Black, White, and Read all Over: Exploring Racial Bias in Print media Coverage of Serial Rape Cases

Abstract

The discussion of race and crime has been a long-standing interest of researchers, with statistics consistently showing an overrepresentation of non-white offenders compared to their white counterparts – specifically in relation to violent crimes such as murder and rape. Prior research has found that about 46 percent of identified serial rapists are black, which correlates with other sensationalized violent crimes such as mass murder and serial murder (Wright, Vander Ven, & Fesmire; 2016). The news media are the primary sources of this kind of information for the general public, with previous studies acknowledging that the media primarily focus on discussing non-white offenders in their crime-based news stories. With the majority of Americans receiving their information about crime from the news media, it is important to increase our understanding of how they present crime information. The current study explores the print media representations of serial rapists, from 1940–2010, from five prominent newspapers: The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. A content analysis was conducted on 524 articles covering 297 serial rape offenders from the data compiled by Wright and colleagues (2016) in which race of the offender was known. Results suggest that while newspapers dehumanize both white and non-white offenders, white offenders tend to have their behavior neutralized using techniques to garner more sympathy, while these same neutralization techniques are not generally applied to non-white offenders, thus potentially increasing racial and ethnic bias.