ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand the potential influence of stereotypes on news reporting, including how sources are influenced by stereotypes, and explains how to apply techniques to control the use of stereotypes in journalism. Stereotypical stories may be easy to write, but they are rarely as surprising or as vivid as real life. Stereotyping is the application of beliefs about the attributes of a group to judge an individual member of that group. People create those mental pictures, or stereotypes, to simplify perception and thinking processes. Stereotypes can be thought of as a particular type of role schema “that organizes one’s prior knowledge and expectations about other people who fall into certain socially defined categories. Despite their bad reputation, stereotypes are integral to the way our minds process information. Some basic attributes of stereotypes are: pervasiveness; predictability; positives; and partly true. News sources are no different from journalists in their cognitive habit of stereotyping others.
