When I went to work as a copy editor for the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s, I was informed of its explicit policy of crime coverage. If a crime occurred in the black ghetto of West Baltimore, we ignored it unless at least two people died, but any serious crime in the middle-class or wealthy areas of North Baltimore rated a full story, sometimes on the front page.
Recently the Albuquerque's Journal ran a lengthy front page article about the injury of one man in a drive-by shooting in a normally safe middle-class area of Albuquerque.
How often does the Journal run a front-page story about a drive-by shooting in the largely poor and Hispanic South Valley in which no one died?
At almost the same time as the middle-class shooting, several residents of Albuquerque's International District (a.k.a. the Combat Zone, largely inhabited by impoverished immigrants) heard gunshots, and one resident said a man had been shot in the buttocks. I could find no media report of the incident.
Some things have changed about reporting during the past 50 years. The Sun, for example, never referred to blacks as “Mr.” in the 1960s but always did so for whites, a policy they abandoned a decade later.
But as the enduring biases of crime reporting show, much remains the same. The causes are fairly obvious and not entirely irrational.
People with black or brown skin are in large degree poor. People without money seldom have influence or power. The powerless do not affect the lives of large numbers of other people; they are atomized, anonymous. Their lives are worth less than are others.
In addition, minorities and the poor are more likely than middle-class Anglos to be both victims and perpetrators of crime, and the old man-bites-dog rubric still applies: it's the unusual event that grabs the attention of editors and audiences.
This kind of media bias, which used to be accepted with little more than a cynical shrug, has become the focus of a social movement called media literacy.
A small but notable Albuquerque organization, the Media Literacy Project, has been pursuing such issues for 20 years during which it has spun a widespread web that has taken executor director Andrea Quijada to such far-flung outposts as Venezuela, Tunisia and, most recently, Uganda.
With three employees, a couple of students and a budget of under $400,000 (its biggest contributor is the Ford Foundation), the organization has leveraged small resources to make a significant impact.
It hold seminars and conferences, instructs students and teachers about the media, makes videos (in its own small production studio), sells teaching curricula, and reaches out to groups throughout New Mexico and beyond.
Its focus is on the media's impact on the young, people of color, the poor and rural communities—groups that add up to a considerable majority of New Mexicans. But to a significant degree, what affects these groups, affects all of us, because in failing to give us a clear and accurate picture of our world, the media shrivel our own lives, denying us the ability to know reality and react to it without ignorance or exaggerated fears.
I spent an hour and a half last week in the offices of the Media Literacy Project on the campus of Albuquerque Academy, talking with Quijada and Shana Heinricy, interim communications and marketing director.
Quijada returned in May from a couple of weeks in Uganda, a visit that was a follow up to internships that two Uganda journalists spent with the Albuquerque project under U.S. State Department auspices.
Uganda has been making headlines worldwide because of journalistic turmoil. A newspaper in the capital published an accusation by a retired general that the longtime president was grooming his son to succeed him. The government reacted by occupying the premises of two daily newspapers and two radio stations. After 11 days of street and journalistic protests, the soldiers left and allowed the newspaper to resume publication, but only because it promised to exercise self-censorship of a list of topics that might displease the government.
“I met with journalists in Kampala, Uganda's capital,” Quijada recalled, “and they talked about how they couldn't say what they wanted to, about what they were up against. But they said this is our job even if it gets scary—you can't put down your pen just because you get a threat.”
The crisis in Uganda, is related to the core concerns of the Media Literacy Project. “Our mission is to advance education and advocacy for media justice,” said Quijada, who has worked for the project for 11 years. “Our vision is a world where all people and communities have affordable access to utilize any and all media tools to secure their self-determination and a healthy media landscape.”
She continued, “We promote the tools in media literacy for them to deal with their own communities whether in Kampala or the South Valley.”
To achieve this vision, the project tries to “enable people to analyze, evaluate and create messages in a wide variety of media.”
She gave an example of class she had held the previous day under contract with an Oakland, Calif., group called the Center for Media Justice. They looked at four or five stories in different newspapers covering the same event: a rat biting a baby in New York. They also “deconstructed” two contrasting TV reports on immigrant driver's licenses.
They asked questions such as what are we being told and not being told, who is in these stores and who is left out.
The goal, Quijada said, is “turning passive media consumers into critical thinkers and media creators.”
Another of the group's projects is to help draft and pass a new hate speech ordinance for the city of Albuquerque that would “hold the media accountable for things that aren't acceptable for our community.” However, they have not yet figured out how to do this without raising the specter of censorship.
The effort, only now in its infancy, is likened to Quijada's indignation at the way “race baiting” and insulting references to women are proliferating on line. She cites Facebook postings that include vicious and obscene references to women. A group called Women Action in Media is working with Facebook to create a new hate speech policy.
A nationwide effort the Albuquerque group is involved in is trying to make it easier for convicts to communicate with their families and others outside prison walls. New Mexico, she said, is one of only eight states that do not levy hefty fees for prisoners making phone calls.
Even as the number and reach of professional media outlets shrinks, amateur, audience-generated content on the web is exploding exponentially. Thus while less professionally collected, written, assembled and disseminated news is available, more voices can be heard contributing wider and sometimes more balanced perspectives to the media universe.
One of Quijada's passions is seeking alternatives to “corporate media,” such as the free neighborhood papers published by local communities in Venezuela. “The biggest problem is that the media are profit driven,” she said, approvingly citing Britain and Japan as governments that help subsidize media.
The issues the Media Literacy Project is dealing with are hard ones. Most have no easy answers; some may have no satisfactory answers at all. But that such a group has survived for 20 years and continues to work for “marginalized people” speaks well of American diversity.
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