PAUL HARTMANN AND CHARLES HUSBAND

The Mass Media and

Racial Conflict
INTRODUCTION
Discussions about the role of the mass media in society are inevitably
concerned with questions of attitude and public opinion, for if the
media do influence events they seldom do so directly, but through
the way people think. We therefore think it appropriate to make
some remarks about communication, attitude and culture at the
outset of this paper, and then to mention some research findings about
mass media and attitudes, before going on to our main argument.
Communication between people is possible to the extent that they
share common frameworks of interpretation. They need to have
similar meanings for the same symbols, and a way of thinking about
things in common before they can communicate. Our perceptions
are structured by the mental categories available to us for making
sense of our world.
Research into attitudes commonly concentrates on differences in
attitude between people and groups, and the interpretive frameworks
within which such differences occur are either taken for granted or
ignored. Where racial prejudice is concerned this emphasis may
produce a tendency to seek the origins of prejudice in the personality
of the individual or the immediate social situation rather than in the
cultural framework itself. This approach was evident in the Colour
and Citizenship’ survey and made possible the comforting but
misleading conclusion that intense prejudice is a phenomenon rooted
in the personality of the individual, an irrational solution to the
inadequacies of an undermined personality.2 But prejudice is not in
the first instance the result of immigration, personal pathology or
social strain; it is built into the culture. Our whole way of thinking
about coloured people, influenced by the colonial past, constitutes a
built-in predisposition to accept unfavourable beliefs about them.
The very notion of ’tolerance’ betrays this cultural bias, for it implies

PAUL HARTMANN is a Research Fellow, and CHARLES HUSBAND Research Assistant,

in the Centre for Mass Communication Research, at the University of Leicester. This
paper is based on an earlier paper presented at the Fifth Annual Race Relations
Conference of the Institute of Race Relations, 1970.
268

that there is something nasty that requires special virtue to put up

with. Even ’authoritarianism’, so often cast as the villain of the
piece, is not some purely personal aberration; for the beliefs and
values that serve to define it are related to our particular social and
industrial history and are well embedded in British culture. They
have much in common with ’Social Darwinism’ and the ’Protestant
Ethic’. Only after the underlying cultural predisposition to prejudice
has been taken into account does it make sense to ask how variations
in prejudice relate to other factors.
The attitude scores given in the Appendix show, for instance, that
among white working-class secondary schoolchildren, at least,
prejudice towards coloured people is more common in areas of high
immigration than in areas of low immigration, and in schools with
appreciable numbers of immigrant children than in schools with
few or none. The data show that immigration into an area is more
strongly related to prejudice than is personal contact in school.33
This means that white children with little or no personal experience
of coloured people who live in areas of high immigration are on the
whole more prejudiced than children with considerable personal
contact living in areas of low immigration. These results suggest
that competition, generated by large-scale immigration into an area,
leads to more negative attitudes. It does not show that competition
causes prejudice; only that competition (real or imagined) may serve
to activateor intensify the existing cultural tendency to view coloured

people negatively.
’

