Race and Ethnic Representations of Lawbreakers and Victims in Crime News: A National Study of Television Coverage

Research on racial-ethnic portrayals in television crime news is limited and questions remain about the sources of representations and how these vary for perpetrators versus victims. We draw from power structure, market share, normal crimes, racial threat, and racial privileging perspectives to further this research. The reported race or ethnicity of violent crime perpetrators and victims are modeled as functions of: (1) situational characteristics of crime stories and (2) contextual characteristics of television market areas. The primary data are from a stratified random sample of television newscasts in 2002-2003 (Long et al. 2005). An important innovation of our work is the use of a national, more generalizeable, sample of local news stories than prior researchers who tended to focus on single market areas. Results indicate that both the context of the story itself and the social structural context within which news stories are reported are relevant to ethnic and racial portrayals in crime news. We find limited support for power structure, market share, normal crimes, and racial threat explanations of patterns of reporting. Racial privileging arguments receive more extensive support.