The Windy City Hip Hop Project

In 1998, researchers analyzed the opinions of 340 African-Americans and Latinos on how their race was portrayed in local Chicago newscasts. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said their race or ethnic group was depicted inaccurately on the news. The tendency for television newscasts to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects of minority communities was a frequent complaint.

“It’s always who got killed today. We don’t need to hear that. We should hear, ‘This kid excelled today,’ ” one study subject reported.

If the questions posed by at-risk youth to members of the media at a recent youth violence prevention forum put on by the Illinois Department of Human Services are any indication, minority perceptions about the media haven’t changed much in the past decade.

More than 600 young people from at-risk communities gathered May 1 for the youth-organized, youth-led Safety Net Works town hall meeting. The event featured six media panelists who fielded questions from the audience about what they perceived as a lack of positive media coverage in their communities.

“When we’re doing positive things, you’re nowhere to be found,” said one teen. “But when people are getting shot – that’s when you come. I don’t feel like that’s how it should be.”

Safety Net Works program director Xavier Williams explained the psychological impact that negative news coverage can have on youth.

“When you constantly see your community in a negative way, you’re not really going to have strong self-confidence and high self-esteem,” he said. “It sort of makes it seem like, ‘What’s the purpose of trying? I’m already destined for failure.’ ”

While all media panelists conceded that they could do a better job reporting, most emphasized that the youth were equally responsible for getting their positive stories told. Some even grew defensive.

“If you have a great story that you want to get covered, you need to verse yourself in the best way to get it covered,” NBC-5’s Carol Ash said. “You can’t just call the assignment desk at 3 in the morning screaming at me, because I will probably ignore you.”

Responses like these prompted accusations by some teens that the journalists had offered excuses rather than straight answers.

“We probably was overflowing them with the right questions and they didn’t have any answers for them,” said 16-year old Tatiana Woulard, of Roseland, who felt the media had dodged most questions. “A couple of the media people sat up there speechless – like two of them did not open their mouth and speak on none of the questions that people were asking them.”

Woulard said that by featuring more positive stories, she thought the media could be instrumental in helping to promote peace rather than inciting violence in her community. But like many in the black community, she was skeptical that the media had any intention of doing that.

Cortez Spearman, a 20-year-old Roseland resident who also attended the event, was more willing to cut the reporters slack.

“I think they could do a little better, but at the same time, I think they’re doing the best they can. It’s a job.” he said. “They can’t view everything that’s great. They can’t view everything that’s bad.”

Former Sun-Times reporter Curtis Lawrence, who did not attend the event, said that negative perceptions about the media in African-American and Latino communities are nothing new.

“That’s always been the case where there’s been a complaint that there’s not enough positive news and I think that that complaint has some legitimacy,” said Lawrence, now a journalism professor at Columbia College. “I think it seems a little sharper now because there’s just not as much reporting on many things across the board because a lot of the staffs at the papers have been decimated over the years.

At the event, panelist and ABC-7 producer Stephen Lewis explained to students how staff cuts underlay the decline of media coverage in certain neighborhoods.

“As you know, the economy is in the tank,” he said. “Newsrooms, newspapers, television are having to reduce staff, tremendously. And so we can’t be everywhere at all times.”

While Lawrence acknowledged the difficulty that dramatically reduced staffs face in trying to deliver comprehensive news coverage, he wouldn’t use it as a justification.

“That’s not a cop-out or an excuse, still,” he said. “Because even when they had the staffing, often the papers failed to cover the communities in a holistic way – covering, you know, the good things and bad things.”

Anumbus Rah, a community activist and founder of the popular Chicago hip-hop blog, “The Guttahouse,” summed up his thoughts on the panelists’ answers in one word.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Because of the simple fact that they’re passing the buck.”

Neither Rah nor Woulard said they regularly watched the local nightly news.

“There’s a point in time when you get tired of hearing it,” Woulard said. “I done got fed up. I mean, I wanna be happy, you know, I don’t wanna feel like, ‘Oh my god, I could die any moment.’ You don’t wanna think about that 24/7. And that’s what the news makes you think about – the negative. Negative, negative, negative.”

