Media and Minorities

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Charlton McIlwain
Fig. 2: Word-Count Comparison between Stories about Black Crime
Victims and Black Perpetrators. © Charlton McIlwain
Black Victims: From Rodney King to Michael Brown
To consider more closely how news media typically cover Black victims, I
gathered a set of data on news reports about four prominent Black victims,
three of whom victims of White police officers. The first was Rodney King,
who, in 1991, was severely beaten by a gang of White officers of the Los Angeles
Police Department. The second case is Oscar Grant who was shot by police
officers on a commuter train in Oakland, California, on New Year’s morning
in 2009. The third is Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager shot and killed by a
zealous neighborhood-watch captain in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. Finally,
there is the case of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager shot and killed in
Ferguson, Missouri, by a White police officer, Darren Wilson, in 2014.
Again, I searched the LexisNexis database for stories on each of these four
cases across the same type of media outlets as previously. This yielded close to
15,000 stories: 1,759 stories about Rodney King, 450 stories for Oscar Grant,
7,050 for Trayvon Martin, and 4,452 for Michael Brown. Given that the number
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