Study finds media to be fair

by Abdel Shakur
   
    The Minnesota media has little or no racial bias in stories written about high-profile Minnesota coaches according to a Northeastern University study concerning racial bias in the local reporting of sports figures. However, the report also found that black coaches were not given the same margin of error as their white counterparts.
    The Minnesota News Council held a public discussion Aug. 29 at Macalester College to discuss the study's results.
    The Northeastern study, written by Keith Harrison and Richard Lapchick, selected four coaches whose personal troubles were widely reported by the local media. The analysis compared coverage of two black coaches, Minnesota Vikings coach, Dennis Green, and University of Minnesota basketball coach, Clem Haskins, with that of two white coaches, former U of M hockey coach, Doug Woog and former U of M basketball coach Jim Dutcher.
    After an exhaustive study of the media coverage, observing what they felt to be an appropriate level of news coverage, the researchers found that the allegations against the African American coaches were deemed more serious than those levied against the white coaches.
    Woog, despite violating NCAA regulations by giving a player $500 toward tuition, was eased out of his coaching position into another at the university. Dutcher, who was fired after a repeated pattern of player misconduct, which included everything from charges of credit-card fraud to rape, was rehired as the Gophers basketball announcer. The three players charged with sexual assault, which hastened Dutcher’s resignation in 1986, were acquitted on all counts.
    The allegations against the two black coaches have been considered more systemic, and therefore more serious.
    In addition to staff members being charged with sexual harassment, Green had sexual harassment charges filed against him personally.
    Haskins was implicated in the Gophers academic fraud scandal in 1999, which some consider to be the largest such infraction in NCAA history. Tutor Jan Gangelhoff wrote hundreds of papers for U of M men’s basketball players over several years, but Haskins was held responsible for setting up the barrier between academics and athletics that allowed the cheating to take place.
    The second finding, which also compared the cases with others outside of Minnesota, was that negative news coverage has a disproportionately deleterious effect on black coaches.
    Negative coverage of black coaches, such as former University of California-Berkeley basketball coach, Todd Bozeman, make them all but unemployable after an incident.
    Bozeman, who led the Golden Bears to several NCAA tournament appearances, including a historic upset of reigning champ Duke University, committed several NCAA recruiting violations. Although Bozeman held a very good career record, he has not yet been offered a second-chance position.
    The report notes examples such as basketball coach Steve Harrick, who is white, formerly of UCLA, who was fired for NCAA rules violations and was quickly rehired by another school.
    While the report did not find blatant instances of racist language involving the black coaches, they did find fault with the way that the media framed the stories.
    Scandals involving black coaches were found to follow a predetermined “cultural script" where stories focused on an opportunity "squandered” on a black coach. The report suggests intensive training to educate members of the media to become more aware of their power to influence the perception and stereotyping of African Americans.
    “I look at it shamefully,” said former U of M athletics director McKinley Boston regarding local sports media coverage. “Fairness is not a mantra that the media works under,” Boston said during the three-hour public forum.
    Boston was joined by several panelists who ranged from Macalester professor Mahmoud El Kati to Star Tribune sports writer Jay Weiner. Although most attendees agreed that there might be a problem in the way that black sports figures are represented, there wasn’t consensus on the size of the problem or what should be done about it.
    WCCO news anchor, Don Shelby, said the reluctance of people to have honest, frank discussions about racial bias might be part of the problem.
    “The audience wishes that this would all go away. They would like to be proud of themselves, so we can feel like we’re not as bad as our ancestors were,” Shelby said.
    Weiner described the tone of local sports columnists as decidedly negative. “We have roughly four sports voices and sometimes they tend to be mean-spirited.” Weiner suggested that the problem could be aided by keeping local columnists from having talk-radio shows, which tend to have a more negative tone.
    “On their shows they’re basically doing their columns,” Weiner said. “After a while the columns start to sound like the radio shows. It’s just too much space for them to have to fill.”