The study examines more than 70 content analyses of newspaper and television crime coverage.
People rely on the news media for accurate information.
Youth rarely appear in the news, but when they do, they are unduly connected to violence or crime. People of color, and especially Africans Americans, are disproportionately portrayed as perpetrators of crime, and underrepresented as victims. Three-fourths of the media studies which examined the race of perpetrators found that minorities were depicted substantially in excess of their rates of offending, while seven out of eight studies examining the race of victims found underreporting of minorities as crime victims. The most recent research on Latinos portrayals indicates that they rarely appear in the news, and when they do it is likely to be in stories about crime or immigration. We need to more stringently monitor the continued distortions of racial and ethnic minorities and crime in the news.