Reznet

NAJA Releases Content Analysis

By Faith Price

Mainstream media is covering Native American issues more than ever before, but the quality of that coverage still leaves something to be desired, according to a report released Wednesday by the Native American Journalists Association.

The "Reading Red Report," co-produced with News Watch, analyzed three years of Native American coverage by nine of the nation's largest newspapers. The findings were presented to participants in NAJA's "Covering Native America" workshop at the association's annual convention, held this year in San Diego, Calif.

NAJA board members commissioned the report because they felt that while there was an increase in coverage of Native issues, they were concerned that much of the coverage was shallow and perpetuated stereotypes, said Mary Annette Pember, Ojibway, NAJA president. The analysis confirmed those suspicions, she said.

The report was more of a "qualitative analysis than scholarly research," she said. The goal of the report "was to enter into a meaningful dialogue with mainstream press," Pember added.

Researchers reviewed content appearing between 1999 and 2001 in The Chicago Sun-Times, Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Newsday, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

The report outlined a few ways newspapers could improve their coverage of Native Americans. The recommendations included:

* Covering a larger variety of Native issues
* Educating reporters on Native America
* Using accurate and unbiased language.

NAJA collaborated with researchers from News Watch, a project of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism of the San Francisco State University Journalism Department, to locate and read over 1100 stories that were part of the report.

"The majority of them were fair and objective," said Lori Edmo-Suppah, Shoshone-Bannock, one of the report's contributors. "There were some that were questionable."

Edmo-Suppah emphasized that reporters needed to do more background research. She gave an example of a story about urban Indians in Chicago that failed to mention the relocation policy that brought most of them to the city.

Nearly half of the Native-related stories published in the major newspapers fell into one of three categories- tribal gaming, Native American mascots and depictions of reservation life.

"I was impressed with the amount of stories out there, but I was also a little stunned about the type of things that were covered in some of them that didn't seem to have a lot of depth to them," said Megan Caluza, News Watch researcher and journalism student.

Clarinda (Pies) Underwood-Willis, a Quinault journalist, said she feels organizations like NAJA and Unity Journalists of Color are making an impact in mainstream media when they do things like publishing the "Reading Red Report."

"It may feel like we're inching along, but we're getting there," she said.

Faith Price, Wampanoag, recently earned her M.A. from the University of Montana School of Journalism. She is program coordinator for the McNair Scholars Program at the university.