THE MASS MEDIA AND ATTITUDES

A considerable amount of research effort has been devoted to

assessing the influence of the mass media on attitudes and opinions.
Results, on the whole, have shown that social attitudes, including
prejudice, are relatively resistant to influence through the media.
What effects have been demonstrated have typically been of a limited
kind. Trenaman and McQuail,4 for instance, in their study of the
effects of the 1959 election campaign on television showed that this
produced increases in political knowledge, but were unable to find
any effects on attitudes or voting behaviour. Blumler and McQuail’s
important and complex study of the 1964 election campaign found
that various kinds of attitude change did occur as a result of exposure
to election television, but the particular kind of attitude change
depended on the characteristics of the voter, particularly his motiva-
tion, and it was not possible to make across-the-board generalizations
that applied to the electorate as a whole. In an early study on
prejudice, Cooper and Dinermang found that although many of the
facts presented in an anti-prejudice film did get through to the
audience, this was not associated with change of attitude, and there
was even evidence of ’boomerang’ effects.
One of the main explanations for findings of this kind is selection.
People select what they read and what they view and tend to avoid
 269
communications that they find uncongenial. They are also selective
in what they perceive and what they remember. Where the ’message’
clashes with existing attitudes or beliefs it is typically the existing
outlook that remains intact, while the ’message’ is rejected, or
distorted to fit the outlook. A study of viewers’ reactions to a
programme in an I.T.V. series, ’The Nature of Prejudice’7 carried
out in 1967 found that prejudiced viewers evaded the intended
anti-prejudice message by a variety of means, ranging from becoming
hostile towards the interviewer (who was opposed to prejudice) to
finding in the programme confirmation of their own views.
In reviewing research on the effects of mass communications
Klapper8 came to the conclusion that they are much more likely to
reinforce existing attitudes (whatever the attitude and whatever the
’message’) than to change them. Attitudes may be expected to be
particularly resistant to change when they are supported by strong
group norms or the prevailing cultural climate.
Work of our own confirms that direct effects on attitude following
short-term exposure to media material are unlikely. We studied the
effects of the six-part television series, ’Curry and Chips’ which caused
some controversy in November and December 1969. We gave
questionnaires to about 200 secondary schoolchildren, both before
the beginning of the series and after it had finished. They had no
reason to connect us or the questions with television. The question-
naires included attitude measures as well as open-ended questions
designed to elicit beliefs and information about Pakistanis. On the
second occasion they were also asked how many of the programmes
they had seen. Differences between responses on the two occasions
were analysed in relation to the number of programmes viewed.
We expected that children who had seen all or most of the series
would show changes in information and attitude not found in those
who had seen none of the programmes. We found no effects that
could be attributed to viewing the programmes. Even when analysed
in relation to initial attitude, to whether the children had discussed
the series with others, to how true-to-life they had thought it, and
other variables, the data yielded no positive results.
This is not to say that the series had no important effects, but only
that it appears not to have had the type of effect studied. We do not
know the extent to which children’s initial opinions were strengthened
by viewing the programmes, for instance. It may be that the series
helped to make it more acceptable for both children and adults to
make fun of immigrants. Letters of complaint appearing in the press
and anecdotal evidence suggest that for a time at least this was so.
And going on press reports and letters, we have the impression that
one of the main effects of the series was to affront the Asian com-
munities. A further possibly important effect was that the programmes
provided a focus of discussion in which the questions of immigration
and race were aired in informal groups up and down the country.
Sixty per cent of the children we surveyed claimed to have discussed
270

the series with others. This must at the very least have resulted in
greater awareness of race as a controversial topic and greater
familiarity with prevailing norms. All that emerges clearly from our
study is that to look for effects in terms of simple changes of attitude
may be to look in the wrong place.
More generally we should not conclude from the type of research
that we have been discussing that the media have no important
influence on public opinion or race relations. Part of the reason for
the high incidence of null results in attempts to demonstrate the
effects of mass communications lies in the nature of the research
questions asked and the limitations of the theoretical orientations
of the research tradition. Much of this work was influenced by a
view of man as an atomized unit of mass society, whom stimulus-
response psychology saw as responding in a straightforward way to
the stimuli or ’messages’ of the media. The tradition is characterized
by a search for direct effects, short-tenn effects, and an over-reliance
on attitude as the index of effect.9 9 This kind of model of mass media
influence is still the basis of much thinking on the subject. It may
be that the media have little immediate impact on attitudes as
commonly assessed by social scientists, but it seems likely that they
have other important effects. In particular they would seem to play
a major part in defining for people what the important issues are
and the terms in which they should be discussed. Thus the debate
surrounding race in Britain has come to be defined as hinging on
immigrant numbers and the threat to existing social patterns, rather
than on integration, housing, or other issues.
We now present, with some supporting evidence, an outline of
one of the main ways in which we believe the mass media influence
the race relations situation in Britain at the present time. We are
concerned with the news media in particular because these relate
directly to the present social situation, have wide circulation and
enjoy the high credibility that enhances their capacity to influence
how people think.10 They also provide a steady stream of race-
related information. Preliminary content analysis shows that the
typical popular national daily contains on average two items a day
in which coloured people in Britain or the U.S.A. figure, or that deal
with explicitly race-related topics.
. :.. : .

, .. &dquo;’&dquo;,&dquo;
, ....., THE ARGUMENT .

