Hero or Threat: How Race Decides the Headline

You don’t need to meet someone to think you already know them. The media can do that for you, and it usually gets the narrative wrong. 

One Story Becomes the Whole Story 

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie named this phenomenon the 'danger of a single story'; when a group is only ever shown through one narrative, it stops feeling like a narrative. In the minds of the audience, it becomes fact, even if it captures only a fraction of the truth.

Adichie used this theory to describe how African stories are flattened to make them palatable to Western audiences. However, the same mechanism operates in how the UK media portrays Black and Minoritised Ethnic (BME) individuals.

According to media psychology, this phenomenon is called 'cultivation theory'. Long-term and repeated exposure to a narrow set of media portrayals (that are often biased) gradually reshapes the audience's perception of reality. Even introducing audiences to the underlying data does not break these perceptions.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 60 studies on media depiction of minority groups confirmed this phenomenon. Negative portrayals consistently worsen attitudes towards outgroups, whereas positive portrayals consistently improve them, regardless of whether or not the data supports the portrayal.

The more consistently a group is depicted a certain way, the more difficult it becomes for the audience to distinguish between fact and framing.

The Shape it takes in the UK

In the UK, this single story has a specific structure. A University of Leeds and Bradford study for the EU Fundamental Rights Agency,analysing over 7,000 UK newspaper articles, found ethnic minorities received relevant coverage in under 8% of them, and that coverage clustered disproportionately around immigration, terrorism, and crime.

According to the same study, minority communities rarely appeared as ordinary participants in everyday stories like school opening, local business, sports, culture, etc. They made an appearance mainly when the story was already framed as a threat. The study found that the problem goes one step further; minority voices rarely appear as speakers or are quoted as experts, even in stories about them. So, the few stories that feature BME communities and individuals are rarely told by the people they’re about. When stories about communities are only told by outsiders, the narrative is left open to further misrepresentation, due to prior biases and consumption of stereotyped depictions.

This is not limited to news framing of crime.  A 2021 analysis of nearly 50,000 UK articles and broadcast clips by the Centre for Media Monitoring found that almost 60% of online news content about Muslims and Islam was negative, and a follow-up 2026 study of 40,000 articles across 30 outlets found roughly 70% associated Muslims or Islam with negative behaviour or aspects. BME individuals keep running into the same pattern; a real subset of coverage becomes the entire story visible in media, turning it into fact for the audience.

This problem becomes more insidious when crimes are defined by the religion of the perpetrator in media coverage. In a May 2026 interview, British-American journalist and media entrepreneur Mehdi Hasan discussed the common practice of using terms like "Islamic rape gangs" or 'Pakistani rape gangs' in UK media, and how this skews public perception by highlighting statistics for one group while ignoring comparable rates elsewhere. This is even though National Police Chief's Council data from 2024 showed that only 3.9% of group-based abusers were Pakistani, while 85% were white. Assistant Chief Constable of NPCC Becky Riggs stated that it is important to address 'all the threat from all races and ethnicities' for child protection and abuse investigation, but constant media coverage has shifted public opinion to believe that this is a threat posed by one minority community only. In the same interview, he noted that the first man killed in America in an anti-Muslim hate crime after 9/11 was actually Sikh. This illustrates how media framing doesn't just harm the community being targeted — it harms minorities more broadly, since audiences rarely distinguish between fact and framing.

Same Act, Different Explanation

The framing gap becomes explicit when you compare how coverage treats a perpetrator depending on their race. A Runnymede Trust analysis of two months of UK newspaper crime coverage in 2007 found that the language, context, and explanation offered for a crime consistently varied depending on whether the perpetrator and victim were Black or white.

As a result of this framing gap, white offenders are more likely to be individualised. Their actions are explained through personal circumstances, mental health, or framed as an isolated incident. Black and minority offenders are more likely to be treated as representative of a wider pattern or threat. Their actions are framed as faults of the entire community rather than a one-off act by an individual. There is rarely any discussion about the offender's socioeconomic conditions or mental health.

This is not unique to Britain. A 2017 analysis of 170 US mass shooting stories across five national newspapers found the words 'terrorist' or 'terrorism' appeared in 83% of stories where the shooter was a person of colour, against 17% of stories where the shooter was white. The same study found white shooters were disproportionately described using the word 'hero', while shooters of colour were more likely to be called 'thug'.

