What’s Wrong and What’s Right
About Press Coverage of
Interethnic Conflict:
Examples from the
Los Angeles Riots of 1992

By Hemant Shah

News media are an important source of cultural production and information. Their representations of the social world provide explanations, descriptions, and frames for understanding how and why the world works as it does. In their coverage of race, news media are animated by certain usually unstated assumptions and expectations related to racial differences. Collectively, it’s a common sense understanding about race and race relations that we might call “racial ideology.” Racial ideology provides definitions of what race is, circumscribes its meanings, and suggests ways to classify the world in term of racial categories.

My contention is that racial ideology informs news media coverage of interethnic or interracial conflict. But mainstream and minority media view, and therefore cover, race and race relations differently. In this paper, I’ll compare mainstream and minority newspaper coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. I provide some specific examples from the Los Angeles Times news coverage of the Los Angeles riots of 1992 that show the ways racial ideology is deployed by the paper. Then, I show some examples form the minority press (Los Angeles Sentinel, KoreAm Journal, Korea Times) coverage of the LA riots to show a different way racial ideology is deployed. Finally, I comment on which press did a better job of covering interethnic conflict in LA and extrapolate a model of reporting that might lead to better coverage of interethnic conflict.