Study: Blacks get scant media coverage

Media coverage of African-Americans during the first year of Barack Obama's presidency constituted just 1.9 percent of the total coverage examined in the last year, according to a think tank's study released yesterday.

In its report, "Media, Race and Obama's First Year," the Pew Research Center also concluded the news media focused more on black newsmakers - such as the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates - as opposed to issues involving blacks generally.

The center noted the controversy surrounding Shirley Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official falsely maligned as a racist last week, and the anniversary of Gates' arrest by a white police officer "has put race back in the news of late."

It added, "these high-profile stories raise a larger question: To what degree does the press cover news about the state of black America generally?"

The Pew report, conducted in conjunction with its Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Social and Demographic Trends Project, said it examined 67,000 news stories - from newspapers, cable and network television, radio and news websites - between Feb. 16, 2009 and Feb. 15, 2010.

It found that 643 of those stories, or 1.9 percent of the total coverage of the media outlets, dealt with African-Americans in the U.S. in a "significant way."

Though small, the report noted that percentage was higher than coverage for Hispanics, at 1.3 percent, or Asians, 0.2 percent.

The report said of the top 10 story lines involving African-Americans during the year studied, five dealt with individuals, two of whom - Gates and President Obama - accounted for 37 percent of the stories.

"Even when the issue of race emerges within news events that occur, the press, from what we see in this study, tends to stay focused on either the individual directly involved in that event, or the politics," rather than exploring race relations more deeply, said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who co-authored the report.

Ronnie Agnew, executive editor of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., who is also diversity chairman of the American Society of News Editors, agreed, adding he was concerned about the loss of minorities in media outlets over the past two years.

"And I think the lack of coverage [of African-American issues] is a direct reflection of that . . . This is an important time in American journalism," Agnew said. "We need to refocus on diversity. It's a content matter. It's a business matter. If affects the product you put out on the street, [and] on the website."