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Despite Advances, Stereotypes Still Used by Media

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Even the most severe critics of the nation’s news media concede that there is now much greater sensitivity in the portrayal of minorities.

But ethnic stereotypes continue to appear.

A Los Angeles Times story last year described a Chinese poker player as “inscrutable” and as a “classically serene Asian,” for example, and a Times fashion layout showed a Latino model, wearing a Latino designer’s clothes--walking alongside a graffiti-scarred wall.

“Do all Latinos live surrounded by graffiti?” asks Alan Acosta, assistant hiring editor at The Times.

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Racially insensitive and offensive language contributing to harmful stereotypes also remains common:

* The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Time and Newsweek--among others--have used the words “invade” or “invasion” when speaking of the influx of Asian-American immigrants or Asian-American business acquisitions in this country; Asian-Americans say this invokes damaging images and memories of World War II.

* The Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Tribune, among others, have used the word “aliens” to describe immigrants who are here illegally; Latinos say this word makes them seem inhuman--strange outcasts from another world. They would rather be called “illegal immigrants” or “undocumented workers.”

* When a woman jogger was beaten and raped in Central Park last year, the New York Times and Washington Post (among others) called her black attackers a “wolf pack,” but these papers used no such bestial imagery to describe the whites who murdered blacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst.

* Television sports commentators, in particular, speak of white athletes as being “smart” or “brainy” or as having worked hard; black athletes are often described as “natural” or “pure” athletes, “gifted” with great speed or strength or jumping ability. These formulations ignore the “natural” physical abilities of many white athletes and the demonstrated intelligence of many black athletes--as well as the hours and years of practice many black athletes put in developing their skills.

Andrea Ford, a black reporter at the Los Angeles Times, recalls that when Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, a white colleague at the Detroit Free Press, where she then worked, wrote a caption for a photograph of Tutu dancing in celebration.

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The caption said Tutu “broke into a jig.”

Ford says she tried to explain that “jig” was a derogatory term for “black” and that it was both ignorant and insulting to suggest that a native of a country with the rich folk dance traditions of Africa would break into an Irish dance. Her arguments initially were rejected, Ford says, and she had to appeal to a higher-ranking editor before prevailing.

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