Stories about crime provide several necessary ingredients for the successful marketing of news-concrete events with powerful impact on ordinary people, drama and emotion, and, above all, attention-getting visuals.The special attraction of television to crime is reflected in the content of local television news. In a recent study of fifty-six different cities, crime was the most prominently featured subject in the local news (Klite, Bardwell, and Salzman 1997). In some cities, crime accounted for more than 75 percent of all news coverage.We argue that local news coverage of crime follows a standard script that features two distinct elements. First, crime is violent. Armed bank robberies, homicides, "home invasions," car)ackings, and gang-related activities are now staples of local news. The second element of the crime script is the presence of a particular suspect. Episodic reporting requires a regular "cast" of characters the most prominent of which is the suspect. Given the visual nature of the medium, the importance of the suspect to the script means that crime news is often accompanied by racial imagery (Campbell,

Using 1987 national sample survey data that included a large black oversample, we reexamine black-white differences in sociopolitical participation. We hypothesized that increases in black empowerment would affect the level of black sociopolitical participation and change the nature of black-white differences in political behavior. The results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor's office—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs. We discuss the results' implications for theoretical interpretations of when and why black sociopolitical behavior differs from that of whites.

In this article, we investigate the interaction of exposure to stereotype reinforcing local crime news and neighborhood racial context on atti- tudes about race and crime. To date, there has been little research inves- tigating whether neighborhood context mitigates or exacerbates the impact of exposure to racially stereotypic crime news. Based on theories of schema formation and change, we predict that residential proximity should condition more complex, multidimensional views of blacks, such that whites from those areas would be less negatively influenced by black criminal stereotypes on the news. We collected information about the neighborhood racial context for each respondent in an experiment. We then exposed respondents either to racially stereotypic or non-stereotypic crime stories on local news programs. Results support our central hypothesis. When exposed to racial stereotypes in the news, white respondents living in white homogeneous neighborhoods endorsed more punitive policies to address crime, expressed more negative stereotypic evaluations of blacks, and felt more distant from blacks as a group. Whites from heterogeneous neighborhoods were either unaffected or moved in the opposite direction, endorsing less punitive crime policies, less negative stereotypes, and feeling closer to blacks as a group as a result of exposure to the stereotypic coverage.

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Crime is central to the public debate about the state of American society. Citizens consistently express great concern about the issue and are increasingly calling for punitive policies, such as “three strikes” and the death penalty. In response, politicians and policymakers have allocated larger and larger shares of their budgets to crime control. This is ironic given that the population-adjusted crime rate has declined in recent years. This article addresses the paradox by focusing on the role of television news. A content analysis of local television news in a major media market demonstrates that coverage of crime features two important cues: Crime is violent, and criminals are nonwhite. We translate these media biases into an experimental design that manipulates the level of violence and the race of the perpetrator to test the relevance of these cues to public thinking about crime. The results indicate that race works independently and in conjunction with racial stereotypes to influence people's concern about crime and their willingness to attribute criminal behavior to breakdowns in the African-American community. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for race relations, the practice of journalism, and public policy.

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The effectiveness of male circumcision in preventing transmission of HIV from females to males has been established. Those who are now advocating its widespread use face many challenges in convincing policy-makers and the public of circumcision’s value. We suggest that frames are a useful lens for communicating public health messages that may help promote adoption of circumcision. Frames relate to how individuals and societies perceive and understand the world. Existing frames are often hard to shift, and should be borne in mind by advocates and program implementers as they attempt to promote male circumcision by invoking new frames. Frames differ across and within societies, and advocates must find ways of delivering resonant messages that take into account prior perceptions and use the most appropriate means of communicating the benefits and value of male circumcision to different audiences.