Media and Minorities

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Charlton McIlwain
Fig. 4: Timing of Racial vs. Non-racial Stories in Two Cases. © Charlton McIlwain
Though I haven’t identified the various journalists, columnists, editorial
boards, and bloggers responsible for the stories I discuss here, one can imagine
a kind of competition that takes place in the initial stages of reporting on
cases such as these. We know that a wide array of players compete not only
for space on the public agenda but also to influence how items on the agenda
are discussed. Journalists and activists, politicians and policymakers, and bureaucrats
and lay ordinary citizens all have a stake in how we talk about such
high-profile incidents, which has an important bearing on the social, political,
and economic decisions we make. In Martin’s and Brown’s stories, the
competition for frame positioning seems to have taken place early, and it also
might provide some criteria for measuring how we judge the success or failure
of news coverage in terms of the public’s response to these and other sorts
of incidents. Two arguments could be made about how media coverage of
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