Briefly, our thesis is that the way race-related material is handled by

the mass media serves both to perpetuate negative perceptions of
blacks and to define the situation as one of intergroup conflict.
In communities where there is a realistic basis for conflict (e.g.
competition for housing) black-versus-white thinking about the
situation will be reinforced by the media and existing social strains
amplified. In multi-racial communities where there is no ’objective’
basis for conflict, conflict may be created because people come to
 271
think in conflict terms. People in all-white communities are particu-
larly liable to accept the interpretation of events offered by the media
because they lack any basis of contact with coloured people on
which to arrive at an alternative way of looking at things-apart, of
course, from the view of blacks provided by traditional culture.
Mass communications regarding race will be interpreted within
the framework of meanings that serve to define the situation within
any social group. At the same time the way race-related material
is handled in the media contributes towards this definition of the
situation. Attitudes and interpretations prevailing in a community
are therefore seen as the result of the interplay between the on-the-

ground social situation and the way race is handled by the media.
’Media influence’ is seen as operating on interpretive frameworks-
the categories people use when thinking about race-related matters
-rather than on attitudes directly. The way the media define the
situation is seen as resulting from the definitions prevailing in the
general culture and from institutional factors that stem from the
media themselves.
The media are social institutions located within the overall socio-
economic structure, and they have their own characteristics which
influence the form and content of their output. In the first place,
the nature of the medium itself, the kind of production ideology this
generates, together with simple physical limitations of time and
space, and the need to attract readers and viewers, imposes constraints
both on what events make the news and on the kind of treatment
they receive. The well-known preference for action visuals over
’talking heads’ in television production, for instance, means that
television coverage of a riot, say, is likely to emphasize the violence
to the neglect of the causes and background. This was the major
criticism made against the television coverage of the 1967 disturbances
in America by the Kemer Conunission.11 The Commission con-
cluded that the type of coverage given contributed to the definition
of the disturbances as simple black-white confrontations. This is
still the generally accepted view, even though the Commission found
that the situation was in fact far more complex. ’In fact almost all
the deaths, injuries and property damage occurred in all-negro
neighbourhoods, and thus the disorders were not &dquo;race riots&dquo; as that
term is generally understood.’12
The Cultural Legacy: There are two main strands to our argument.
They are intertwined but it will make for clarity to illustrate each
separately. Briefly, the first is this: The British cultural tradition
contains elements derogatory to foreigners, particularly blacks. The
media operate within the culture and are obliged to use cultural
symbols. Hence it is almost inevitable that they will help to perpetuate
this tradition in some measure. The prevalence of images and stereo-
types deriving mainly from the colonial experience and at least
implicitly derogatory to coloured people may be gauged from the
existence of a number of traditions of cartoon jokes. These include
272
the missionary in the pot, the fakir on his bed of nails, the snake
charmer, and the polygamous Eastern potentate with his harem.
Similar themes and images are to be found in nursery rhyme, idiom
and literature.
We do not think that these examples are particularly important
in themselves, except as an index of the widespread familiarity with,
if not acceptance of, the image of coloured people that they carry.
It does, however, become disturbing to find this kind of outmoded
image obtruding itself into the media handling of current events
concerning real people; so that elements of the cultural legacy that
are at best ethnocentric and at worst racist come to influence reactions
to and interpretations of race-related events in Britain today. The
tendency may most clearly be seen in headlines and in cartoon
comment, where the use of a phrase or image that will evoke a
similar set of associations and meanings in virtually all members of
the society to which it is directed enables a complex point to be
crystallized unambiguously and memorably in a few words or a
single picture. In its front page report of the discovery of the forty
illegal Indian immigrants in a Bradford cellar last July the Daily
Express of 2 July used the heading ’Police find forty Indians in
&dquo;black hole&dquo;’. This is an instantly recognizable allusion to the
’black hole of Calcutta’, which, by evoking colonial associations
suggests that the appropriate atttitude to adopt towards these Indians
is that adopted towards the natives in the days of Empire. We are
not suggesting that this is what the Express intended, only that this
is the sort of reaction that the heading is likely to have achieved.
The importance of headlines in influencing the way news items are
interpreted has been demonstrated by Tannenbaum, and by Warr
and Knapper.13 Headlines have a particularly strong influence when
the item itself is not thoroughly read. In the illegal immigrant story,
a similar effect was created by the cartoon in the Sun on 3 July in
which an illegal immigrant asking the way addresses a white man as
’Sahib’, and in the cartoon in the Mirror on 6 July which showed
two lovers on a beach, one of whom was saying ’I thought you said
this was a quiet beach’ while the beach was being overrun by illegal
immigrants in turbans, including a man riding on an elephant, a
snake-charmer complete with snake, and a man carrying a bed of
nails. The reiteration of this kind of image, not merely at the level
of joke or fantasy, but in relation to actual events involving real
people, can only perpetuate an outlook which is not only outmoded
but antithetical to good race relations and likely to influence percep-
tions of current events. These examples illustrate the way in which a
cultural tradition may be at least partly self-sustaining. The image
is used because it exists and is known to have wide currency and
therefore enables easier communication. By virtue of being used it is
kept alive and available for further use.
News Value: The second strand of our argument concerns the
concept of ’news value’ which influences the pattern of coverage of
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race related topics. We might regard news value as composed of

