Chicago is the World

We were talking about the stories that could be written about North Lawndale and Isaac Lewis reeled off one idea after another.

Stories about health and the economy and what’s happened to the community. Stories about now and then. Stories that lift people up and stories that give you a sense of what needs to be done.

Shameka Robinson, our intern with Isaac’s North Lawndale Community News, wanted to do all of them too.

I thought about brainstorming with Isaac when I came across this discouraging report on the mainstream news media’s coverage of African-Americans.

The report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reached this conclusion after a long term study:

“As a group, African Americans attracted relatively little attention in the U.S. mainstream news media during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency — and what coverage there was tended to focus more on specific episodes than on examining how broader issues and trends affected the lives of blacks generally”

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1676/media-coverage-african-american-issues-first-year-obama-presidency

It explains further:

The study finds that 9% of the coverage of the nation’s first black president and his administration during Obama’s first year in office had some race angle to it. Here, too, this coverage was largely tied to specific incidents or controversies rather than to broader issues and themes.

These findings come from an examination of more than 67,000 national news stories that appeared between Feb. 16, 2009 and Feb. 15, 2010 in different mainstream media outlets, including newspapers, cable and network television, radio, and news websites.

Just 643 of those stories, 1.9% of the total newshole examined by the study, related in a significant way to African Americans in the U.S.¹ (To be considered a “significant” part of a given story, 25% of the content of that story must be about a demographic group and its race/ethnicity). However, this was more coverage than was given in the s same time period to two other minority groups — Hispanics (1.3%) and Asian Americans (0.2%). As a percentage African Americans make up 12.9% of the U.S. population.“

This has been a difficult and complex year for many black Americans. The economy has swallowed millions of jobs and taken away thousands of homes, virtually the only source of wealth for many blacks. Crime consumes a large part of the worries in many black communities. And so do concerns whether the schools that serve black children will collapse under the weight of shrunken budgets.

Where were these stories?

Apparently, they didn’t show up in the mainstream media.

“The storylines that generated the most press attention on African Americans were driven primarily by black figures who made news. In its coverage of race, in other words, the press largely responded to breaking news during the year studied rather than exploring the state of African Americans or developing African-American angles around events or issues in the news.”

So what does that mean?

That we live in separate worlds as ever before? That the black news media has to work harder to tell the story it knows so well. But if it does, if it churns out compelling, important news, will it matter if it is only read by its audience?

What do you think? Talk to me.

Steve@newstips.org