Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 29
VI. The Power of Acknowledging and Apologizing
TOWARD REALIZING THE DEBT
Since the colonial era, media outlets have used their
platforms to inflict harm on Black bodies through
weaponizing narratives that promote Black inferiority and
portray Black people as threats to society.
Early colonial newspapers, such as the Boston News-Letter,
depicted Black people as criminals.
In calling for more white indentured servants, the paper
claimed in 1706 that the local Black population was
“much addicted to Stealing, Lying and Purloining.” And
in its coverage of New York’s 1712 slave revolt, the paper
wrote that Black people were arrested because they “knew
of the Late Conspiracy to Murder the Christians.” The
arrests resulted in the execution of many of the uprising’s
leaders.1
These types of narratives are still a primary feature of
coverage of Black communities.
But perpetrators of systemic violence rarely acknowledge
and admit to their harms. In recent decades, however,
a few news outlets have apologized for their papers’
advocacy of violence against Black people or for their
harmful coverage of civil-rights issues.
These apologies make it clear that many news outlets
worked in tandem with white-controlled institutions and
power structures to maintain white supremacy in their
communities. But these publications are far from the only
news outlets that need to reconcile and make amends for
racist — and at times illegal — conduct.
Perhaps the most shameful example of a powerful white
publisher using his outlet to advocate violence against the
Black community was Josephus Daniels. The publisher
and editor of Raleigh’s News & Observer — at the time the
state’s most influential paper — Daniels played a leading
role in the only armed overthrow of a local government in
our nation’s history, which took place two days after the
1898 elections in Wilmington, North Carolina.2
As David Zucchino wrote in Wilmington’s Lie, his book
about the coup, at the time Black people made up a
majority of the city’s population.3 Zucchino describes the
conditions that bred white rage and resentment. After an
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