some of the major criteria by which information about events is
gathered, selected and published. Johan Galtung’s14 famous analysis
of what factors make events newsworthy includes the concepts of
unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, continuity and negative-
ness. Though we shall not use these terms our approach is essentially
the same. A similar approach was used by Lang and Lang, 15 who
showed that the television coverage of a parade in Chicago bore a
closer resemblance to the newsmen’s anticipations of what the event
would be like, than to what actually happened. Sinilarly, Halloranls
and his colleagues in their recent study of the anti-Vietnam war
demonstration in London in October, 1968 showed how the event
came to be defined by the media in advance as a violent one, and
once this news framework was established, how it structured the

coverage of the event itself so that violence was emphasized, and the
issues involved and the predominantly peaceful nature of the march
neglected.
For present purposes we may distinguish two kinds of characteris-
tics which make events newsworthy. Firstly, conflict, threat, and
deviancy all make news, both because information about these has
a real importance to society, and because, for various reasons, people

enjoy hearing about them. Conflict is the stuff of news just as it is

the stuff of drama and literature. Material that can be couched in
terms of conflict or threat therefore makes better ’news’ than that
which cannot. Hence for the story of the forty illegal Indian immi-
grants referred to above, the front page of the Daily Mail of 2 July
1970, carried the headline ’40 Indians &dquo;invade&dquo;’. The word ’invade’
manages to imply that society is somehow threatened by them.
This theme was echoed in the Sun of 3 July which headed its story
’The Invaders’, and in the Daily Sketch of the same date which had
the headline : ‘ &dquo;Invasion of Migrants&dquo; Fear in Bid to Beat Ban’.
Similarly, the police were said to have ’seized’ the Indians in the same
way as drugs, firearms and other dangerous commodities are seized
(Sun and Express, 2 July). This story was big ’news’, being carried
on an outside page of seven of the eight major national dailies.
That it could be made to carry the inference of threat and conflict
would seem to be at least part of the reason that it was thought so
newsworthy.
A second feature that makes events more newsworthy is their
ability to be interpreted within a familiar framework or in terms of
existing images, stereotypes and expectations. The framework and
the expectations may originate in the general culture, or they may
originate in the news itself and pass from there into the culture.
The situation is one of continuous interplay between events, cultural
meanings, and news frameworks. The way events are reported helps
structure expectations of how coloured people will behave and how
race relations situations develop. Subsequent events that conform
to the expectation stand a better chance of making the news than
 275

