Melissa Hickman Barlow (1998) investigated the news media's role in the construction of the criminalized portrait of "young black males" by forging connections between the issue of crime and the civil rights struggle, using a qualitative analysis of news articles as the research design. The subjects consisted of cover stories addressing the issue of crime, which were published in the Times and Newsweek magazines between January 1946 and December 1995. Her main research question was whether the news articles' historical coverage of crime from 1946 and 1995 contributed to the creation of the image of the black criminal by blurring the boundaries between crime and the civil rights struggle. The variable of racial bias in the media coverage was measured by the use of a qualitative analysis of new articles.
The main findings were presented in three chronological sections. The articles published during the 1940s and the 1950s served as a baseline comparison with the other periods because of the minimal references to connections between the Civil Rights movement and the problem of crime. By the mid-1960s, the coverage in the news articles demonstrated tremendous media bias as the African American leadership's call for civil rights was blamed for the riots in areas such as Watts. Moreover, the focus shifted from the causes of the African American's community's political agitation to the need to reinforce police power and authority to stop the former from violating the laws in their struggle for civil rights (Barlow, 1998, pp. 163-7). From 1970 to 1995, the news articles had established the linkage of race and crime as an unquestioned assumption. Barlow's (1998) analysis of these research articles thus indicated that the news media had contributed significantly to the construction of the negative image of African American youths as criminals.
Shawn Ginwright and Julio Cammarota (2002) investigated the implementation of a youth ...