Television news, both local and network, fosters anti-black prejudice and perpetuates racial stereotypes. In recent years, the problem has grown worse, not better. So say Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki in their book, The Black Image in the White Mind, and they marshal a good deal of evidence to back up their harsh charge.

Entman and Rojecki, communications professors at North Carolina State University and the University of Illinois at Chicago, respectively, came to their conclusions by studying how the ABC, CBS, and NBC flagship evening news shows portrayed black Americans during four randomly chosen weeks in 1997. They also examined a comparable group of evening newscasts in 1990, and looked at studies of local newscasts in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

The increasing emphasis on crime and violence in local TV newscasts, the authors conclude, "constructs a sense of the prototypical black person that fits with anti-black stereotypes." Local TV newscasts overrepresent stories about black perpetrators and white victims, and underrepresent stories about black victims. They disproportionately show African-Americans under arrest, living in slums, on welfare, and in need of help from the community.

The...