those that do not. Thus new events may be interpreted in terms of

existing images even if the existing image is not in fact the most
appropriate. The use of the image of ethnic conflict derived from
the American disorders of the sixties as the framework for reporting
the British situation is a case in point.
In January 1970 the Birmingham Eventing Mail published a series
of feature articles on the race relations situation in the Handsworth
area, which explained the background to the social problems there.
This was a positive attempt to foster better community relations
and was rightly commended as such. The first article of the series,
which gave an overview of the situation, provides a good example
of what we have been discussing. Its first sentence was ’Must Harlem
come to Birmingham?’ In the subsequent fifty column inches there
were four further explicit parallels drawn between Birmingham and
the United States. There were also fourteen separate sentences in
which explicit reference was made to violence (this excludes genera-
lized references to crime and robbery). Effectively the situation is
defined as one of potential riot. Thus the image of black-white
confrontation derived from the media coverage of the American
disorders becomes the model for thinking about the British situation,
both because it is known to be familiar to the audience, and because
it fulfills expectations of how race relations situations develop. The
question is, is such an image the most appropriate one for Birming-
ham today, and does its use not have all the elements of the self-
fulfilling prophecy ? Might it not be that any benefits resulting from
the in-depth explanation and pro-tolerance tone of the Eventing Mail
series were bought at the expense of confirming expectations of civil
disorder and amplifying conflict in the area? The author of the
article himself seems to be aware of the danger, for he writes:
The trouble about violence in a multi-racial area like those we have in north
Birmingham is that it may be dangerous to the
community. People start using
emotive words like ’race-riot’ and take sides according to the colour of their
skins. Reports appear in overseas newspapers. Before you know it the com-
munity is split into bitter factions. The problems of the Handsworth area are
bad enough as it is.
The fact that he is effectively doing with the best of intentions what
he fears might be done by others and the overseas press, illustrates
the apparently unconscious nature of many of the assumptions that
go to structure the news.
The Numbers Game: Public perceptions of the race relations situation
depend very heavily on the type of material made available through
the media, the relative prominence given to different types of material
and the way it is handled. All these factors are influenced by con-
siderations of ’news value’. A comparison of the coverage given to
two events by the eight major national dailies provides an illustration
of this process in a particularly important area.
The events were the publication on 10 March 1970 of the Registrar
General’s returns which showed that the birth-rate among immigrants
 276
was higher than the national average, and the announcement by the
Home Secretary on 14 May 1970 of the immigration statistics which
showed that the rate of immigration was decreasing and that the
number for the previous quarter was the lowest on record. Our
comparisons are of the coverage of the events on 10 March and 15
May respectively, the days on which the news was first carried.
Seven of the eight national dailies carried the birth figures, five of
them on the front page. Only four carried the news about the
reduction in immigration, only one of these on the front page. The
average headline for the birth figures occupied four times as much
space as the average headline for the low immigration figures.
Altogether there was about five times as much news-space given to
the birth figures and reactions to them as to the immigration figures
(approximately 250 column inches as compared to about fifty). Five
of the seven papers carried Enoch Powell’s reaction to the birth
figures, of which only one, The Times, went to the trouble of trying
to balance the story by eliciting reactions from other sources. This
pattern of coverage meant that almost no-one who opened a news-
paper on 10 March-or even glanced at his neighbour’s on the bus-
could fail to become aware that the coloured population was increas-
ing and that this was regarded as a matter of great importance;
while only the most diligent newspaper reader on 15 May would
have discovered that the rate of immigration was low, and reducing.
Even if we accept that the birth figures were of greater social
significance than the reduction in immigration and therefore war-
ranted greater coverage, and allow that Enoch Powell did make a
statement, a reportable event, it would still seem necessary to invoke
other factors to explain this pattern of coverage.
Specifically, events that carry or can be given connotations of
conflict or threat are more newsworthy than others. ’More coloureds’
is thus better copy than ’fewer coloureds’. That the threat image
was important in making the birth figures newsworthy is clear from
the opening paragraph in the Telegraph’s front page report where it
was stated that ’there was no sign of panic over the fact that nearly
12 per cent of the 405,000 babies ... were conceived by mothers
born outside the United Kingdom’. And the front page of the
Sketch carried the assertion that ’The report adds fuel to Mr. Enoch
Powell’s previous warnings of the rapid breeding rate among coloured
families.’ Note the use of the word ’warnings’ and the acceptance
of the Powell definition of the situation. The idea that coloured
people constitute some kind of social threat is simply taken for
granted-it has become one of the unspoken assumptions of the news
framework. The birth figures made a story that fitted this framework,
.

and so the story got big play. The reduction in immigration didn’t
fit the framework very well, and so it got little play. But even in the
reporting of the immigration figures the framework is evident. All
four papers that carried the story also reported the Home Secretary’s
determination to keep the figures low.
 277

Finally the amount of newspace devoted to Powell’s statement

must be partly explained by the fact that Powell on race has come
to be newsworthy in himself. Once a particular kind of news has hit
the headlines there appears to be a lowering of the threshold for
subsequent news of a similar kind. With Powell one has the impres-
sion that since his first immigration speech his every utterance on
the question is now thought worth reporting, even if what he says
diners in no important respect from what he said the previous week.

