These beliefs have been found to manifest in a heightened fear among whites of victimization at the hands of racial minorities, specifically African American males.
Both theory and empirical evidence indicate that media exposure contributes to the construction and perpetuation of these perceptions by disproportionately depicting racial/ethnic minorities as criminal suspects and whites as victims in television news.
[7] Twitter, one of the more widely used forms of social media, with over 271 million active users, is the choice of the Millennial generation to get breaking news.
[10] Dana Mastro reports that African Americans are nearly four times more likely to be represented as criminals than police officers on television news—a proportion inconsistent with U.S. Department of Labor statistics.
He believed these two factors contributed to "modern" or "symbolic racism"—which he defined as resistance to affirmative action, welfare benefits, and a sense of blacks "pushing too hard", coupled with the belief that racial discrimination was no longer an issue.
[7] A smaller study delved a bit deeper into the tendency of journalistic racial bias by moving from data, to analyzing reporters.
Throughout the different series a common theme kept emerging, they questioned why “race relations appeared to be worsening – and racial disparities increasing”.
They realized that two of the reasons bias most often happens in journalism is because privilege is not recognized and is due to a lack of diversity either on staff or in the city that they live and work.
Some short lived efforts of this study included programs aimed at hiring more people of color to staff these papers and for reporters to start becoming a part of the actual communities they were coving.
Furthermore, an MMFA article claims that a shooting of an Australian teen was labelled a racial hate crime by Fox News.
[16] Doocy described the shooting, saying, "a new wave of violence comes one week after Attorney General Eric Holder vowed to dismantle that city's police department", and questioned whether it was "what he wanted.
In the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia journalist and activist who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981 for the murder of a police officer, ABC News formed a specific argument for their audience to see.
[18] Tom Gardner, a professor at Westfield State University, decided to look deeper into this case and saw many valuations within the trial that needed to be reassessed.
Many scholars believe that Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner and is only in jail because of his specific views and criticisms of how police have dealt with the black community.
This case only got recognition after people continued to dispute that Abu-Jamal's trial was fair or lawful, to the extent that it reached national and international attention.
[18] ABC stated in their letter sent to the Pennsylvania prison authorities when trying to get an interview with Abu-Jamal that they were "currently working in conjunction with Maureen Faulkner and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of the Police.
"[19] When Mike Farrell and Ed Asner were interviewed on 20/20 by Donaldson, he had to portray them as "know-nothing dupe celebrities" once they started to sound knowledgeable.