Cole Sebastian

Pd. 9
The Racism of Objectivity
Liberal columnists and social media activists have long called out the contribution of biased news
media reporting to racism. There are damaging double standards throughout the news media industry.
Black and muslim shooters are thugs and terrorists while white shooters are mentally ill. Black
protesters causing destruction is called rioting while white sports fans causing destruction is called
celebration gone too far. The far more damaging reinforcement of stereotypes, however, is in the
medias objective reporting.
According to the FBI, African-Americans made up 55.9 percent of those arrested for robbery and
71.0 percent of those arrested for robbery under eighteen in 2014. With these statistics, it is more likely
than not that when an American turns on their local news and hears about a robbery, the picture that is put
up the suspect will be of a black man or women. The significance of this is not that the viewer will
suddenly equate that one criminal with all black people and forever mistrust the entire race. The
significance is that, for the avid local news viewer, a trend will start to appear. When someone sees a
black face over and over again when hearing about the latest juvenile criminal, the objectivity of the news
source becomes irrelevant. Whether intentionally or not, if a local news channel wants to report on young
crime in the community, the chances are they will be reinforcing the negative stereotypes surrounding
African-Americans.
Three young black men committed an armed robbery in a shoe store in southeast DC on Friday,
November 27 at around 2:10 pm. The three men walked into the shoe store, held the customers and
workers at gunpoint, and proceeded to fill a bag with boxes of shoes and cash from the register. Fox 5 DC
released surveillance footage of the crime as well a Persons of Interest report on the suspects of the
crime. There are many possible reasons for why the men robbed the store. It could be that the stereotypes
surrounding young black men gives the men the feeling that crime is what they are expected to do. It
could be that the income inequality in America leaves these men with no hope of climbing out of poverty
and therefore they must do what they can to survive. It could be that they feel that they must lash out
against the very society that has oppressed them all their lives by disrupting the peace. It could be that
they were raised to view crime as their only way of survival. But none of that has a place in a news report.
Those possibilities are not facts but speculations. Objective reporting cannot include speculation.
This is not to say that those men did nothing wrong; they absolutely did. They could have just
been some spoiled kids who think its funny to rob a shoe store. The problem is that when someone who
does not understand the racist institutions of our country sees that kind of reporting, they see nothing
more than what is given to them. What they are given is the information that a person did a bad thing.
With that, the ignorant viewer assumes that the person is a bad person. And when that person is so
frequently black, it doesnt take long before the tiny idea is placed in their brain that black people are bad

Cole Sebastian
Pd. 9
people. Thats where racism starts. This subconscious idea that is born not just from ignorance but from
accurate information that doesnt tell the whole story.
There is no clear solution to this problem. It wouldnt be objective reporting to have the news
outlets explain the psychological effects of racism on the behavior of black people every time a black
person commits a crime because there is no way of knowing the motives behind a crime. It would be
irrelevant to any given story to provide statistics about other types of crime in which whites are the usual
suspects. It would be unbalanced reporting to limit what robberies are reported based on the race of the
suspects. Local news could reduce crime reporting, but it is important to the viewers and to the success of
the networks. The real culprit is the ignorance of the wider story surrounding black crime. If everyone
who watched and read the local news was aware of the systematic racism of American culture and how it
can create black criminals, people would not formulate prejudice conclusions about black crime. The
cause of the stereotype of the black criminal is ignorance and objective reporting is the catalyst.