A Glimpse Of Racial Bias Progress Within America’s News Media

Racial bias in the way American Blacks are portrayed on and in TV and print mainstream news media is not a new phenomenon in America. But the attentive, proactive, and positive way American TV and print mainstream news media have reported on an American Black story in the last 2 weeks, is a first and very new phenomenon that hopefully will become commonplace.

The late American Black PBS anchor Gwen Ifill coined the phrase, “ Missing White Woman Syndrome”, to describe the mainstream media’s racial bias practice of covering missing or endangered American White women while almost ignoring missing or endangered American people of color. To determine how bad the racial bias is, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) sampled 3,600 articles from American TV, radio, newspaper, and online news organizations about missing people that appeared last year, between January and November of 2021. CJR then matched its data with age, gender, and race data tracked by the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System ( NamUs).

What CJR’s research found was “ if you’re young, white, female, and a resident of a big city, the coverage you’d receive if you went missing…