White shooters were also disproportionately framed as mentally ill, shifting attention toward individual crisis rather than a threat posed by an entire group. This is a luxury not afforded to BME individuals; their actions result in an entire community being framed as criminals or dangerous, regardless of individual motivations and struggles. Even though the acts are the same, the media coverage is decided based on the race of the offender.

This framing gap becomes even more problematic when we acknowledge that mental health outcomes for BME individuals are generally worse, often due to socioeconomic disparities, institutional racism, and systemic oppression. BME individuals are also more likely to be exposed to violence or crime at a younger age due to these very same problems. Instead of acknowledging and fighting to reduce these factors, the 'single story' narrative of the media helps to perpetuate them.

The murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old British student stabbed to death in Southampton in December 2025, illustrates how quickly a single case can be conscripted into a wider racial narrative once it enters the media cycle. Despite an appeal from Nowak's family that his death not be used to create further division, the case was seized by several people as an opportunity to advance claims about immigration and "two-tier policing."

Nowak's father said the case was not about racism or religion, and that he wanted his son's death to lead to safer streets rather than "further division, hatred or tension." That request was ignored almost immediately. Bodycam footage of the arrest was amplified by high-profile accounts, protests turned violent, and the case became, within days, a global talking point about race and policing rather than a local story about a family's loss.

The Nowak case shows that the single-story mechanism doesn't require malicious intent from a single outlet. Once footage or a headline reduces a specific act to a symbol, the people most affected by it lose control over how their own tragedy is used.

Why This Calcifies

Cultivation theory says that if the only stories a population repeatedly sees about a group are stories of threat, deviance, or crisis, perception will calcify around that narrow story, regardless of how unrepresentative it actually is. When the same act receives a different explanation framework depending on the race of the perpetrator, the assumptions feel factual.

As we shift from traditional forms of media to digital and social media, algorithmic amplification takes the narrative further. The initial framework of coverage, language, and tone was set by legacy coverage. Studies have shown us that social media algorithms prioritise hostile, threat-coded, negative content because they are emotionally driven; so, they are incentivised to push this content whether the audience is interested or not.

A pre-registered 2024 experiment on Twitter's ranking algorithm found it amplified emotionally charged and hostile content directed at BME individuals, immigrants, and minorities, beyond what a neutral chronological feed would show. Additionally, the study found that Twitter was pushing this content even when users said they did not opt for it or even wanted to see it. However, people's worldview continues to be skewed.

What This Means in Practice

The essential thing to remember is that none of this requires malicious intent from any individual journalist or editor to produce a biased population-level effect. Some journalists are incentivised to push certain narratives based on the political leanings of the media owners. However, even this is not required to have the kind of impact we are talking about.

Cultivation theory describes an aggregate, statistical process – small, consistent framing choices, repeated across thousands of stories over years, shift the baseline assumptions an entire audience carries into every subsequent interaction with a member of that group. Widespread unlearning and relearning campaigns will have to be organised to reverse the effect of decades of underlying stereotyped coverage.

This is the actual danger of a single story. It is not about one biased article, or one media outlet incentivised to create hostility. It is much more subtle and has been reinforced by legacy coverage and algorithmic amplification, so now the narrow story stands for the whole story, and the audience did not even notice when the substitution took place.

The positive thing is that cultivation works in both directions. To counter the negative effects of the single-story phenomenon, we must ensure that minorities are present in stories other than those about crime, deviance, and crisis. BME individuals must be included in coverage of ordinary news, as well as positive stories. Media outlets must keep a check on the tone and language used when a BME individual is part of the story. Coverage of crime should be fair; individual acts must be written and spoken about as just that, instead of framing it as the tendency of an entire community. Digital and social media platforms must take another look at their algorithms; algorithmic amplification should not prefer content that is emotionally charged or incites hostility. We need more minority voices speaking as sources and experts. Most importantly, we need to have more BME journalists and editors, so that BME individuals are in the room when decisions are made about how their stories are told to the world. We must move away from the single story and attempt to give the audience the whole picture.