3.30 Extra Credit - Local News Assignment

Although I can’t provide statistics, as I did not enter the tracking sheet findings into a program like SPSS, I don’t believe my tracking sheets really display any form of racism, gender bias, etc. on behalf of the newscast.

Half of the crime reports I documented were reported by a news anchor of a minority ethnicity. So, given that there was an equal representation of minorities versus majorities on part of the news program, I especially don’t believe any biases were prevalent in the newscasts.

I also feel like there was a pretty evenly split number of those suspects or offenders who were identified by photos and those who were identified by video. I make this distinction because I had anticipated that perhaps some category (men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos, etc.) would be mostly represented by “mug shots”. If this were the case then that would have been an incriminating way to represent the suspects, because it would tell viewers that they have a history which entails a police record, therefore they already have a “mug shot”. However, as I mentioned, identified suspects were identified by photos as much as they were by video and simple naming.

I performed the majority of my newscast tracking sheets while in Dallas, hence the reason why the majority of my crimes were located “out of state”. I mention this because I think the particular location of the crimes within Dallas area districts is representative of the racial demographics of the area. For example, a crime committed in Pleasant Grove, which is a mostly black part of town, was in fact committed by an African American. Similarly, a crime committed in a more rural suburb of Dallas, where most people are white, was committed by a Caucasian.

Finally, the crimes I documented were split evenly between non-violent and violent crimes. This is not what I had expected, simply because Dallas is a big city and I feel like higher violent-crime rates are stereotypical of big cities. This is neither a race nor gender stereotype observation, but a stereotype nonetheless. However, as noted, there were just as many non-violent crimes I documented as there were violent crimes.