Over the past three decades, United States foreign policy, new immigrant communities, and increasing global economic interdependence have contributed to an increasingly complex political economy in America's major cities. For instance, recent immigration from Asia and Latin America has generated cultural anxiety and racial backlash among a number of ethnic communities in America.

Newspaper Coverage of Interethnic Conflict: Competing Visions of America examines mainstream and ethnic minority news coverage of interethnic conflicts in Miami, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Authors Hemant Shah and Michael C. Thornton investigate the role of news in racial formation, the place of ethnic minority media in the public sphere, and how these competing visions of America are part of ongoing social and political struggles to construct, define, and challenge the meanings of race and nation. The authors suggest that mainstream newspapers reinforce dominant racial ideology while ethnic minority newspapers provide an important counter-hegemonic view of U.S. race relations.

Features of this text

Pioneering and extensive comparisons of the mainstream and ethnic minority press

Unique comparative focus on relations among ethnic minorities

Both traditional quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods used to examine news stories

Informed by the sociological theory known as “racial formation,” which previously has not been applied to the field of mass communication research.

The general process of racial formation and the role of news in that process will be compelling to anyone studying the social construction of racial categories. Newspaper Coverage of Interethnic Conflict is highly recommended for students and scholars in the fields of Journalism, Mass Communications, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology.

Washington, D.C., 1991

Washington, D.C., 1991

The main focus of this chapter is to explore how the general-circulation and ethnic press in Washington, D.C., covered Latino–Black relations during and after three days of interethnic violence in May 1991. We will examine the Washington Post, the primary general-circulation newspaper in the city; the Washington Informer and the Washington Afro American, two leading Black newspapers in the city; and El Tiempo Latino, a Spanish-language newspaper in the city. After an overview of these newspapers, we provide a brief review of Latino–Black relations in Washington, D.C., before delving into the analysis.

The Washington Post was started by Stilson Hutchins in 1877 as a party paper for the Democrats. Much of the local political news was partisan, but there was editorial ...

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