Media and Minorities

Creating an Inclusive Public Commons  57
overlook the very social conditions and outcomes that a journalist intends
to highlight.
Research in experimental psychology has found that journalism that relies
on the anecdotal frame may increase the audience’s feeling that a non-majority
individual is the “other.”25 The news story focuses one’s attention on an
individual’s behavior and choices. This in turn may prompt an audience to
blame the victim, if you will, or attribute inequities in health, for instance, to
cultural practices or group behaviors of the less healthy instead of holding the
society at large accountable.
News stories on health inequities often feature individuals who have become
health advocates. For example, an article in the Savannah Morning
News described an African-American woman who having survived breast
cancer had begun promoting mammograms for women in her community.26
On the whole, the story was fine. But, by emphasizing this individual’s experience,
the writer suggested that fear and financial worries prevent black women
from getting tested and that, as a result, we see a higher death rate among African-American
women with the disease. Like many other such articles, it also
pointed to contested evidence that supposedly links certain types of African
ancestry to an especially aggressive type of breast cancer. However, the article
didn’t mention what may be an equally important, perhaps even more important,
factor in the increased death rate that has nothing to do with an individual’s
decision making or ancestry. There is convincing evidence that Afri
can-American women receive lower quality health care over their lifetimes.27
Another article, on a website called Healthy Hispanic Living, is like many
that aim to empower Latinas to take steps to lower their risk of breast cancer.
In the course of recommending screenings and self-exams, the site’s content
speculates that there is something biologically distinct about this very diverse
group, whose members come from Spain, Mexico, Central and South America,
and the Caribbean, that leads to high susceptibility. In fact, there is no scientific
agreement on this hypothesis.28
Such reporting turns society’s attention to individual or supposed group
characteristics that cannot be changed and, thus, away from solutions that can
25 Mahzarin Banaji, personal communication, 2006.
26 Dana Clark Felty, “Black Women & Breast Cancer: Lower Risk, Greater Danger,” Savannah
Morning News, 30 March 2010, http://savannahnow.com/accent/2010-03-30/black-womenbreast-cancer-lower-risk-greater-danger.
27 Jeffrey H. Silber et al., “Characteristics associated with differences in survival among
black and white women with breast cancer,” JAMA 310, no. 4 (2013): 389–397, doi:10.1001/
jama.2013.8272.
28 Laura Fejerman et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Breast Cancer in Latinas
Identifies Novel Protective Variants on 6q25,” Nature Communications 5 (2014): 1–8,
doi:10.1038/ncomms6260.
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882