The Boston Globe perpetuated a negative stereotype about Dorchester

By Juan Perfetti

“Pietate, Literis, Industria” – Dorchester’s motto.

Dorchester is the biggest neighborhood in Boston, the biggest city in New England. A.k.a Dot has about the population size of the city of Cambridge, the fourth largest city in Massachusetts.

The Dot, founded in 1630 just a few months before Boston, is a spectacular place, full of the iconic “three-decker” buildings, beautiful parks, and an amazing bay area… but the most wonderful characteristic of this neighborhood is its community.

Called “God’s country” by journalist John King, Dorchester is considered the most diverse place in Massachusetts, and this is not only because of the diverse skin colors you can see on the streets but because of the diverse languages, cultures, ethnicities, nationalities its residents have, diverse income levels and even diverse sexual orientation, with one of the largest concentration of same-sex couples in Boston. As you may imagine, this diversity has a strong impact on Dorchester’s local dynamics. From a journalistic perspective, there are infinite stories to be told about the “Mini United Nations,” as some people call Dorchester, which by the way, is also home of the Mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh.

This diversity was one of the reasons we chose to start Dorchester Post, but it wasn’t the only reason.

The other important reason to choose Dorchester, a place that could fit the “inner-city” definition, was the interesting way this neighborhood is portrayed in the mainstream media: on one side (local reality) the place and its people are lovely; but on the other side (what the mainstream media shows) it seems to be mostly evil things, especially violence and crime.

An obsession with the evil

After more than one year running Dorchester Post, we’ve learned a lot about the neighborhood and a little more about the media industry in Massachusetts. Our interactions with the people of Dorchester have made us grow to understand that the best way to create constructive neighborhood-based journalism is with love… and data.

We’ve learned that, in order to make constructive journalism, we need to be as unbiased as possible, so we can do our best to reflect the interest of the people and not the interest of a few.

Therefore, in order to unbiasedly understand the disparity of what Dorchester is vs. how Dorchester is portrayed in the mainstream media, we started by analyzing the official data available about crimes, the one that comes from the Police. The numbers show that Dorchester is not significantly worse on crime or violence compared to other neighborhoods of Boston (when it is justly compared according to their population size).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Dorchester is “heaven on Earth” and there is no crime or violence. There’s a lot to fix, like in many other places. However, the result of analyzing the data raises some questions: Why does the mainstream media show mostly the evil side of Dorchester? Is the mainstream media distorting the reality of what Dorchester really is?

As we may never know the exact answers to the questions above, we decided that, at least, we may find the answer to a related question: How is Dorchester portrayed in the mainstream media?

The Boston Globe

With the limited resources we have, we decided the best shot was to focus our analysis on the Boston Globe. We thought the Globe is an excellent case of study because is the oldest, largest, and leading newspaper in Boston, and -very remarkably- because their headquarters was located in Dorchester for 59 years… So they (must) know the neighborhood.

To see how Dorchester is portrayed in the Boston Globe -as more unbiased as possible- we decided to analyze their own data, based on articles posted on their digital news outlet.

Related:

For promoting “fear and irrationality,” scholars from Harvard, BC, BU, NU condemn the Boston Globe

The data

Through a web scraping system, we created a database with a random sample consisting of 132 Boston Globe stories about Dorchester, posted in their subscription-only digital news outlet (http://bostonglobe.com) from October 2016 to October 2017.

The articles were separated into two different sections of data: headline and body content.

Data summary:

Body content data

• Articles: 132
• Characters: 302,925
• Words: 51,936
• Sentences: 3,351
• Paragraphs: 1,567

Headline’s data:

• Articles: 132
• Characters: 7,076
• Words: 1,111

Non-human analysis

The first (and most relevant) analysis of the data was done through text mining, an unbiased way to see the most repeated terms about Dorchester in articles posted in the Boston Globe.

From this analysis, we got that the top 20 most repeated terms from the sample of 51,936 words are:

1. police (433)
2. street (186)
3. Man (159)
4. officers (150)
5. shooting (113)
6. building (102)
7. people (102)
8. time (86)
9. school (83)
10. shot (80)
11. scene (78)
12. car (77)
13. woman (69)
14. years (69)
15. victim (68)
16. possession (66)
17. court (63)
18. arrested (58)
19. Area (58)
20. firearm (56)

As you can see, from the twenty most used words in the body content of the articles’ sample, 10 terms might directly relate to police terminology: Police, Officers, Shooting, Shot, Scene, Victim, Possession, Court, Arrested, Firearm. The other ten words are difficult to relate to police terminology, but given the context, some of them may also have a relation. This becomes more probable when we analyze the headlines.

