Perceptiveness of U.F.S. students towards racial messages in newspapars

[摘要] In 1998, the Human Rights Commission (HRC) received a request from twoprofessional bodies, The Black Lawyers Association (BLA) and the Association ofBlack Accountants of South Africa (ABASA), to investigate two newspapers. TheBLA and ABABSA claimed that The Star and The Mail & Guardian were allegedlyguilty of racism.The HRC consequently appointed two research authorities, Claudia Braude(qualitative content analysis) and The Media Monitoring Project (quantitativecontent analysis), to investigate these allegations.Several newspaper editors and journalism institutes questioned these findings.According to them, the research was considerably weakened by the absence ofresearch into media consumers (HRC report, 1999). They based theirarguments on the premises that the research focused primarily on the content ofthe respective newspapers, and not on the interpretation of thereaders/audience of the papers. In the final section of the report, the HRCconcluded that the media can be characterised as racist institutions (HRCreport, 1999).By not considering the opinion of the media receivers, the HRC report failed tomake a credible and valid impact. An investigation on the audience'sinterpretation of these racist messages was called for.The population sample of the study was drawn from students between the agesof 18 and 25; the future readers and interpreters of newspaper messages. Thesample included a variety of nationalities in order to determine to what extentrace plays a role in the interpretation of the mass media messages.The content of three newspapers (Mail & Guardian, The Citizen and The Star)was analyzed over a period of a nine weeks based on the same guidelinesdetermined by the MMP report (i.e. quantitative content analysis categories).Newspaper items were analyzed by monitoring items in which race was explicitlystated and implicit to the content.Once the content analysis was completed, examples of specific newspaperarticles, which have been selected on their racist content, were supplied to therespondents. After reading the items, the respondents were asked to complete aquestionnaire based on the selected newspaper articles.An exploration of the media as an institution and the interpretation of therespondents on the other side of the spectrum provided a relative holisticencapsulation of racism in the mediaThe data gathered from the survey indicated a statistical significant differencebetween the responses of the White and the Black respondents. Although all theitems presented to the respondents contained implicit or explicit racist messages,the respondents did not perceive these newspaper items as racist.

[发布机构] University of the Free State