“They all look alike....”

[flowomo]

Here's an interesting letter from David Mills to Jim Romenesko's site at Poynter Online, the website for journalists:

(snip)
From DAVID MILLS: Ever notice how black people are often misidentified in newspaper and magazine photo captions? I mean famous black people. It’s a weird phenomenon.

In last month's James Brown tribute issue of Rolling Stone, there's a photo on page 48 with this caption: "Brown with Sharpton in 1974.” Alas, the man seated next to J.B. isn’t the Rev. Al Sharpton; it’s trombonist Fred Wesley....

"Forget how widely exposed Rev. Al’s face is. Fred Wesley is one of the great musicians, arrangers and bandleaders in funk and soul music going back 35 years. The editors of Rolling Stone should know what he looks like.

"Reuters last month moved a photo of the female stars of “Grey’s Anatomy” at the Golden Globe Awards. The caption identified the black woman standing in the middle, holding the trophy, as “writer Shonda Rhimes.” Wrong. It was actress Chandra Wilson. Reuters moved a correction....

"Such misidentification can occur within the body of a story. The AP moved the following correction on January 6: “In a Jan. 3 story about the death of former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, The Associated Press misidentified a singer who appeared in a concert in Jerusalem to mark Israel's 30th Independence Day. The singer was Leontyne Price, not Lena Horne.”

Sometimes it happens in the story and in the photo caption. Check out this double-whammy correction published in the New York Times on November 6, 2004:

“A review of the concert film ‘Fade to Black’ in Weekend yesterday misidentified a star appearing in the film with the rapper Jay-Z. She was Foxy Brown, not Lil' Kim. Because of an editing error, a picture caption misidentified the singer dressed all in white. He was R. Kelly, not Jay-Z.”

I have observed this phenomenon first-hand. In the late 1980s, as a feature writer for the Washington Times, I wrote a piece about a cable-TV movie, and I’d interviewed its star, Avery Brooks. Insight magazine reprinted the story, and ran a photo of co-star Samuel L. Jackson over the caption "Avery Brooks." Imagine my embarrassment.

I confronted an editor about this, and she kind of laughed it off. I don’t think Insight even bothered to run a correction. At that point, Sam Jackson wasn't the movie star he is today. But black folks in D.C. were seriously digging Avery Brooks as Hawk on “Spenser: For Hire.” So any black person who picked up that magazine and saw that error probably felt a little pinprick of insult. “Guess they think we all look alike.”

That’s what’s so amusing and/or annoying about this phenomenon. It links to that old racist trope of “they all look alike.” And I simply can’t imagine the media so frequently misidentifying white people of similar status (nor can I find evidence of it)...."
(snip)

Full letter and more examples at: http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=12289

[izzie]

1. Since the subject is brought up, any one looked at who runs

the govt. Now they do all look like.

[BoneDaddy]

2. I would be interested to see how many

caucasions, asians, hispanics are misidentified in media. My guess is that this has less to do with racism and more to do with incompetance or basic mistakes.

I mean when I read my multiple papers, there are always some sort of apology for people being called by different names, incorrect info and not uncommonly, a wrong name under a picture.

[badgerpup]

3. I was told that we caucasions all look pretty much alike

by a very nice Vietnamese lady.
She mistook me for the other woman with whom I was having lunch...and our only resemblance was that we are big women....decade difference in age , dark w/glasses, blonde w/o glasses, and we weren't dressed anything NEAR alike...but we looked the same to her.

Felt very strange to be on the receiving end of that perception...:wow:

[BoneDaddy]

6. I mean there is some truth to that

I work in a very multicultural school with kids from all over the globe. One of the indian kids I worked with said the same thing, we all laughed.

[flowomo]

4. as Mills himself says:

"And I simply can’t imagine the media so frequently misidentifying white people of similar status (nor can I find evidence of it)...."

remember, he's talking about working journalists here, not the general public

[Karenina]

5. .