Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 26
V. How the Media Profited from and
Participated in Slavery
THE ORIGINAL SIN
There is so much that we have to grapple with in understanding how our nation’s white-controlled media system has harmed
Black people. And it’s important that we start from the beginning.
Since colonial times, our nation’s media companies have used their platforms to surveil, criminalize, dehumanize and control
Black bodies. Many of our nation’s first newspapers laid the foundation for anti-Black racism in our country and in our media
system.
Early newspaper printers (who often were also the publishers ) took part in human trafficking by participating in and profiting
from the slave trade with the publication of thousands of slave ads. Profits from the enterprise of slavery helped keep the
earliest newspapers afloat.1
As Smith College Visiting Assistant Professor Jordan E. Taylor explains in a 2020 essay, profits from slave ads spread ideas that
increased support for a revolution:
The slave trade stimulated revolutionary politics by providing a valuable revenue stream for
newspaper printing. The texts, information, and ideas that catalyzed American Revolutionary
— and then national — politics did not spread on their own. Their circulation depended on the
ongoing profitability of the printing business. Although slave notices comprised just a portion
of a printer’s income, eighteenth-century newspapers operated at such fine margins that some
might have needed this advertising revenue to survive.2
Taylor’s essay focuses on the active role many newspapers played in human trafficking: “Advertisers used printers as brokers
and the print shop as a public space for transactions.”3 Thousands of ads that sold slaves contained the phrase “enquire of the
printer.”4 This meant that the printer acted as the broker between the buyer and the seller. And it meant that newspapers were
active participants in the slave trade and the enslavement of Black people. As Taylor notes:
Eighteenth-century Americans, as well as some subsequent historians, have celebrated the
printing press as a vehicle of liberation and freedom. But northern or southern, American
newspaper printers were deeply embedded in the political economy of slavery. Without
newspaper printers, slavery still would have thrived in North America. Yet ‘enquire of the printer’
slave advertisements improved the profitability and flexibility of the slave trade while integrating
it into the readers’ daily lives. Printers’ business calculations included the trafficking of thousands
of enslaved humans and the destruction of many families.5
The Boston News-Letter, our nation’s first continuously published newspaper, was also the first paper involved in the slave
trade: It ran a slave ad less than a month after its founding in 1704. The ad, from a local merchant, sought a purchaser of “two
Negro men” and a “Negro Woman & Child.”6 The paper’s publisher, John Campbell, acted as a broker.7
26
WWW.MEDIA2070.ORG