1 Power and the News Media

THE READERS  
It is not surprising that, as a result of such coverage, the white readers get 
a seriously biased version of ethnic affairs. Because the average readers 

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Political Communication in Action 
21
lack access to alternative definitions of the ethnic situation, and because 
alternative interpretations are hardly consistent with their own best inter-
est, they will generally accept such mainstream definitions as self-evident. 
Conversely, as indicated earlier, the press will again use such 
popular resentment as support for its own coverage. Despite the general 
and official norms against discrimination and racism, few popular trans-
gressions of such norms have so much access to the press as those on 
ethnic affairs. Letters to the Editor that sometimes openly express bla-
tant ethnic or racial prejudices are hardly rejected, certainly not in the 
right-wing press. Interviews with resentful whites in the poor inner 
cities are standard fare of race reporting.
Indeed, the same whites 
would have little access if their ire was directed along class instead of 
racial lines. In other words, popular resentment against immigration or 
minority rights is both newsworthy and welcome, while also allowing 
journalists to publicize opinions that would be inconsistent with their 
more liberal and moderate self-image. What would be strictly local, per-
sonal, or neighborhood opinions thus become national opinions due to 
the vast scope of the mass media. 
Whether intentionally or unwittingly, the press thus plays a cru-
cial role in the reproduction of racism in society. It does so not by simply 
voicing the attitudes of the white public, but by defining the ethnic situ-
ation in such a way that it persuasively influences the public in adopting 
these elite models of ethnic events in the first place. Under specific 
socioeconomic, political, and sociocultural conditions of crisis and 
uncertainty, such models may be further exacerbated by sections of the 
white population in a more overtly racist direction, against which the 
respectable press may then take issue too late and with little energy. 
Once conjured, racial resentment is hard to put back into the bottle. And 
because explicit and consistent antiracism is not the policy of most 
Western newspapers, there is no alternative framework to combat the 
dominant ethnic consensus it has helped to preformulate.