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Is White-Collar Crime White? Racialization in the National Press Coverage of White-Collar Crime from 1950 to 2010

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2023

Marina Zaloznaya ,
Alexandria Yakes  and
James Wo
Marina Zaloznaya
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Iowa, US, and the Co-Founding Director of the Corruption in the Global South Research Network. Dr. Zaloznaya’s research and teaching focus on the political dimensions of white-collar crime and corruption. Dr. Zaloznaya thanks Andrew Wendell and the team of the University of Iowa undergraduate researchers for their help with data collection and analysis. Email: Marina-zaloznaya@uiowa.edu.
Alexandria Yakes
Affiliation:
US Department of Labor in the Employee Benefits and Security Administration. Email: alexandriayakes@gmail.com.
James Wo
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Iowa, US. Email: james-wo@uiowa.edu.
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Abstract

While much is written about racialization of street criminals in the American media, racial dimensions of the media framing of white-collar crime remain underexplored. To address this issue, we analyze the coverage of bribery, electoral fraud, tax evasion, and insider trading in five national newspapers between 1950 and 2010. Drawing on John Hagan’s (2012) work, we trace the racialization of white-collar crime in the press back to Richard Nixon’s presidency and the beginnings of the War on Drugs. We also find that race is a significant predictor of offenders’ individualization, or the length of description accorded to them by writers. We argue that by individualizing black offenders significantly more than white perpetrators, reporters connote their oddity in the context of white-collar criminality and contribute to their collective framing as an exception. Finally, we find that black perpetrators receive significantly more positive coverage than white offenders, which serves to further underscore their distinctiveness from stereotypical black criminals and their similarity to nonthreatening (white) Americans. These findings support Hagan’s (2012) argument that racialization of street crime is mirrored by the collective framing of elite economic crime as white and, by extension, a nonthreatening side effect of American capitalism.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 1117 - 1137
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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