Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

Media Bias and the Legacy of “The Superpredator Myth”: Reclaiming the Narrative

As evidenced especially with “The Superpredator Myth” of the 1990s, conventional American media has been known to tell a slanted tale about Black youth, particularly young Black men like Justyce. In Chapter 18, although Justyce is an accomplished student, we see the news reports on Manny’s death portraying Justyce as a “Thug Extraordinaire.”

As many social scientists and media researchers have shown, this type of misrepresentation is all too common in news reporting. In this exercise, you will have the opportunity to re-write and re-frame damaging and stigmatizing news coverage of crimes involving young Black men.

• First, read this short piece titled “When They See Us: Improving the Media’s Coverage of Black Men and Boys,” which was created by the non-profit The Opportunity Agenda for journalists and media organizations, to help them “produce fuller and more accurate reporting on African-American boys and men while reducing bias and stereotyping in their coverage.”
• Next, select a piece of biased reporting and perform an analysis that pinpoints racially charged and racially biased language, using the “When They See Us” memo as a guide.