Journalists’ Apprehension of Being Politically Correct A Source of Racial Stereotyping of Street Harassment Perpetrators in the Press

While racialized stereotyping in mass media is well-documented, sociological analysis of the journalistic practices and norms contributing to the production of such representations remains underdeveloped. We study these by analyzing media reporting on street harassment in the Netherlands, which frequently mentioned the racialized profiles of perpetrators. Existing research has proposed two major causes of racialized stereotyping in the press: (1) journalists’ passive and unreflective reproduction of popular racialized stereotypes and (2) commercialization of the press as favoring the provocative racialized discourse of right-wing populists. Based on content analysis of press coverage and interviews with Dutch journalists and the actors they reported on—politicians, activists, and others involved in the public problem of street harassment—we identify apprehension of political correctness as a third cause of racialized framings in the press. Specifically, we show how many journalists considered addressing the question of whether racialized men are overrepresented as perpetrators to be a way of avoiding complicity with politicians and other powerful actors who allegedly avoid sensitive questions about race and migration. This article proposes a theory of “apprehension of political correctness” as a contribution to scholarship on journalistic practice and racialized stereotyping in the press.