SOME RESULTS
It is one thing to argue from an examination of the media themselves
that their handling of race effectively defines the situation in conflict
terms, and another to show that this pattern of coverage does in
fact influence people’s view of the matter. We now present evidence
based on a partial analysis of some of the data from our ongoing
research that provide support for our general argument. These
results cannot be taken as conclusive because our sample is small and
confined to white working-class secondary schoolchildren, and the
differences we have found do not always reach a high level of statis-
tical significance. A rigorous evaluation of our argument must
await the completion of our data collection and analysis. However,
the results we have available show a sufficiently coherent pattern to
make them worth presenting now.
Unless otherwise stated, the quantitative evidence that follows is
based on a combined group of 208 11/12 year old and 14/15 year old
children, both boys and girls. Half of them come from areas of high
immigration in the West Midlands and West Yorkshire and half
from Teesside and Glasgow where immigration has been very low.
Schools were chosen in pairs from each area so that one contained
an appreciable number of coloured immigrant children (at least 10
per cent, normally 20-40 per cent) and the other few or none. So we
have fifty-two children from ’high contact’ schools in ’high contact’
areas (high-highs), fifty-two low-highs, fifty-two high-lows and fifty-
two low-lows. We shall make our comparisons between ’high’ and
’low’ types of area, and our sampling design ensures that the children
are roughly equated for amount of personal contact with coloured

people, and for social class.

The first thing that has become evident from our interviews is the
widespread conviction that the number of coloured people in the
country or the rate of immigration is very high and that this poses
some kind of threat. This is true even of places where there has been
no immigration. In a school in a County Durham village for example
(not part of the sample described above) as many as 35 per cent of
children expressed something of this kind in response to general
open-ended questions. When specifically asked whether they thought
anything should be done about coloured immigration to Britain,
nearly half (47-4 per cent) advocated restricted entry or more stringent
278

policies. In areas of high immigration the impression of vast numbers

is understandably even greater and a clear majority want the numbers
limited or reduced. But in an area like our Durham village the only
possible major source of this impression is the media. Even apart
from that, what is striking is that the idea that ’there are too many
here’ or ’too many coming in’ should be taken as self-evident by
such large proportions of children wherever they live. Clearly the
message about numbers and their implied threat has got through.
It has been equally evident that the message that there is little threat
(promoted from time to time, usually in editorials) has not got
through. Nor has it got through that whatever threat was posed by
unrestricted immigration is now being dealt with. We were con-
fronted with people recommending, as a matter of urgency, the
adoption of policies that have been in operation for five years! This
is clearly the result of the pattern of reporting about ’numbers’
discussed earlier. The inference of threat that any increase in numbers
has come to carry is also evident from the fact that when asked how
they thought the presence of coloured people in Britain would affect
their lives in the future, 23 per cent of all answers referred explicitly
to increasing numbers or expressed the fear that the blacks would
’take over’.
Other findings show an interesting pattern. Firstly, children in
areas of high immigration are more aware of the major points of
’realistic’ competition or conflict between black and white-namely,
housing, and employment-than are children in ’low’ areas. When
asked, ’How do you think the presence of coloured people in Britain
might affect your life in the future ?’, firstly fewer of them foresaw
no effect (thirty-eight compared with sixty-one of the ’low’ group),
and secondly they were more likely to say that their housing or
employment opportunities would be threatened (25 per cent of 138
answers given compared with 13 per cent of 117 answers-these
include ’no effect’ answers.aa When ’no effect’ answers are left out,
the percentages change to 35 per cent of 100 answers in ’high’ areas,
and 27 per cent of fifty-six answers in ’low’ areas.b Some children
gave more than one answer). This fits the commonsense expectation
and is also consistent with the pattern of attitude scores (see Appendix)
which shows that there is more hostility in areas with a realistic basis
for conflict.
On this basis we might expect that the ideas of white children in
areas of high immigration would be relatively more dominated by
the notion of conflict than those living elsewhere. To test this we
examined the responses to one of our first questions, ’Can you tell
me what you know about coloured people living in Britain today?’
Ten per cent of each group gave no answer. Of the remainder we
counted the responses having a conflict theme. These fell broadly
into three groups: (a) References to direct conflict, e.g. ’They cause
a For difference between proportions z=
2&middot;48, P 0&middot;014, two-tailed.
=

