Media More Likely to Prominently Mention Race of Criminal Offender If They Are White, Says Study

Screenshot via CNN.

The media is more likely to prominently mention the race of the criminal offender if they are White than if they’re non-White, according to a study published on Thursday by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website.

The publication noted that The New York Times and Reuters did not mention that Frank James, the man behind Tuesday’s subway attack in Brooklyn, is Black. The Free Beacon noted The Washington Post “only mentioned James’s race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for “low-income Black youths.” However, his race is also mentioned two paragraphs down in the 26th paragraph.

In the report, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal contributing editor Charles Fain Lehman described how the Free Beacon had reviewed nearly 1,100 articles about homicides that were published between 2019 and 2021 in six major papers from around the country: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune.

The study found “papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders,” wrote Lehman, and “are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender’s race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the protests that followed.”

There were also disparities in where within an article race was first mentioned:

Half of articles about a white offender mention his race within the first 15 percent of the article. In articles about black offenders, by contrast, mentions come overwhelmingly toward the end of the piece. Half of the articles that mention a black offender’s race do not do so until at least 60 percent of the way through, and more than 20 percent save it until the last fifth of the article.

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