Black and Mainstream Press's Framing of Racial Proling: A Historical Perspective
Black and Mainstream Press's Framing of Racial Profiling: A Historical Perspective
AUTHOR: QUEENIE A. BYARS
TITLE: Black and Mainstream Press's Framing of Racial Profiling: A Historical Perspective
SOURCE: Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 86 no1 206-8 Spr 2009
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Black and Mainstream Press's Framing of Racial Profiling: A Historical Perspective. Mia Nodeen Moody. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008. 75 pp. $18.95 pbk.
The premise of Mia Moody's Black and Mainstream Press's Framing of Racial Profiling: A Historical Perspective takes on a renewed and timely significance with the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth U.S. president.
While historians and scholars study Obama's historic election in search of what it says about the evolution of race relations, Moody's book documents a quantitative study of racial profiling, its evolution, and the implications for the future of the black press.
Specifically, the author explores whether the September 11, 2001, terrorists attacks and the subsequent targeting of Arabs led to any changes in the ways press outlets covered the issue of racial profiling. She also directs the reader's view of racial profiling beyond the frames of a social injustice or useful police tactic.
Moody's racial profiling timeline chart starts in 1803 with the Free Negro Registry. Implemented in colonial Virginia, the registry was used to identify and track so-called free persons of color. Her chart includes Jim Crow Laws, Japanese Internment Camps, and the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo in New York.
The book focuses of how mainstream newspapers and African American newspapers covered racial profiling before and after 9/11. Moody, a professor of journalism at Baylor University, raises the bar in understanding social phenomena through frame structures, reporting her study in six concise chapters covering a mere seventyfive pages that leaves the reader wanting more. However abbreviated these chapters are, researchers will no doubt find the overview, literature review, theoretical framework, methodology, findings, and conclusions easy to follow and understand, and also applicable for future studies. Moody's book will appeal to diverse audiences, from policymakers to social scientists and journalists.
These findings indicate that black and mainstream newspapers differed before and after 9/11 in their coverage of racial profiling. Moody attributes this to several contributing factors -- sources, ethnic groups, education, demographics and audience served religion, politics and society. Two overriding factors seemed to be the press's use of sources and ethnic groups.
Prior to 9/11, Moody reports, racial profiling had been considered a problem primarily for blacks and Hispanics. Moody's findings reveal that after September 11, the mainstream press broadened the term to include Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims. However, the black press held steadfast to its original perspective on profiling and continued to focus predominately on African Americans, with a small percentage of articles focused on Arabs.
Although Moody acknowledges that many of the findings are not surprising, her use of content and textural analysis to examine the issue covered in newspapers over a six-year period packs a punch. The findings are well reported, with sufficient tables that list the frequencies and percentages for numbers of articles in each publication before and after 9/11. Including editorial cartoons, photographs, and cut-lines would have enhanced the study and expanded the book.
True to the book title, the main conceptual framework for the study is framing. Moody discusses in detail framing theory as it relates to the press. She walks us through a media framing flow chart that illustrates the roles of frames, media messages, frames, sizing, and sources. Moody does acknowledge that framing in reporting is as controversial as the field of frame analysis. She also does a creditable job of using framing and gatekeeper theories as the foundation for her research. Throughout the book, she reviews, refines, and reaffirms the tenets of these established theories.
Moody's research also illustrates how the gatekeeper approach is important to studying the portrayal of Arabs and Middle Easterners in the press, and reaffirms the tenet that race and culture play a key role in what reporters and editors perceive as important. Even though she discusses the pros and cons of frame analysis and gatekeeping theory, Moody ignores some significant elements; for instance, she does not mention McCombs and Shaw's agenda-setting theory in the discussion chapter.
Twelve frame categories were used on the press reports. Moody meticulously researched both editorial and hard news stories published in five black press and five mainstream newspapers serving metropolitan areas. Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., were chosen because they each had both black press outlets and mainstream newspapers.
The eleven pages of literature review reflect both a summary and synthesis of sources covering racial profiling. Highlighted in the review is the start of modern-day racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics dating back to the Reagan Administration's war on drugs in the 1980s. Nearly three decades later, a new Obama administration is on record promising to ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies. The new president also wants to provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.
Regardless of the outcome of those promised initiatives, Moody recommends follow-up qualitative studies on racial profiling because journalists' framing of issues do influence public understanding and ultimately the formation of public policy.
ADDED MATERIAL
QUEENIE A. BYARS University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
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Source: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Spring2009, Vol. 86 Issue 1, p206, 3p
Item: 508057958
