THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
2.1 (January 2002): 65-68
© 2002 National Communication
Association
Jeremy Zilber and David Niven. Racialized Coverage of Congress: The News in Black and White. Westport CT: Praeger, 2000. 141 pages. $60.00.
Questions about the role of race in American national politics have taken on an urgency unmatched since the Civil Rights movement. The possible disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, the re-drawing of legislative districts based on the 2000 census, and efforts of George W. Bush to assemble a White House administration that purportedly “looks like” America, are some of the issues that have brought the linkages between race and politics once again to center stage in American public life. As a result, Jeremy Zilber’s and David Niven’s book about major U.S. newspaper coverage of white and black members of Congress between 1993 and 1999 could not be timelier.
Zilber teaches in the Department of Government at William and Mary College. Niven teaches at Florida Atlantic University in the Department of Political Science. Both have written numerous articles on race, media, and politics.
Racialized Coverage of Congress: The News in Black and White makes the following argument: African American members of Congress are more likely to be depicted as primarily concerned about “minority” issues and less likely to be portrayed as typical members of Congress whose range of concerns and activities go beyond race. The primary reason for the racialized coverage of Congress, say Zilber and Niven, is that reporters tend to lump African American members of Congress together into a single undifferentiated category that facilitates unreflexive stereotyping of African American members by both white and black reporters. There are two implications of racialized coverage of Congress. The first is that African American members may benefit from the coverage in that their constituents, who tend to be primarily voters of color, may believe their Congressional representative is promoting their concerns. The second is that racialized coverage makes it almost impossible for African American members of Congress to appeal to moderate voters and, therefore, may prevent African Americans from being elected to statewide or national political offices such as governor or senator.
Most of the components of this argument are not new. As Zilber and Niven themselves show, previous research has indicated coverage of Congress is racialized (18) because of certain biases reporters bring to their work routines (67), and that this pattern of coverage may have negative implications for African American politicians (97-98). Nonetheless, this book represents a carefully designed and systematic exploration—using both quantitative and qualitative methods—of the relationships among journalism, race, and representational politics.
Chapter 1 lays out the basic premise of the book: The existence of black-white disparities in public office holding and public opinion is “anything but a natural state of affairs” (2). This premise is supported, in turn, by two normative principles asserting that (1) “individuals’ opinions and political prospects ought not to be easily inferred from their skin color” and that (2) “we should be striving for a politics where, in the words of Toni Morrison, ‘race exists, but does not matter’” (2-3). Though the authors are obviously deeply concerned about stereotyped and biased reporting of African Americans, their apparently synonymous use of the terms “skin color” and “race” needs attention. When they prescribe a politics where race does not matter, it is not clear if they mean—as Toni Morrison surely does in this passage—race as “skin color,” the biologistic term they use in explicating the first normative principle, or if they mean race as a signifier of particular kinds of relationships, practices, status, and so on. If race means skin color, then a politics where race does not matter is a worthy goal. But if race refers to the social, cultural, and political history and experiences of the group to which a person belongs, then perhaps race ought to matter to the extent that the electorate desires a Congress whose members come from diverse backgrounds. Overall, however, this chapter clearly and concisely lays out the basic research questions and study design.
Chapter 2 reports the content analysis of major newspapers’ coverage of Congress. Zilber and Niven examined all news articles covering the activities of African American members of Congress and a sample of “liberal” and “conservative” white members of Congress. Among the key findings are that race was injected more frequently into articles about African American members of Congress than into articles about white members; that African American members were more likely to be depicted in their districts rather than in the District, suggesting more concern about local than national issues; and that African American members are more likely to be discussed in a “negative” tone. Zilber and Niven provide passages from articles to show specific ways language is used to racialize the news.
The authors wonder, at the end of the chapter 2, whether the differences in coverage can be attributed to African American members of Congress actively seeking or encouraging racialized coverage. In chapter 3, Zilber and Niven report, based on interviews with the press secretaries of members of Congress in their sample and an investigation of the members’ websites, that African American members do not court coverage of their activities in ways that emphasize their race. Chapter 4 investigates why reporters seem to emphasize race in their coverage of African Americans members of Congress but not their white counterparts. Based mainly on a national survey of 127 political reporters, the authors argue that the race of the reporter has little bearing on how they view members of Congress. The process that seems to explain racialized coverage of Congress is a “distribution effect” (86-87) in which “reporters in areas with few African American representatives may be categorizing African Americans as political oddities, and this perception may encourage reporters to dismiss their value . . .” (91). Thus, racialized coverage of Congress is not a result of the members’ partisan affiliation, political ideology, or seniority. Nor is it a result of the extent to which the members of Congress project a race-centered agenda to the public. According to Zilber and Niven, the race of the members seems to explain racialized coverage better than any other factor.
Chapter 5 examines the potential effect of racialized news coverage on the political futures of African American members of Congress. The authors examine voter ratings of congressional candidates gathered in National Election Studies. The ratings of four groups—white voters represented by whites in Congress, white voters represented by African Americans, African Americans represented by whites, and African Americans represented by African Americans. Zilber and Niven discover that racialized coverage of African American members of Congress is likely to have a racial priming effect on voters (101). Specifically, the effect is that white voters may view African American members of Congress as motivated primarily by racial interests and will not support African American members, while African American voters support both African American and white members of Congress. Among the potential problems of the racial priming effect for African politicians is an increased inability to get re-elected in newly created mixed-race districts and the difficulty of developing a national base of support.
Chapter 6, in which Zilber and Niven make a number of suggestions for the media, officeholders, and the public that are aimed toward improving news coverage of Congress, is disappointing. The suggestions go over well-trod ground and can only be characterized as either mundane or simplistic. For example, the recommendations for media can be summarized as a call for better use of sources, which has been suggested since the earliest agenda-building studies of the 1970s. At the same time, what is not called for—and should be—is more context and better explanations relating to the activities of African American members of Congress. Another example is the argument that news coverage will improve if consumers demand it. The authors state that the profit motive “ensures that news organizations will generally comply with what they believe the public wants to read and hear” (120). A fairly long tradition of critical media studies shows that public demands for change in news content results, at best, in largely cosmetic modifications in reporting practices. Deep and meaningful alterations result only when there is significant change in media structure and media practice.
Despite problems such as an under-conceptualized idea of race and somewhat simplistic suggestions for improved coverage, the book contains many positives. The study design is tightly constructed, parsimonious, and uses multiple methods. The authors pose simple, straightforward research questions and use methods based on those questions, avoiding the trap of letting the methodological tail wag the theoretical dog. In sum, the book represents a strong contribution to the field of race and media studies and would be a good supplementary text for upper-level undergraduate courses on media, race, or politics.
Hemant Shah is associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.