When a corporate journo reports on a murderer, they mention his race in the first few sentences* of the article in:
- 68% of articles when the murderer is white.
- 12% of articles when black.
Note: These charts use "Articles That Even Mention The Murderer's Race" as the denominator.
The charts do not include articles that don't mention their race.
I'd imagine this disparity in reporting would grow substantially if we included "race not mentioned at all" articles. But that's a much harder question to study in text.
Anyway, this chart below is the full dataset of where in the article the race is mentioned.
This visualization is much less "glanceable" & provides basically no additional insight into this issue than the simpler chart above. So I didn't use it.
In addition, they mis-race whites all the time, when a lot of crimes are from Hispanics that they show as ‘white’ in their statistics.
Put simply, Blacks are protected in modern media, while Caucasians are outright demonised - either when guilty or yet to be proven innocent.
*in the first 2/10ths of words of the article
The likelihood of a newspaper mentioning a murderer's race depends on the murderer's race.
"White offenders' race was mentioned in roughly 1 out of every 4 articles, compared with 1 in 17 articles about a black offender and 1 in 33 articles about a Hispanic offender."
- 68% of articles when the murderer is white.
- 12% of articles when black.
Note: These charts use "Articles That Even Mention The Murderer's Race" as the denominator.
The charts do not include articles that don't mention their race.
I'd imagine this disparity in reporting would grow substantially if we included "race not mentioned at all" articles. But that's a much harder question to study in text.
Anyway, this chart below is the full dataset of where in the article the race is mentioned.
This visualization is much less "glanceable" & provides basically no additional insight into this issue than the simpler chart above. So I didn't use it.
In addition, they mis-race whites all the time, when a lot of crimes are from Hispanics that they show as ‘white’ in their statistics.
Put simply, Blacks are protected in modern media, while Caucasians are outright demonised - either when guilty or yet to be proven innocent.
*in the first 2/10ths of words of the article
The likelihood of a newspaper mentioning a murderer's race depends on the murderer's race.
"White offenders' race was mentioned in roughly 1 out of every 4 articles, compared with 1 in 17 articles about a black offender and 1 in 33 articles about a Hispanic offender."
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