Blog Post Week 2

Oct. 7, 2025

By definition from dictionary.com, the term “implicit bias” means “an unconscious favoritism toward or prejudice against people of a particular ethnicity, gender or social group that influences one’s actions or perceptions.”

In our Lind book of chapter one, Laying a Foundation for Studying Race, Gender and The Media, we learn that these stereotypes or biases are learned by culture and exposure to particular messages (p. 1-12). In short, this means that even when journalists (and audiences) think they’re being objective, biases can still show through coverages and interpret events.

An example of bias in media coverage is Black criminality. In our Lind readings, we also see that our news outlets overrepresent Black men as criminals, all-the-while underrepresenting them as victims or in a professional field. In our chapter Black Criminality and the Persistence of Stereotypes in the 21st Century (p. 19-23), we see the explanation of how our media commonly draws an association between Black people with danger, which reinforces the harmful and cultural narrative.

Biased content spreads because of agenda setting because the media often talks about race and crime stories. It allows the media to almost manipulate the public to see this as a prioritized social issue. We can draw an example of media manipulating the public to Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party took over all media outlets in Germany when they achieved leadership, ensuring absolutely no media was in opposition to the Nazi belief. Jewish people and Allied country’s citizens were described as “disgusting” and enemies of Germany. This continued to instill fear and hate towards a group of people by controlling the media.

The news media doesn’t do much of challenging inequality, but rather protecting the status quo. Since the media has repeatedly compared marginalized groups to negative traits, the media allows social “tiers” to still exist. As the Lind book tells us in the chapter titled The Social psychology of Stereotypes (p. 13-18), stereotypes exist to simplify a very harsh reality. Although in doing this, they also reinforces prejudice and inequalities.