” said Clark, the Poynter official. (He also said race can play a factor.)
Malcolm McMillin, police chief of the Jackson Police Department, was quoted as saying that Norman’s disappearance should have been met with “the same kind of concern” as that of other cases. “As far as the interest by the national media in the story, I think race probably had an impact,” said McMillin, who is white. “It’s a small college in the South. It’s the daughter of simple people who maybe are not important outside of their circle, and maybe we don’t attach the same importance to them that we do for other people.”
Clark said in cases of campus violence, the level and type of coverage is as much fueled by class and gender as it is by race.
Added Shapiro: “The technical college is not so much a middle-class institution. One of the reasons why campus shootings often attract the attention of media is that middle class parents imagine their kids on campus. Let’s be realistic: This is every parent’s nightmare"...
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 11569
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - 02:57 pm: |
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Black students at NIU mentioned in passing that the racists threats and graffiti aimed at them last year was given very little credence and was subsequently dismissed. I guess harrassment of black students is not as newsworthy as a murder.
And I am a little miffed at how the Chicago media is headlining how this kook was really a nice caring guy who, um, just decided not to take his meds. They were not so forgiving of the krazy Asian guy who went on a rampage at Virginia Tech. |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2670
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - 03:00 pm: |
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Yup, yup, and yup, Cynique. |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 2986
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 - 01:05 pm: |
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"The alleged media bias in cases of violence goes something like this: Shootings happen so often in the black community that they are more newsworthy when victims are white."
And there ya have it! Nothing new or interesting about this story. I've written about this before. If you are white and female (blondes get extra perks), you receive instant head of the line media coverage. Black or Latino (especially male), get in the back.....NOW!!!!!! Even if Negroes didn't have the highest homicide rates of any other group (which they do), they still would receive minimal or no media coverage of these tragic events. End of subject......
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