Race and Ethnicity, Coverage of

Development

When the penny press first arose in the 1830s, it sought to attract a broad audience by combining a low price with plenty of crime news and human interest stories. At its center was the heterogeneous white audience, rather than marginalized racial and ethnic minorities. This financially pragmatic formula, along with the general exclusion of people of color from public and political affairs, shaped general news considerations and practices for decades to come. Scholars have identified four basic approaches in coverage since those days: at different times, mainstream news outlets have (1) excluded racial and ethnic minorities altogether, (2) focused on them as a threat, (3) detailed social confrontations among racial and ethnic groups, and (4) selectively covered minority groups based on a stereotyped view.

At least until the middle of the twentieth century, only community-based outlets provided any in-depth coverage of racial and ethnic minorities. The bilingual El Misisipí began publication for Spanish exiles in New Orleans in 1808. It lasted only two years, but La Prensa, which later became El Diarió La Prensa, still operates in New York. In 1827, the first black-owned, edited, and published newspaper for black Americans was founded, called Freedom's Journal. A year later the Cherokee Nation launched its own paper, soon named the Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate, with international circulation and the interests of other tribes in mind. The paper ran out of money in 1834, and the Georgia Guard burned its building to the ground just before the tribe's forced relocation. But the Cherokee were able to revive the paper and it still publishes. China Times, based in San Francisco, has produced newspapers since 1924.

Several defining moments in U.S. race relations over the past century forced mainstream news outlets to reassess their white-centered approach. In the early 1900s, for instance, mainstream journalists comfortably disregarded the rise of black leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, who led the drive to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (when trains were still the prime means of long-distance travel); Walter White, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement [Page 1180]of Colored People; and W. E. B. Du Bois, the influential scholar and editor of NAACP's magazine, Crisis. The New York Times ran only one page-one story mentioning Randolph and none about the others in the five years between 1935 and 1940, according to a review of the newspaper's archive by journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. But the push for desegregation in the late 1940s; the brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black Chicago teenager visiting family in Mississippi, by two white men who were subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury; the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the mid-1950s; and the 1957 showdown over desegregation at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, challenged reporting that had ignored the lives of black people. Roberts and Klibanoff describe white news editors' slow realization that the civil rights movement and the white supremacy resistance to it could no longer be overlooked. A few papers hired black reporters, and white reporters began to venture out into the black community in order to cover the people and issues central to the day. In 1948 Carl T. Rowan took a job as a copy editor at the formerly all-white Minneapolis Tribune; in 1950, Marvel Cooke began reporting for the Daily Compass in New York; and in 1952, Simeon Booker became the first black reporter at a major newspaper, The Washington Post.

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