THE INTERSECTION OF RACE AND CRIME IN TELEVISION-NEWS STORIES - AN EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY

Studies of media content consistently find that black criminal suspect s are portrayed more frequently and more menacingly than white suspect s in television news stories of violent crime. Here we investigate the impact of such portrayals on white viewers' attitudes by means of a v ideo experiment in which we manipulate only the visual image of the ra ce of the suspect in a television news story of violent crime. We foun d, consistent with our expectations, that even a brief visual image of an African American male suspect in a televised crime story was capab le of activating racial stereotypes, which in turn heavily biased whit es' evaluations of the suspect along racial lines. Thus, white partici pants in our experiment who endorsed negative stereotypes of African A mericans viewed the black suspect in the crime story as more guilty, m ore deserving of punishment, more likely to commit future violence, an d with more fear and loathing than a similarly portrayed white suspect In the conclusion of the article, we discuss the implications of our findings for the study of racial stereotyping, visual images, and the intersection of race and crime in television newscasts.