The negative tendency

In my high school's attendance office there was a poster of a cat covered in spaghetti. The caption underneath said: "When I do something right no one remembers, but when I do something wrong no one forgets." This is a similar idea to the statement made in the article The Racial Chameleon. Entman and Rojecki state that "psychologists have found more generally that people remember negative information most readily." This is very true in regards to the issue of racism. The media has portrayed blacks and Latinos as being the epicenter for criminal action. If you watch any crime investigation show such as CSI, Law and Order, or NCIS to name a few, you will find cases where more times than not the criminal is black or Latino. Even though I know many wonderful black and Latino people, I still clench my purse when I pass a stranger of color on the street. I have noticed that even on my safe college campus I never bat an eye if I pass a white female, but as soon as I see a black male student coming my way my body tenses. As the article Culture, Media, and the White Mind: The Character of Their Contect states, it is due to schemas and frames that these notions are developed. These are the basis for the development and storing of preconceived knowledge. They are our sources of storing and referring to previous experiences or learned information. I have never personally been attacked, but the encounters in the news and in the paper are enough to invoke caution in my step. Are the media solely respnsible for this unnconscious reaction? Stuart Hall comments on this very question in his article The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media. "The media are not only a powerful source of ideas about race. They are also one place where these ideas are articulated, worked on, transformed, and elaborated." This is a straightforward answer to the question of the Media's power over racial tendencies and perceptions in society. It is through the various sources of medium that racial ideologies are formed.