b z =
1&middot;065, P 0&middot;29, two-tailed.
=
 279

trouble.’ ’They make riots.’ (b) Responses implying incompatibility

of interests between black and white, e.g. ’They take all the houses.’
’They take white people’s jobs.’ ’They’ll take over the country soon;’
and (c) Responses that showed awareness of hostility of whites to
blacks, e.g. ’People dislike them; are prejudiced against them;
discriminate against them.’ These were counted whether they were
said with approval or disapproval. The essential criterion was
whether the response explicitly or implicitly contained a definition
of the situation in terms of conflict. This is not the same as attitude.
Contrary to the hypothesis we found that conflict themes were more
common in areas of low immigration (29-6 per cent of 159 responses,
as compared with 23-0 per cent of 161 responses in areas of high
iminigration-some gave more than one response).c
For each response a child gave we asked hun also for the source
of his information. 27-4 per cent of the 190 sources mentioned in
’low’ areas were media sources, against only 17-5 per cent of 177
sources in ’high’ areas.d Taking both groups together, 54-2 per cent
of the eighty-three responses attributed to a media source were
‘conflict’ responses, as against 45-1 per cent of the sixty-two attributed
to other people, and 16-7 per cent of the 222 claimed as personal
experience, ’own idea’, or ’don’t know’.e So of all the information
children were able to give us, that obtained from the media was more
likely to contain the conflict theme than that obtained elsewhere.
Looked at in another way, there were 110 responses in all that had
the conflict theme of which forty-five (41 per cent) were attributed
to a media source. There were forty-one answers that mentioned
cultural differences (religion, clothing, life-style) of which only five
(12 per cent) were attributed to media sources. This suggests that
while the media seem to play a major role in establishing in people’s
minds the association of colour with conflict, their role in providing
the kind of background information that would help make the race
relations situation, including its conflict elements, more understand-
able, is relatively small.
The picture seems clear, and is what might be expected if our
analysis of the handling of race-related matters in the mass media
is correct. Children who live in areas of low immigration rely perforce
more heavily on the media for their information about coloured
people than do others. Media-supplied information carries the
inference of conflict more often than that from other sources. As a
result these children are more prone to think about race relations
in terms of conflict than are those in ’high’ contact areas, even though
they (the ’lows’) live in places where the objective conditions for
inter-group competition or conflict are absent. It would seem that
c
Testing for difference between proportions z 1&middot;34, P 0&middot;18, two-tailed, under
= =

the null hypothesis of no difference. Our prediction was for a difference in the other
direction.
d For
difference between proportions z =
2&middot;266, P 0&middot;02, two-tailed.
=

e
Comparing the proportion of conflict themes derived from media with those from
elsewhere, z 5&middot;5, P < 0&middot;0001, two-tailed.
=
 280

while attitudes are responsive to the characteristics of the local

situation-i.e. the extent of iminigration-interpretive frameworks,
ways of thinking, are heavily structured by the mass media, parti-
cularly in areas where there are few immigrants.
CONCLUSION
The news media have a crucial role to play in maintaining an informed
state of public opinion, upon which the effective functioning of
democracy depends. They do this by providing information, defining
issues and interpreting events. The generally high credibility which
they enjoy enables them to perform this function. Their role is
particularly important on subjects which are not matters of common
experience-such as the consequences of immigration, and the state
of race relations.
We have argued that a number of factors pertaining to traditional
culture, to the media as institutions, their technologies and their
related ideologies, and to the interplay between these factors, operate
to structure the news coverage of race related matters in a way that
causes people to see the situation primarily as one of actual or
potential conflict. Blacks come to be seen as conflict-generating per
se and the chances that people will think about the situation in more
productive ways-in terms of the issues involved or of social problems
generally-are reduced. The result is that real conflict is amplified,
and potential for conflict created. For the media not only operate
within the culture, they also make culture and they help shape social
reality.
Clearly the factors that have discussed are not the only ones
we
that structure news coverage. There are obviously others, including
the nature of events themselves and editorial policy, but the ones
we have discussed do influence what is reported and how it is reported.
Although there may be political and other motives at work in the
media that influences the coverage of race, it is not necessary to
invoke these to explain the kind of pattern we have described. A
main point of our argument is that this kind of result may be produced
in a quite unintended fashion. The media do not need to try to define
the situation in terms of connict. They need merely unreflectingly
to follow their normal procedures of news-gathering and selection
and to apply their normal criteria of news value.
We do not, however, believe that the type of consequence we have
outlined need be inevitable. It is something the media themselves
can do something about. There is no reason why the (apparently)

_
unconscious assumptions that underlie the sense of ’what is news’
need remain unconscious, or the unintended consequences of news
.
reporting should go unrecognized, or that unwitting bias should
remain either ’unwitting’ or ’bias’. It is also not inevitable that the
sort of media ideology that defines the media as passive and impartial
mirrors of society, reflecting but not affecting events, should hold
indefinite sway.
 281
Advice to the communicators from social scientists is seldom
taken kindly, so in conclusion we quote Harold Evans,17 Editor of
the Sunday Times: .

