Does crime-happy local TV news perpetuate racism? One professor argues yes–and suggests some drastic measures to fix it.
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The authors of the FCC’s public-interest standards didn’t have in mind footage of running gun battles on LA’s freeways. They were thinking along the lines of PBS’s ”NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” What they got, instead, was ”Cops,” narrated by better-looking people.
Photo caption: On May 11 Angel Galvan led Los Angeles-area police on a 40-minute car chase that ended with him being shot to death – on live television. (Boston Globe)
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The authors of the FCC’s public-interest standards didn’t have in mind footage of running gun battles on LA’s freeways. They were thinking along the lines of PBS’s ”NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” What they got, instead, was ”Cops,” narrated by better-looking people.Photo caption: On May 11 Angel Galvan led Los Angeles-area police on a 40-minute car chase that ended with him being shot to death – on live television. (Boston Globe)
From PRWatch: “So counterproductive is local broadcast news,” UCLA law professor Jerry Kang argued in the Harvard Law Review, “that it is time the FCC stopped using the number of hours a station devotes to local news as evidence of the station’s contribution to the ‘public interest’, which has traditionally been a requirement for a broadcast license.”
More below with, of course, a poll!
PRWatch further states:
Kang cites psychological research that racist assumptions linking people of color with violence and crime are weakened, after “footage of a respected black figure like Bill Cosby or Martin Luther King, Jr.” is viewed. Local TV news reinforces racist stereotypes, Kang argues, pointing to a 13-month study of Los Angeles stations that found crime stories led broadcasts “51 percent of the time and took up 25 percent of total newscast minutes.”
For a fuller discourse on Kang’s controversial proposals, see the Boston Globe‘s “Crime scenes.”