Page 284 - Culture Society and the Media

274 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
The extent to which the media definition of race influences or distorts the
reporting of events is a matter of controversy. Max Wall, editor of the South
London Press, says that

Today any newspaper which attempts to cover community relations, even
remotely adequately, is aware of constant surveillance, not only from those
working in the field, but by social and political groups, trade union
organizations, university researchers and often the minority press. (Wall,
1978, pp. 463–4)

Thus, according to Wall, reporters on the South London Press—although they
inevitably make errors of both fact and judgement—are ‘instructed to check,
check and check again all stories with any ethnic content—to an extent far
beyond that felt necessary in other fields’ (Wall, 1978, pp. 463–4). On the other
hand, according to Harold Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times,

Racial stories tend to be reported against only the flimsiest background of
verifiable fact…. There is persistent carelessness in sources. Odd individuals
without any real following at all are elevated into ‘spokesmen’ for
immigrant groups, though a moment’s enquiry would show that they are
spokesmen for no-one but themselves. (Evans, 1971, p. 45)

If either of these two views is to be accepted then we must conclude that there is
something special in the way the press reports race: either particular care is
exercised (partly because of the expected surveillance by numerous outsiders), or
there is unusual ignorance and carelessness.
Perhaps the perfect illustration of Evans’ contention was the New York
Times’s coverage in 1964 of the ‘Blood Brothers’—an alleged organization of
Black teenagers in New York who were said to be pledged to maim or kill any
white person venturing into Harlem. The Times cited four isolated and unsolved
slayings of whites in hold-up attempts and credited them to the Blood Brothers.
According to one commentator, despite denunciations of the story from every
responsible social and anti-delinquency agency in Harlem and despite, as another
commentator put it, the difficulty—as those who work in Harlem know only too
well—of getting 400 Negroes organized to do anything, ‘the Times continued to
pursue it with its competitors panting in its path—and with the Blood Brothers’
membership growing from 30 to 400 and then dropping to 90 in successive
editions’ (Poston, 1967, p. 68; also Klein, 1967, p. 148). Moreover, this was not
an isolated example, for as Poston explains, there was hardly a year without a
season of black scare stories: ‘One paper may pick up a legitimate and dramatic
story of racial conflict and then the season is on. A competitor will seek a “new
angle” only for the story to be topped by a third and a fourth rival’ (Poston,
1967, p. 67).