We need a better understanding of their responsibilities from, for want of a

better word, I have to call communications people. We need a discretionary
code of conduct. This is not because bad race relations are less acceptable than
bad housing or bad crime, certainly not because we can hope to gloss over
genuine difficulties, but because experience has shown that the way race is
reported can uniquely affect the reality of the subject itself...
It is not enough to rely on what we call ’news value’. We have to ask why
there is news in a racial or religious identification. What assumptions are we
making about the readers and about society? It is not enough to rely on the
accuracy of the facts assembled. We have to ask whether, as presented, they
represent truth. All facts may be true but some combinations of facts are truer
than others. And any single collection of facts is itself susceptible to dramatically
different treatments. We have had some vivid instances of all these things in
the way race and immigration are reported. This has demolished once and for
all any idea that matters of race can be left to report themselves.

APPENDIX
Attitude Scores of white secondary school children: Scores are derived
from a ten-item Likert scale that we have every reason to believe is
a good measure of attitude to coloured people in general. The
higher the score the more negative the attitude. The scores were
obtained at interview from a combined group of white 11/12 and
14/15 year old children (half and half ), both boys and girls, randomly
selected from fourteen schools--eight from areas of high immigration
in the West Midlands and West Yorkshire, and six from areas of
low immigration-Glasgow, Teesside and Sheffield. Schools were
chosen in pairs from each borough used so that one had a relatively
large number of coloured pupils (at least 10 per cent, and in most
cases 20-40 per cent) and the other similar school, few or none.
The means are given below with Standard Deviations in brackets.
Table 1 .

Type of Area

Low Areas, z
Significance of differences: High versus 4’921, P < 0.0001 two-tailed.
=

High Low Schools, z

versus =
2-347, P 0-02, two-tailed.
=

High Area-Low School versus Low Area-High School, z 1-76, P 0-08, two-tailed.
= =
282
References
1
E. J. B. Rose, et al., Colour and Citizenship (London, Oxford University Press
for the Institute of Race Relations, 1969).
2 N. Deakin, Colour, Citizenship and British Society (London, Panther Books, 1970).
3
For a review of relevant studies and a discussion of the complexity of ’contact’
as a variable see: Y. Amir., ’Contact Hypothesis in Ethnic Relations’, Psychological
Bulletin, Vol. 71, No. 5, (1969).
4 J. M. Trenaman, D. McQuail, Television and the Political Image (London, Methuen,
1961).
5
Jay G. Blumler and D. McQuail, Television in Politics: Its Uses and Influence
(London, Faber and Faber, 1968).
6 E. Cooper, H. Dinerman, ’Analysis of the Film "Don’t be a Sucker": A Study in
Communication’. Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1951).
7 The study was carried out by Dr. Roger Brown in connection with a production
study
8
conducted by Philip Elliott, to be published shortly.
J. T. Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (New York, Free Press, 1960).
9
A good review of work in this tradition is to be found in Klapper (op. cit.). For
general reviews and discussion of mass communications research and theory see:
D. McQuail, Towards a Sociology of Mass Communications (New York, Collier-
Macmillan, 1969); M. L. De Fleur, Theories of Mass Communication (New York,
McKay,
10
1966); J. D. Halloran (Ed.), The Effects of Television (London, Panther, 1970).
See e.g. Klapper (op. cit.), Chapter V.; C. I. Hovland, I. L. Janis, H. H. Kelley,
Communication and Persuasion (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953).
11
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, Bantam
Books, 1968).
12
Ibid., p. 365.
13 P. H. Tannenbaum, ’The effect of headlines on the interpretation of news stories’,
Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 30, (1953), p. 189-197; and P. B. Warr and B. Knapper,
The Perception of People and Events (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1968).
14
J. Galtung and M. H. Ruge, ’The Structure of Foreign News’, Journal of Peace
Research, No. 1 (1965).
15
K. Lang and G. E. Lang, ’The Unique Perspective of Television and its Effect:
A Pilot Study’. American Sociological Review, XVIII (1953), p. 3-12.
16
J. D. Halloran, P. Elliott and G. Murdock, Demonstrations and Communications:
A Case Study. (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970).
17
H. Evans, The Listener (16 July 1970).