Another Disaster: An examination of portrayals of race in Hurricane Katrina coverage

Abstract

This study uses a content analysis to explore portrayals of race in newspaper photographs from four national newspapers covering Hurricane Katrina. The study found that the photographic coverage of Katrina, while ostensibly sympathetic, reinforced negative stereotypes about African-Americans, while conversely depicting Caucasians in powerful roles. The findings support previous studies in literature on stereotyping and modern racism in news coverage.

The authors want to thank S. Shyam Sundar, the founding director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, for his guidance.

Notes

The authors want to thank S. Shyam Sundar, the founding director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, for his guidance.

¹There are missing days due to the unavailability of some issues, which explains the N of 1073 in Figure 1. The missing samples comprise less than two percent of the whole population.

²Contact the authors for a copy of the codebook.

³Newspapers in September of 2005 were not available at that time to the coders, otherwise, we would have randomly chosen our pretest samples.