Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 59
Media executives too often care more about maximizing
profits than producing quality journalism. This has
come at the expense of the Black community and other
communities of color. Race is often covered as a spectacle,
filled with dog-whistle language that perpetuates the
myth of Black inferiority. And this has harmed so many
journalists of color who work tirelessly to fulfill their
journalistic missions.
While Moonves is no longer in power, many of the people
who fueled Trump’s rise are still firmly in charge.
President Trump is a media creation. One of the people
and makes for easy segments to program. It attracts a
bigger audience by inflaming viewers. But viewers learn
little about the lives of the people that Trump’s horrific
policies target.
Meanwhile, inflaming racial divisions has been a central
political and business strategy for Fox News in appealing
to white viewers who fear our nation’s changing
demographics. Fox News’ on-air personalities, including
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, have spread whitesupremacist ideology by promoting the dangerous
narrative that immigrants of color are invading our
country and replacing white people.8
most responsible for his rise is CNN President Jeff Zucker.
And during the Trump presidency, Fox
News has become the administration’s
political-propaganda arm, where racist
ideas and policies that Fox News advocates
are repeated and acted on by the Trump
White House and vice-versa.9
Zucker was the president of NBC Entertainment when he
greenlit Trump’s reality-TV show The Apprentice.2 In 2011,
Color Of Change launched a campaign against Celebrity
Apprentice after Trump made the racist accusation that
President Obama was not born in the United States.3 But
the group found little support for its effort.
“To a person, across the movement, at organizations that
we regularly work with now, people were like, ‘He’s a
clown, just ignore him,’” said Color Of Change’s Rashad
Robinson in a 2017 interview. “Allowing Donald Trump to
be seen as a smart, capable businessman who each week
showed up on TV to make decisions, while he was saying
these other things, was not something that we should have
let stand. Now that he’s president, it is interesting to [think
of] this moment, [when] we could have all gone in, to
really put him away.”4
Zucker was the president of CNN during the 2016
campaign when the racist Trump candidacy propelled the
network to earn nearly $1 billion in profits. As president,
Trump remains a primary focus of the network’s coverage,
which features pundits frequently debating his racist
remarks — but little on how his policies hurt people of
color.5
“We’ve seen that, anytime you break away from the
Trump story and cover other events in this era, the
audience goes away,” Zucker told Vanity Fair in 2018. “So
we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”6
Zucker also told The New York Times Magazine in 2017
that “the idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we
understood that and approached it that way.” 7
Given Zucker’s analogy, it’s easy to see why cable
networks like CNN and MSNBC cover race as a sporting
event. Pundits spend hours debating Trump’s latest racist
statement. Conflict is good for ratings, cheap to produce
This is playing out right now as the 2020 election nears.
Trump is using thinly veiled racist dog whistles for his
supporters, including white militia groups, to signal his
support of violence against racial-justice activists. And Fox
News is providing Trump with political cover.
In August, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake,
a 29-year-old Black man, seven times in the back, leaving
him partially paralyzed. Days later, 17-year-old Kyle
Rittenhouse, who is white, shot three people — killing two
— who were protesting the police shooting. Rittenhouse,
who was charged with murder, had traveled from Illinois,
where a militia had called for people with guns to “defend”
Kenosha.10
Carlson came to the defense of the shooter and said
“Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the
authorities in charge of the city abandoned it ... So are
we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to
murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles
decided they had to maintain order when no one else
would?”11
Days later, Trump also defended Rittenhouse, suggesting
he might have been killed if he had not acted first.12
#MEDIA2070
59