Content area
Full Text
Mary Ann Weston. Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century Press. Westport, cr: Greenwood Press, 1996. 190 + x pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $55.00.
This work examines how the mainstream press has portrayed Native Americans in the twentieth century and how that portrayal has changed with the times. Despite the slightly misleading title, the book contains no photographs or other illustrations and confines its analysis to literary images. Mary Ann Weston, a specialist in multicultural issues in journalism, journalism history, and reporting and writing at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, not only analyzes images of Indians, but also includes surveys of twentieth-century media history and U.S. Indian history to provide context for her analysis. Weston argues that the limitations of news gathering and reporting contributed to the media's perpetuation of inaccurate stereotypes, which, by virtue of their inclusion in news stories, have been lent the weight of fact.
Weston organized her study by decade, beginning with the 1920s. Throughout the century, she found stock images, "good Indians" (the noble savage) and "bad Indians" (the "uncivilized" or degraded) incarnated according to mainstream society's sentiment toward Indians. In the 1920s, the "good Indian," personified in media depictions of Puebloans with an emphasis on their similarities to...