In his article titled, Racial bias starts close to home, the Toronto Star’s Royson James gives his two cents on the media’s role in preventing racial bias.
He begins by reviewing the Star’s week long series on crime and punishment, a rather detailed inquiry and analysis of the racial discrepancies within Canada’s criminal justice system, and noting how studies and reports here and abroad have evidenced racial profiling and discrimination. Following his somewhat cursory review he concludes that:
All this provides scientific justification, applied with academic rigour, for claims we are biased. It gives people not predisposed to hate or blame reason to pause. To some, though, it is a red flag
That’s all fine and dandy, but now for his insights.
He self-admits that the media is partly to blame, yet doesn’t stop there:
While we must report the news, and bad news sells, greater care is needed to provide off-setting images of groups that tend to be featured in violent crime and crimes with a high media quotient
His ‘epiphany’ comes next:
If disaffected black youths in socially neglected neighbourhoods play out gang feuds on our streets – events that naturally cause alarm – there must be counter-images, or we will all think “gun violence” when we think “black.”
Hmm, counter-images what a great idea! No limits on press coverage, topics, reporting etc. Instead, in effect, he suggests more coverage and more views with greater diversity. The only problem he hasn’t solved is getting recalcitrant editors to entertain such a deplorable practice.
July 25th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Possibly his first.
Good news stories are a great idea. The more the better. But it is, I suspect, delusional to think “good news” will trump the bad news of “disaffected black youths in socially neglected neighbourhoods play out gang feuds on our streets”. And who is to say that these neighbourhoods are socially neglected. Backward, perhaps; but neglected, I doubt it. Platoons of social workers are employed in these ‘hoods. Money is spent, basketball courts constructed; the reality is that the neighbourhoods producing the “disaffected youths” are worlds in which the trite bourgeois notions that disagreements are settled by reason not the gun, that fathers are more than biological and that school is not a nightclub have been, to a great degree, lost. This is not neglect on the part of the larger society, rather it is abdication on the part of the particular community.
But, hey, by all means let’s have reporting of the people who are taking responsibility. Let’s hear about the successes as well as the kids shot down.