Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 92
And while numerous white-owned media outlets and
white reporters have exposed racial injustices in our
society, too few have used their powerful platforms to
advocate for Black economic, political and social equity.
This is an issue that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
addressed in his final book, Where Do We Go from
Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. King argued that white
people and white-controlled institutions, including the
news media, have never fully supported racial equity. In
fact, King wrote, they had more in common with white
segregationists:
With Selma and the Voting Rights Act one phase of
development in the civil rights revolution came to an end.
A new phase opened, but few observers realized it or
were prepared for its implications. For the vast majority
of white Americans, the past decade — the first phase —
had been a struggle to treat the Negro with a degree of
decency, not of equality.
White America was ready to demand that the Negro
should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse
degradation, but it had never been truly committed to
helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of
discrimination.
The outraged white citizen had been sincere when he
snatched the whips from the Southern sheriffs and
forbade them more cruelties. But when this was to a
degree accomplished, the emotions that had momentarily
inflamed him melted away. White Americans left
the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers
walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white
segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more
in common with one another than either had with the
Negro.
When Negroes looked for a second phase, the realization
of equality, they found that many of their white allies had
quietly disappeared. The Negroes of America had taken
the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when
they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But
the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the
presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing
as to ordain brotherhood.
The word was broken, and the free-running expectations
of the Negro crashed into the stone walls of white
resistance. The result was havoc. Negroes felt cheated,
especially in the North, while many whites felt that the
Negroes had gained so much it was virtually impudent
and greedy to ask for more so soon.8
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The racial reckoning happening now within the news
industry comes at a time when local newspapers across
the nation are in financial crisis. This crisis is particularly
concerning for the Black press, where the financial
struggle has been acute for a long time.9 But the struggle
of big white-owned daily newspapers, which the pandemic
has exacerbated, has led to increased advocacy from
journalists, journalism organizations, media companies
and elected officials for a federal intervention.10
There have been plenty of discussions within the
journalism field about the profession’s future and the
need for new economic models to save and sustain local
news. But too few Black journalists and members of the
broader Black community have been a part of shaping
these discussions. There’s reason to fear that potential new
models won’t address institutional and structural racism —
and will replicate existing inequities and continue to harm
Black people.
We need a new media model that dismantles the whiteracial hierarchy and the myth of Black inferiority. A
federal intervention is needed to undo policies that have
played a pivotal role in creating these inequities. It must
examine the history of racism in our media industry,
including the role of federal policies and oversight. And as
calls grow for federal funding to support local journalism,
we should not simply prop up a commercial media system
that is more accountable to its shareholders than to the
people it is supposed to serve.
Instead, federal policies must be used to ensure Black
journalists and media-makers are equitably funded and
supported. Policies must facilitate Black media ownership
and allow Black owners to thrive. We have to ensure
that federal funding to support journalism goes toward
reconciling and repairing the harm caused by policies that
have created and sustained an unjust and racist media
system.
It is a debt that is long overdue.
As the issue of reparations gains more political attention,
it’s critical that our government and institutions take
part in a process of making amends for wrongs they have
committed — as well as all the ways in which they’ve
benefited from the harm and exploitation of the Black
community. Media reparations are essential to ensuring
our government repairs the harms it caused by adopting
policies that have materially, physically and spiritually
subjugated Black people in the United States. Reparations
are also necessary to address a broad history of structural
racism in the media industry — an industry that has
defended our nation’s white-racial hierarchy.
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