Mondaire Jones, a Democratic Congressman from New York’s 17th district, recently retweeted a post by Sherrilyn Ifill, the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The tweet included a video clip of MSNBC anchor Brian Williams discussing a story about police brutality against Black Americans.
The clip shows Williams stating that he always knows when he is reading an article about police violence against Black individuals because there is one sentence that inevitably appears: “He was unarmed.” Ifill commented on the tweet with the statement, “I just keep reading until I get to this part. I always know it’s coming.”
This simple yet powerful observation highlights an all-too-familiar pattern in media coverage of incidents involving police violence against Black people. The fact that an unarmed victim is often mentioned as if it were expected or unsurprising speaks volumes about how normalized and pervasive these incidents have become.
It also points to the larger issue of implicit bias in media reporting. Journalists may not even realize they are perpetuating harmful stereotypes by consistently mentioning an individual’s lack of weapons as if it were somehow relevant to their innocence or guilt.
This phenomenon has been documented in numerous studies analyzing media coverage of police shootings and other forms of racial injustice. In one study published in the journal Communication Research, researchers found that news articles describing White victims tended to focus on their positive qualities while articles about Black victims emphasized negative aspects such as criminal history or drug use.
As calls for social justice and systemic change continue to grow louder across America, journalists must be aware of their own biases and strive for more balanced and accurate reporting. Only then can we hope to achieve true equality both in our society at large and within our nation’s newsrooms.