Negative Representation

How the News Misleads

"The news media has been charged with using a variety of techniques to mislead audiences. These include: (1) "tunnel vision," which includes "providing little breadth or perspective and narrowing one's perception of what is newsworthy to what has been newsworthy in the past or to what one was looking for in the first place.""

- Judy Cohen & John Richardson, "Pit Bull Panic,"

The videos below are just a few of the many, many, many news negative, sensationalized clips available on YouTube after searching "pit bull news." It's almost like the news wants to create a melodramatic caricature for pit bulls so that they have a quick, easy story they can fall back on if they need to. In fact, most of these stories are maximum five minutes long, though some of them are as short as a minute. There is absolutely no way someone can communicate all the nuances involved in a dog attack, namely factors like the environment the pit bull was raised in (i.e. previous abuse), their temperament (i.e. are they good around other dogs, children, cats, etc.), and others. According to Judy Cohen and John Richardson, "the Pit Bull has been portrayed in the past one and a half decades as "the archetype of canine evil, predators of the defenseless"" (285), partially because these news sources are on a time crunch to communicate the information in the most engaging way possible. However, the public looks to the news as a reliable source of information (for better or worse) so when these media sources spread videos like the ones shown above and act as if all pit bulls act like these individual dogs, a stereotype or an implicit bias is created surrounding how people view these animals. And then, that stereotype or bias becomes fact due to the perceived reliability of news channels.

KCAL News - "Caught on Video: Police K-9 Attacked by Pit Bull In Anaheim"

KPRC 2 Click2Houston - "2 large pit bulls shot in Katy area after attacking 3 people, including HCSO deputy"

KTLA 5 - "Compton pit bull breeder mauled to death by his own dogs"

FOX 26 Houston - "Pit bull attack leaves elderly Harris County man in critical condition"

A&E - "Delivery Driver Saves Homeowner & Dog from Pit Bull Attack"

KSAT 12 - "Pit bull attack seriously injures two children at West Side apartment complex, SAPD says"

NewsNation - "Family: Mother tried to shield children killed in Memphis pit bull attack"

Inside Edition - "Teen Hero Rescues 6-Year Old Attacked by Pit Bull"

ABC7 - "Violent dog attack in Simi Valley turns deadly after owners intervene"

Stereotypes of this sort (i.e. "tunnel vision") are closely related to implicit bias, a concept debated by psychologists and philosophers alike. Christiane Merritt explains implicit bias in terms of two types of biases: those stemming from associations and those from propositions. The association account is described as "evaluations of social groups that are largely outside of conscious awareness or control [...] typically thought to involve associations between social groups and concepts or roles such as "violent," "lazy," "nurturing," assertive,"" (Merritt 26) and so on. In pit bull's case, the breed has been associated with being violent, temperamental, and as predators.

The proposition account is references as a theory of implicit bias used by a minority but influential group of scholars. While the proposition account is similar, there are two main differences when compared to the association account: (1) "associative links must be created and strengthened over multiple exposures to stimuli, while propositional knowledge can be acquired through one-shot learning" (Merritt 29), and (2) "while associations merely link two concepts, encoding no information about how the concepts are related, propositions specify relationships" (Merritt 29). For pit bulls, people are constantly being exposed to media that frames them as attackers of the defenseless by showing graphic clips of them mauling children, intense post-attack comparisons of the victims' faces or bodies, and other clearly skewed tactics for sensationalization purposes.

Merritt also proposes measures such as "strengthening new, less biased associations" (25) or "exposure to arguments that undercut those biases" (25) in order to intervene, reduce, or eliminate our tendency to perceive biased information or opinion as fact. By educating yourself beyond the anecdotal evidence of violent pit bulls and exposing yourself to some pro-pit bull arguments you can balanced the types of information you're receiving and avoid limiting your understanding to one perspective.