Chi Trib don't know black men?

Google something like "Facial Recognition Studies" and you'll get over a million hits. Quoting from one:

Social psychologists have long noted that our ability to recognize individual faces varies depending on the racial identity of the perceiver and the face being recognized—subjects recognize faces from their own racial group with greater accuracy than faces from other racial groups. One plausible explanation for this same-race memory advantage is that people tend to have more experience with faces from their own race and thus develop expertise at their recognition. Support for this idea comes from the finding in US culture that the same-race advantage is greater for European-Americans than African-Americans, who tend to have more interactions with members of other races by virtue of being a minority.


http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n8/full/nn0801_775.html

 

Thanks jgmacg...good stuff. I'm heading to the site right now.

However...does anyone think that the simplest solution here would be to take extra time to check before reflexively IDing a photo?

 

I know what you're saying, but that example is a little ridiculous.

I can just see the conversation in the newsroom. "Hey, token black copy editor! Would you mind coming over here and helping us identify this B-list celebrity. We're certain you're familiar with him. After all, he's black and so are you."

 

Bingo.

After all, we're talking about the same paper who misidentified a retired janitor riding his bike as Joey "The Clown" Lombardo -- the reputed former head of the Chicago mob -- in a cutline. Trib officials were outraged when the old man had the "chutzpah" to sue them for libel.

Careless? Yes.

Stupid? Absolutely.

Racist? Not hardly.

 

Whoa, whoa, hold on here for a second.

Lew Freedman, who is white (and who I know), might have written the stories, but, knowing a little something about journalism the way I do, I seriously doubt if he picked the photos to run with the stories. You know how I know that? Because if he did pick photos, he would have picked the right ones because he talked to these players. Had the desk shown him the photos, he would have said, "No, wait, those aren't the guys!" (I'd wish the desk would do that more often.)

Dan McGrath, who is also white (and who I also know), took the fall for the mistakes, which he should have. Maybe it would be a good idea for the photo editor to e-mail reporters the photos they are running with stories. But nowhere does it mention the ethnicity of the photo editor who selected the wrong art to run with the stories. Maybe he/she was white -- or maybe not.

 

Well, it certainly wasn't that blatant, but I have seen situations exactly like that.

 

Hey, guys, one of the photos in question was a wire photo that came across misidentified. How many papers check every wire photo to make sure it's really who it says it is? I dare say even most NBA fans -- black or white -- wouldn't recognize Dee Brown or Kevin Gamble if they stepped on him.

 

Sounds like da man is in favor keeping Kevin Gamble down.

(I keed.)

 

The first situation can happen to anyone. Having recently suffered through that, the paper shouldn't have it happen again.

Re: the Eddie Johnson mixup, someone at the Chicago Tribune should be familiar with the Eddie Johnson of Illini fame.

Seems like a recurring problem; hardly racist though.

 

So this guy, undercover black man, has a regular (not quite weekly) feature called Misidentified Black Person of the Week on his blog. Who knew it was this prevalent?

 

Crap like this happens at newspapers across the country everyday. The Trib, however, is held to a higher standard. Their minority hiring practices and reaction to minority-related stories has been, at best, awful through the years. It's time for a change.

 

Boots, that might well be true -- I know nothing of the Tribune and its inner workings -- but that's an entirely separate issue from the one this thread is about. The issue here is general sloppiness and incompetence, not racism. If they had hired more minorities and paid more attention to minority-related stories, they still wouldn't have correctly identified Dee Brown or Marcus Heard unless they ran a tighter overall ship. The problem in those cases was attention to detail (and, apparently, a wire screwup in one case).

And, BTW, that blogger obviously knows little about how newsrooms work if he's blaming the writer for any of this.