Abstract
Newspapers believe the ethnic composition of newsrooms should mirror the society that journalists seek to understand and record. Yet little research has addressed how readers react to the ethnicity of a journalist. In two experiments manipulating ethnicity in bylines and good news/ bad news treatment, an Hispanic author was highly likely to be associated in readers' minds with a glowing article about Hispanics, but was unlikely to be credited with authorship of a positive article about Anglos. The Hispanic author was evaluted no differently than was the Anglo-American author of comparable skill. Negative treatments of news were regarded as better stories than the positive treatments.
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