Criminal Justice

Media outlets have traditionally devoted a disproportionate amount of newsprint and airtime to investigating disappearances of middle-class whites, especially women, while often ignoring minority women and other demographics, such as men and the poor.

A 2005 study by Scripps Howard News Service found that although half of missing children are white, they were subjects of more than two-thirds of reports on the Associated Press national news wire during the last five years and for three-fourths of missing-children coverage on CNN.
 

In recent years, the crackdown on unlawful immigration has led to increased reporting on local, state and federal immigration policies. But the media coverage often has done more harm than good by using biased language to characterize immigrants and ignoring the many challenges faced by immigrant women in particular.

Even as incidents of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies continue to rise across the country, some activists say the media haven’t grasped how to provide comprehensive coverage of the story.

With elected officials and the public concerned about crime, authorities have been randomly stopping and searching people suspected of criminal involvement, even without evidence of illegal activity. Most often, victims of such random stops are people of color, usually Latinos and African-Americans. 

Extensive media coverage of the fatal police beating of a homeless man in Fullerton, Calif. has renewed questions about whether the news media react differently when the victim is white and if news outlets routinely ignore non-lethal police brutality. 

Police accountability activists have closely monitored the international media attention resulting from the death of a white man, Kelly Thomas, 37, in July.