The news represents but one small slice of all mass media, yet it possesses enormous power to subtly shape our perceptions of important issues, of other people, of the world. The issues the public perceives as critical are very likely to be the same ones recently highlighted by the news media (Glassner, 1999; McCombs & Reynolds, 2002), which demonstrates the power of the media for "agenda-setting." The Mean World Phenomenon describes the link between heavy television viewing and escalated perceptions of danger (Rule & Ferguson, 1986). And Mullen et al. (1986) made us aware that just the understated smile of an anchorman may be enough to sway something as critical and deliberate as voting behavior: viewers who watched Peter Jennings smile as he delivered news of Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign were more likely to vote for Reagan than those who watched other, more neutral newscasters. (4)
News can also serve to anchor gender and racial stereotypes firmly in the public's minds, albeit in a very subtle manner. For instance, Archer and his colleagues (Archer, Iritani, Kimes, & Barrios, 1983) found that men and women are typically portrayed differently in news photographs: there were more close-up shots of men than of women. Zuckerman and Kieffer (1994) found that this "face-ism" effect also varies as a function of the race of the target person; Whites were pictured in close-ups more often than Blacks were. Both research teams found that close-up shots promoted greater impressions of dominance and intelligence; thus, the media may subtly but forcefully convey the message that men and Whites are more intelligent and powerful than women and Blacks.
Gilens' (1996) examination of the discrepancies between the actual and the media-portrayed racial makeup of America's poor strongly suggests that the stereotype of the "typical" welfare recipient as being Black is in part media-driven. Gilens sampled every story on poverty in America from the nation's three major news magazines (Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report) from 1988 through 1992, and then analyzed the content of the accompanying pictures. Of those persons pictured as in poverty, 62% were Black, which is more than twice the actual proportion of Blacks who make up the American poor (29%). Clawson and Trice (2000) extended Gilens' work and found that media portrayals of poverty not only exaggerate the proportion of poor Black Americans, but that they are particularly overrepresented in negative stories about the poor.
The potential for such subtly discriminating coverage to influence the perceptions of those it portrays certainly exists. For instance, Gilens (1996) surmised that the overrepresentation of Blacks in poverty may lead to exaggerated impressions of their numbers, as several surveys have shown that the majority of Americans mistakenly believe there are more Blacks than Whites in poverty. Among White respondents to the 1990 General Social Survey, Gilens found a negative correlation between perceptions of the percentage of Blacks in poverty and support for welfare: higher estimates of the proportion of Blacks in poverty were related to less support for public assistance. Therefore the manner in which the media represent groups of people may affect the perceptions of those groups and, in turn, influence the treatment of targeted groups and even social policy.
Examination of news stories about women, particularly those who have been the victims of crime, reveals that women too are the subjects of biased and stereotyped coverage. Meyers (1997) painted a very disturbing picture of how the news media conspire to maintain the status quo of men's dominance, both pictorially and textually. Meyers' (1994) analysis of news coverage of a domestic murder-suicide (in which a woman was murdered by her husband who then killed himself) makes the case that the manner in which the media frame news of domestic and sexual violence gives rise to victim blame rather than to empathy for victims. When violence against women is framed in terms of the perpetrator's obsession with the victim, the victim herself becomes the cause of the violence. In some cases, Meyers argued, the "real" victim may actually be portrayed as the perpetrator of the violence who has been driven to desperate action by his female partner. However, even news accounts that place the responsibility squarely upon the perpetrator are problematic in that the violence is portrayed as residing within the individual, rather than within a larger societal context. Spotlighting the perpetrator allows the social conditions that engender violence against women to remain unexamined and, therefore, securely in place. "By perpetuating the idea that violence against women is a problem of individual pathology, the news disguises the social roots of battering while reinforcing stereotypes and myths which blame women. In this way, the news sustains and reproduces male supremacy" (Meyers, 1994, p. 60).
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