In Rah’s opinion, members of the Roseland community are generally oblivious to the news.

“They’re not really paying attention to the news – they could care less,” he said. “We know that the news is not going to be accurate so we don’t even pay attention to it. Half of the youth don’t even watch the news, never picked up a newspaper, ain’t interested in a newspaper.”

For media professionals, this shift from community-wide anger over coverage to all-out news avoidance may be one of the most troubling take-homes from the event.

It left panelist Brenda Butler wondering what right youth have to complain about news coverage when they aren’t consuming it.

“Teens are criticizing on one end, but they’re not doing their work,” said Butler, a longtime editor at the Chicago Tribune. “They’re not reading as they should. They’re not engaging. And some of the criticisms they talked about, I just wondered, how far would they really go to try to reach someone at a newspaper or at a TV station. Had they really tried to do that?”

Woulard said she had no intention of contacting any news organizations about covering positive stories in her community.

“I know if we do we’re not gonna get a response,” she said, shaking her head. “Because they don’t care. They only care about putting money in their pockets. Let’s say they get a set of shootings. The one with the most violence and the one with the most death will be aired.”

Despite the pervasive negativity surrounding Chicago’s mainstream media coverage of high-crime communities, residents of these communities insist that viable solutions exist which could renew interest in and satisfaction with news coverage.

Rah, Woulard and local hip-hop artist Mikkey Halsted, who performed at the town hall event, all stressed the need for reporters to embed in communities of color to get a more balanced picture of daily life there.

Halsted, also of Roseland, said he believes that much of the violence associated with recent school closings and turnarounds, specifically the beating death of Fenger High School student Derrion Albert, could have been prevented by enterprising reporters.

“They should talk to somebody like me, who’s from the community, who still lives in the community and would not give my community up,” Halsted said. “They would know stuff, like [the problems that would arise] when you shut down Carver High School and turn it into a military academy. I’m from that area. I know that people from Altgeld Gardens have always been at odds with people [in Roseland].

“But, nobody is there to understand the dynamic of the neighborhoods, the gang structure, the community structure, and so it’s like a time bomb just waiting to go off,” continued Halsted. “If the people at the Board of Education don’t do their due diligence, if the media beats them to it, then the media can play the role as the watchdog it should play and not be reactionary, but be proactive. They could shine the light on the problem so somebody will say, ‘Oh, we didn’t think of that. Let us do something about that.’ ”

Lawrence agrees that the only way to accurately report on any community and gain its trust is through embedding and becoming a fixture at community events. He acknowledged that devoting significant time to the type of in-depth reporting Halsted suggested can be challenging, but insisted that it was possible. While covering the Chicago Housing Authority and the demolition of the city’s high-rises earlier this decade, Lawrence said he embedded in the communities he covered.

“I made myself a current fixture at Stateway Gardens and spent a lot of time reporting them and to a lesser extent the Robert Taylor Homes,” he said. “I got to know the people as people in the community and they got to know me, so the only time they saw me wasn’t just when somebody got shot or when the police raided one of the developments. They knew who I was. They had seen me at community meetings. I had done profiles on various people in the community.”

Speaking after the event, panelists Butler and Kathy Chaney both agreed that embedding in communities was essential.

“Clearly more of that needs to be done because there is a distrust or a disconnect between the media and the people in the communities,” said Butler, who currently heads a youth journalism program for CPS students at Columbia College. “More of that needs to happen, those alliances with people in the communities. All the best stories are told that way.”

Breaking down the barriers of fear and distrust that hold back members on both sides of this vital issue will only occur, it seems, when the practice of reporter immersion within a neighborhood is applied wholeheartedly by a significant number of media outlets.

Given widespread budgetary constraints throughout the industry, a future media landscape where major outlets do thorough and in-depth reporting is unlikely.

One hope for the future of comprehensive community storytelling lies with citizen journalism.

“Larger entities can only do so much,” Butler said. “That’s why you see these little experiments going on in communities with community journalism and citizen journalism. Mainstream papers and foundations are funding some of these efforts. People know that there’s a problem there and they’re working on it.”