Any Boston Globe reader who is curious about the Boston neighborhood of Mattapan can simply type its name in the search bar and find lots of stories about crime.
Mattapan is located in the southern part of Boston next to Roxbury and Dorchester. It is also north of Milton, Massachusetts, a suburb in greater Boston. In 2015, the Boston Planning and Development Agency found that Black people make up 74% of Mattapan’s residents.
Articles unrelated to crime make up less than half the content of the Globe’s first five pages of search results. The types of crimes with a significant number of appearances are: shootings, stabbings, homocide, armed robbery, and (sexual) harrassment or (sexual) assault. Police investigation, which is not a crime but is related to crime, also shows up often.
While news organizations must report on crimes, the concentration of articles relaying crimes in a predominantly-Black area reflects an ongoing issue with portraying marginalized communities.
A 2010 study from the National Center for Biotechnology Information revealed that marginalized racial and ethnic groups are less likely to be portrayed as victims of crimes, but Black people are relatively overrepresented as perpetrators of crimes.
An overwhelming amount of negative coverage about certain people or places results in media priming. Florian Arendt, a communication scientist who coined the term, states that mass media’s reproduction of stereotypes leads to the incorporation of biases into common knowledge. As a result, media that perpetuates stereotypes affects the consumer’s perception of and behavior towards the depicted group.
Although the Boston Globe never has the race of the perpetrators in the headlines, the coverage of a location can still be racialized. According to Dr. Azeta Hatef, a journalism professor at Emerson College, racialized coverage of a location occurs when journalists are not invested in the community.
She says, “We rely on these stereotypes of, ‘Oh, this was what that neighborhood is like,’ without actually giving an opportunity to fully get into these communities to understand what it is that people are focusing on?”
Oftentimes, journalists take information directly from police reports when they produce content about crime. The quick release of information and the prioritization of the police sources may also cause harm to communities with significant populations of marginalized racial and ethnic groups.
Repairing the harm from media priming and racist coverage requires different coverage of the wronged communities as well as effort from multiple departments of a news company.
One option for making amends is solutions-oriented journalism. Andrea Wenzel, Daniela Gerson, and Evelyn Moreno recommend that media outlets involve residents and community organizations in the process of making a story and sharing it. They also encourage journalists to be more mindful of who they pursue for interviews, so they will not reproduce harmful messages about a community.
Boston Globe reporter Tiana Woodard tries to combat the harm perpetrated against communities like Mattapan when she covers Black neighborhoods in Boston and the greater Boston area. While she cannot escape serious or negative topics in her work, Woodard makes sure to highlight the reparative work people or organizations do for their community.
Woodard says, “I think it’s helping to show our communities in a better light,” when referring to the work she does at the Globe. However, she believes that “the work shouldn’t be on just (her) to be really successful.”
Woodard thinks that different topics of journalism should intersect with the Black community of Boston, so the efforts against racism in reporting does not become one person’s responsibility. This allows for multiple people to undo the damage, which is more realistic in cases of systemic injustice. Also, the Globe’s efforts related to race and equity, such as The Emancipator and Fresh Start initiative, will take years to create change against the harm towards communities like Mattapan.
The issue with the search results for Mattapan is also beyond the journalists’ control, despite the serious impact of the stories they write. The Boston Globe’s website has a search filter titled “Order by.” After the text, a box contains two options: "Relevant," which appears first, and "Newest."
The presented data on the search results for “Mattapan” demonstrates an additional issue with algorithms.
“Algorithms are really helpful in being able to categorize information and help us search for things,” says Dr. Hatef. “These are still created by people, and these are still created by people that have biases.”
The biases behind algorithms within journalism prevent audiences from discovering the good things about Mattapan and other communities with overwhelming amounts of crime stories. Dr. Hatef states that it also implies uplifting aspects of community life are not newsworthy.
“If I’m not aware of it—even though I’m really new, I don’t think that other reporters that are further in the industry, are kind of new to the digital side of things, are not really as tech savvy…they probably have no idea, too,” Woodard states. Like Dr. Hatef, Woodard also believes there needs to be a conversation about the intersection of journalism and technology.
Comments