Perceptions

This semester I took an internship with the Washington Post working at the breaking news desk. It's a great opportunity to learn, and I have learned a lot, but there are aspects of the job or rather I should say the news makers that make me question whether the public is being underserved. Here is what I found just by watching the newsroom.

Before starting this internship, I never really looked at what was being “left out” of the media. I always thought news was given to you in an unbiased way- or at least that’s the way it should be. Working in this environment I see how race, status, class and culture play an integral part in media and how much, or little, coverage a story gets.

Example:

O.J. Simpson was charged with several crimes over the past few weeks, in connection with a Las Vegas hotel robbery. Britney Spears as the most highly hit/watched page the day following the MTV VMA Awards. Michael Vick was all over the news when he was being indicted on dog-fighting charges. Madeline McCann, an English girl, went missing in Portugal and has yet to be found.

While all of these cases have been popular with the public and even emotionally felt, there are other stories that are not getting talked about, that are missing mainstream media, that are just as or even more important, are missing the general public.

It is a shame that Simpson had more headlines, more articles, and more T.V. “breaking news” stories than the six young black men in Jena, Louisiana who were charged with attempted murder in a school yard fight with a white-classmate. What some see as a modern day lynching and blatant racism that would condemn these young men for basically the rest of their lives, gets minimum coverage-until activists call for a protest.

A black woman is kidnapped and held against her will for a week, where she is brutally beaten, stabbed, choked, sexually assaulted and forced to eat animal feces. Yet her story isn’t covered until the police have recovered her from her tormentors; never once was there a report on a missing black woman.

The perception is poor people don’t read or watch the news and upper/middle class families can’t relate to a victim that is unlike them. This is the main reason why we don’t see or hear about children of ethnicity that go missing. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, each year there are 58,000 non-family child abductions and 42 percent are African-American. All children are important but some just ring household names such as Amber Hagerman (Amber Alert), Madeline McCann, and Elizabeth Smart but what about the Jaquilla Scales and Kendrick Jackson’s of the world. It could be that there just isn’t enough diversity in the newsroom but at some point the media has to represent the underserved.

This is just one of the many observations that I have observed at the Washington Post over the past week.