Research by a Penn State media studies expert reveals that memory of crime stories with the suspects' pictures reflects racial stereotypes, and African-Americans are especially likely to be mistakenly identified for perpetrators of violent crimes, an issue being discussed nationally by community and law enforcement groups. "When readers were asked to identify criminal suspects pictured in stories about violent crimes, they were more prone to misidentify African-American than White suspects. The same readers, to a far lesser degree, tended to link White offenders more with non-violent crime," says Mary Beth Oliver, associate professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Laboratory at Penn State. The Penn State researcher and her co-author, Dana Fonash, assistant director of development with The Second Mile in State College, Pa., published their findings in the paper, "Race and Crime in the News: Whites' Identification and Misidentification of Violent and Nonviolent Criminal Suspects," which appeared recently in the journal Media Psychology. For the full story by Paul Blaum, visit http://www.psu.edu/ur/2002/crimesterotypes.html