Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 91
In recent years, we have seen major essays by Black
journalists and writers that have broken through the
public consciousness during a moment when Black
activism is pushing our society and government to address
systemic racism. Despite the power inequities in our
nation’s newsrooms and in the United States at large, Black
journalists are still producing amazing work to tell the
story of who we are and how racism impacts us.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project, published in August
2019 and named after the year the first enslaved Africans
arrived in the English colony of Virginia, is one of
the latest examples of why we need Black journalistic
brilliance in newsrooms. The groundbreaking project,
conceived by The New York Times Magazine’s Nikole
Hannah-Jones, a Black woman, “aims to reframe the
country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery
and the contributions of black Americans at the very
center of our national narrative.” The project earned
Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer for commentary in 2020.1
But there are still so many barriers to overcome, and so
many voices that still need to be heard.
Black trans journalist and activist Monica Roberts founded
the blog TransGriot in 2006 to address the void of online
resources and information for Black trans people.2
In 2018, activist and writer Raquel Willis became the first
Black trans woman to be named the executive editor of
Out Magazine, one of the leading LGBTQIA+ publications
in the country.3 Willis, who recently left the magazine,
published the Trans Obituaries Project in 2019 to highlight
“the epidemic of violence against trans women of color.”
The project includes “a community-sourced 13-point
framework to end the epidemic.”4
Black journalists are continuing to break new ground
— nearly 200 years after the first Black newspaper was
founded — while reckoning with racism in the news
media.
But the question remains: Can newsrooms reconcile and
repair the harms they have caused? And can we count
on the same profit-driven, white-owned corporate media
institutions to fully integrate their newsrooms and allow
Black journalistic brilliance to rise half a century after
failing to heed the Kerner Commission’s recommendations
to do so?
You can’t blame anyone who would answer “no” to these
questions since white supremacy is very adaptive. When
confronted by demands for change, those who benefit
from and practice white supremacy often seek to release
the pressure valve by making some concessions while
keeping the white power structure intact. Media owners
and newsroom leaders often play the long game and
institute only incremental changes to buy time … only to
reverse the gains Black people have struggled to obtain.
Power makes and plays by a different set of rules.
We have to fight to change the rules so our civil and
human rights are fully realized. We have to advocate
for new laws and regulations that will put an end to
structural racism in the news industry instead of relying
on performative corporate solutions or race-neutral laws
that fail to confront our racial-caste system. Only then will
we be able to control the telling of our own stories that
need to be told and the sharing of our own dreams for our
communities that need to be heard.
But this is difficult to achieve when Black owners didn’t
receive their first radio and TV station licenses until
both mediums were firmly established.5 And when our
nation’s lawmakers and regulators have paved the way
for massive media consolidation — ensuring that Black
people, due to a lack of wealth, own few radio, TV or cable
channels or networks. And when the funding structures
in noncommercial media have ensured its dominant
institutions are white run and serve primarily white
audiences.6
We have a de-facto media-apartheid system where the
vast majority of radio, TV, cable and broadband networks
are white-owned and -controlled companies. To realize
a true multiracial democracy we will need to dismantle
this system. As WURD Radio’s Sara Lomax-Reese told the
Institute for Nonprofit News:
Black media … it really is an endangered
species. If there is not a wholesale
investment in reviving and supporting and
providing resources to Black media — and I
am not talking about Black-oriented media,
I am talking about Black-owned media —
it will go away. It is going away … we’re
going backwards. We’re absolutely going
backwards. And if there aren’t things done
from a policy level, at the FCC level, at the
national, state and local level, if there’s not
stuff done from a corporate level, from a
philanthropic level, these entities will go out
of business.7
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