The data from the body content analysis got much more relevant when we ran the text mining on the headlines from the same 132 articles. Getting the following list of the 20 most repeated terms on the headlines:

1. man (36)
2. shooting (19)
3. shot (16)
4. gun (16)
5. arrested (14)
6. police (13)
7. killed (10)
8. charges (8)
9. injured (8)
10. woman (8)
11. teen (7)
12. men (7)
13. dead (6)
14. fatal (5)
15. crash (5)
16. expressway (4)
17. charged (4)
18. people (4)
19. arrest (4)
20. drug (4)

This list has bigger relevancy in the analysis because the headlines, as any well-trained journalist knows, have a greater impact on the reader’s perception of the story. As you can see in the list above, from the twenty most repeated words, 14 terms might directly relate to police terminology: Shooting, Shot, Gun, Arrested, Police, Killed, Charges, Injured, Dead, Fatal, Crash, Charged, Arrest, Drug.

Please note that we excluded from the analysis the terms “Dorchester”, “Boston”, “Globe”, numbers, words less than 2 letters, and frequently used words that don’t carry a thematic component (eg. said, are, and, been) because they didn’t give any relevant information.

Human perception of the sample

After the text mining was done, we also ran a reader perception of the articles’ sample. This analysis added another understanding, but in this case, humans were involved, so they may have imprinted their bias while judging the articles. Anyway, we think is significantly important to see the results, and add it to the entire analysis for your consideration.

In order to get the perceptive analysis, we asked 6 unrelated individuals to categorize the articles of the sample as positive, negative, or neutral. We didn’t explain to them what it means a negative, neutral, or positive article, we just wanted their perception.

From this analysis, what we found is that a concerning average of 64.4% of the articles of the sample were perceived as negative, 18.2% were perceived as neutral, and 17.4% were perceived as positive.

The purpose

“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan.

Is everything published about Dorchester in the Boston Globe on the evil side? Of course not, but this analysis -made with a random sample of their own data- shows that there is a pattern.

The purpose of this analysis is not only to show that the Boston Globe’s portrait of Dorchester is significantly negative, something that may have had a negative effect on the development of the community for decades, and definitely helped in the perpetuation of negative stereotypes of the neighborhood. We want to raise awareness about the role of journalism in the shaping of society in the “Global Village” we live in now, particularly from the base of the society, the neighborhoods.

Our analysis of the Boston Globe should not be interpreted as an assumption that they are the only mainstream media that distort Dorchester’s local reality. We don’t have the resources to run a more comprehensive study on this issue, but we think that is exceptionally probable that it affects media outlets across the industry, regardless they are considered  “liberals,” “conservatives,” “left,” “right,” etc. We don’t know the reasons for this distortion, but there are some theories and resources that may help us understand it, to fix the problem… if they want to fix it.

“There is evidence that disadvantaged communities are underrepresented in news media accounts of crime,” explains Boston University professor Shea W. Cronin in his book Neighborhood Context and Media Representations of Crime, adding that “media representations of crime are thus likely to have important implications for the distribution of social control”.

Changes in what-it-seems-to-be a positive direction have happened already, a very iconic was the recent acknowledgment by National Geographic magazine about their “decades of racist coverage”. The Boston Globe itself “recognized” part of the problem when they created a new series called “Boston. Racism. Image. Reality.” just after the most recent Mayoral election in November 2017.

Anyway, is important to highlight that these changes are far from being enough because the distortion of the local realities in the mainstream media industry cannot be only framed as racial or even American, but a much deeper systemic problem.

It is not a secret that the Internet, innovation, and the data-driven economy, are making the traditional media industry collapse as a commercial business. The industry has the freedom to decide if they want to use their power to help raise a better society for the future of humanity; or on the other hand, continue raising the power and the money that comes from unfair generalizations, divisions, stereotypes, prejudice, and conflict. And war.

About the author

Juan Perfetti is a Venezuelan exiled in Massachusetts (USA), social entrepreneur, self-taught journalist, and web developer. Born in Caracas, in 1986, with 10 years of experience in Local Journalism and Local Dynamics, he is the editor of the Shrewsbury Post and the Dorchester Post.

Contact him via email or Twitter @juanperfetti.