Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 93
Reconciling and repairing the harms that the media have
caused the Black community is central to deciphering
the future of the field. This means that individual news
organizations must partake in systematic change and
repair while also actively offsetting the impacts of a
history of anti-Black racism inside their own newsrooms
and communities. And to ensure equitable Black media
ownership, the federal government must dismantle
policies that created a racist and segregated mediaownership system.
As the Movement for Black Lives policy toolkit on
reparations states, realizing justice requires a “systematic
accounting, acknowledgement, and repair of past and
ongoing harms, monetary compensation to individuals and
institutions led by and accountable to Black communities,
and an end to present day policies and practices that
perpetuate harms rooted in a history of anti-Black racism,
along with a guarantee that they will not be repeated.”11
Black journalistic brilliance has never fully received its
due in the white mainstream-journalism world. Yet Black
journalists, media-justice advocates and community
organizers provide a vision of what a liberated media
system for Black people might look like. This liberated
media system includes reparations.
The idea of media reparations is not new. Past and current
reparation efforts have included calling for payments to
fund Black-owned and -controlled media outlets.
And as we mentioned in Chapter VII, the 1898
Wilmington Race Riot Commission report, released in
2006, called for newspapers to acknowledge their role
in the deadly coup and to “study the effects of 1898 and
impact of Jim Crow on the state’s black press and to endow
scholarships at the state’s public universities.”12
When civil-rights leader James Forman presented the
“Black Manifesto” in 1969 at the National Black Economic
Development Conference in Detroit, he called for
white churches and synagogues to pay $500 million in
reparations that would fund several initiatives, including:
•
The “establishment of four major publishing and
printing industries in the United States to be funded
with ten million dollars each.” These publishing
houses were to be located in Atlanta, Detroit, Los
Angeles and New York.
•
“No less” than $10 million for the “establishment of a
training center for the teaching of skills in community
organization, photography, movie making, television
making and repair, radio building and repair and all
other skills needed in communication.”
•
The “establishment of four of the most advanced
scientific and futuristic audio-visual networks
to be located in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and
Washington, D.C. These TV networks would provide
an alternative to the racist propaganda that fills the
current television networks” and each would receive
$10 million.13
Meanwhile, in 2015 the National African American
Reparations Commission released its 10-point preliminary
reparations plan, which calls for:14
•
“An annual federal set-aside of advertising dollars to
support Black-owned newspapers and magazines and
radio and television stations. These funds would be
administered by the National Newspaper Publishers
Association (NNPA) and the National Association
of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB) under the
guidance of the Reparations Trust Authority.”
•
“Funding for a national nonprofit, noncommercial
newspaper, radio and television network dedicated
exclusively to culture/education, economics/business
and civic-engagement programming for the benefit of
Black America.”15
The Movement for Black Lives policy platform calls for
“full access to technology — including Net Neutrality and
universal access to the internet without discrimination —
and full representation for all.”16 It also calls for “universal,
affordable, and community-controlled access to the
Internet, for all Black people and oppressed communities
at large.”17
Modern-day crises have brought into sharp relief the
urgent need for a serious and renewed discussion of media
reparations. Uprisings following police and vigilante
murders of unarmed Black people have laid bare a system
of injustice that has long refused to listen and failed to
respond.
And while the Kerner Commission report informed
our government that the media were critical sources of
disinformation and oppressive narratives that fed the
conditions for unrest, the 2020 media uprisings show that
there is still a lack of accountability or a commitment to
fundamental change.
#MEDIA2070
93