The Media's Distorted View Of Black Families In America

In this Majority Report clip, communication professor Travis L. Dixon joins the program to discuss the distorted view that the media gives African American families.

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---If all you knew about black families was what national news outlets reported, you are likely to think African Americans are overwhelmingly poor, reliant on welfare, absentee fathers and criminals, despite what government data show, a new study says.

Major media outlets routinely present a distorted picture of black families — portraying them as dependent and dysfunctional — while white families are more likely to be depicted as sources of social stability, according to the report released Wednesday by Color of Change, a racial justice organization, and Family Story, an advocate of diverse family arrangements.

“This leaves people with the opinion that black people are plagued with self-imposed dysfunction that creates family instability and therefore, all their problems,” said Travis L. Dixon, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducted the study.---