Last November, a 13-year old Liberian boy who had immigrated to the United States with his family just two months earlier from a Ghanaian refugee camp was nearly killed in Philadelphia after a brutal beating. He was the victim of a hate crime. And the unlikely assailants of the attack were his African-American neighbors.
In a country were racial tensions are more markedly common between whites and blacks, this sad story should have made national headlines.
And while it wasn't ignored by the media, it also did not stir up much debate about what happens when one ethnic group invades another group's space.
African immigrants are sometimes insensitive to the historical marginalization that African-Americans in this country have suffered. African-Americans often ignore the ethnic differences between African populations and their cultural diversity. But we wouldn't know any of this from watching the news.
It seems that when it comes to minorities, mass media are often selective about how much news coverage to give to them. An often-cited example is what some media critics have termed "the missing white woman syndrome." Kidnapped men and non-white women are virtually ignored, while kidnapped white women receive weeks or even months of media coverage.
One example of a case in which a non-white woman disappeared is that of Penn State student Cindy Song, who was last seen on Halloween in 2001. Few freshmen students today know who she is, as her story slowly disappeared from local news. And if the State College community isn't hearing about her case anymore, the rest of the country certainly must not be on the lookout either.
When cases involving minorities do receive coverage, it is often because they did something bad. The coverage of international news adds to this negative image as well. We don't hear anything about Arabs unless it involves terrorism, about Africans unless it is related to famine or AIDS or about Asians unless it involves the emergence of a new virus.
In all fairness, the media has begun to address this problem internally.
In a March 14 article, CNN correspondent Tom Foreman argued this bias is not necessarily caused by racism from the media, but from viewer preferences: "I've never, not even once, seen a story spiked because the victim was not attractive enough or the wrong race," he said. "But I've seen plenty of stories fall by the wayside, pushed down and out of the show, because a consensus develops that says, 'You know, I don't think our viewers are very interested in this case.' "
I strongly disagree. News coverage should not be governed by the laws of supply and demand. It should be based on a thoughtful consensus among the media about what stories fairly and adequately reflect our society. The news is a business, certainly, but reporters and others in the media are still trained as professionals -- not as businessmen.
Alternatives to selective or biased news coverage do exist. Web sites such as www.blackdrummer.com and www.latinopundit.com have been created to counteract this gap in the coverage of minority news.
They provide a full coverage of news specific to a minority population and allow readers to give feedback on what is read or even vote on what news deserve continued coverage.
These outlets, however, are mostly read by the group whose news it covers, and virtually ignored by the general public. And while it is positive for people to be offered news about their own ethnic group, it would better for our society if we all knew what was going with everyone else. But for this to happen, the large media outlets have to give fair coverage to everyone.
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