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When is the "Racist" Designation Truly Applicable? News Media's Contribution to the Debatability of Racism
Abstract
Since the U.S. 2016 presidential election, journalists and news organizations have been forced to confront shifting racial, social and political climates, and re-evaluate practices and norms. However, news coverage of racism is complex, especially because the conceptualization of racism in society is discordant, and the parameters of racism are heavily debated. News coverage can contribute to this debatability, specifically when it presents issues of racism with certain linguistic and topical features. In a content analysis of social media posts from six of the Facebook pages maintained by national broadcast and newspaper organizations, the present study explores contextual and linguistic representations of racism, and how social media users on Facebook engage with news posted by these organizations. Results suggest representations in news coverage signal a public debate about what is and is not racism. Coverage heavily emphasized prominent figures, while social media audiences amplified Trump's presence in social networks.
... Multiple studies have found the US journalism profession to be disproportionately white, cis-male, and middle-to-upper class (Bauder, 2021;Grieco, 2020;Usher, 2019). This homogeneity in newsrooms, along with professional conformity pressures, may contribute to why journalists have conserved racist, heterosexist, classist, and other biases in reporting (Alamo-Pastrana & Hoynes, 2020;Brown, 2021;Lowery, 2020). Disrupting hegemonic biases requires taking seriously the insights of people outside of newsrooms who are affected by them, as our study has begun to do. ...
This study positions social justice activists’ objections to dominant reporting norms as a catalyst for critically reassessing these norms and their connection to diminishing trust in US journalism. Based on a conceptual application of discourse ethics to journalism and qualitative analysis of 28 in-depth interviews with social justice activists, we examine how participants experience and evaluate mainstream coverage of social justice, and why they think journalism could improve its trustworthiness through practices consistent with solidarity reporting norms.
... In a comprehensive study of Trump's Tweets over his presidency, Ott and Dickinson (2019) observe that his managerial, physical, and linguistic performances expressed white rage that appealed to a predominantly white support base by manipulating centuries-old fears concerning the decentering of white privilege. Conducting a large-scale content analysis of major newspapers and news broadcasters, Brown (2021) finds that Trump's rhetoric of white rage manifested in popular denials of racism's existence among grassroots audiences and contributed to making racism appear 'debatable' in news coverage. ...
This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they have been fragmented threefold by debates about their politics (whether to humanize research subjects), practice (whether to intervene in field research), and epistemology (procedural, craft, and bricolage orientations). Reflecting on the legacy of bell hooks, this article articulates a Black feminist approach by unearthing methodological and epistemological themes underwritten in hooks' work (inclusive pedagogy, creative dialogue, and reflexive accountability) to offer new perspectives on the three debates and, in so doing, to identify ways to better qualitative research methods as tools for emancipating the marginalized-by invigorating cross-professional and transdisciplinary dialogue, collaboration, and love.
... The implication of this is that news organizations and editors need to be careful when framing racism because headlines can be powerful. Covering racism can be tricky, and the media should adopt appropriate strategies to build a healthy discourse around this important issue (see also Kilgo, 2021). ...
... News report is one of the most accessible and concerned new media information types. News report has the characteristics of dynamic change, fast growth, and many related topics [10]. Traditional search engines play an important role in people's new media life. ...
With the rapid development of Internet, new media news has gradually become the most concerned information source of new media people. New media public opinion is a force that cannot be ignored. It needs monitoring and guidance. The research on hot topic discovery and trend analysis can timely find social hot topics and analyze the trend of topics, which is conducive to grasp the trend of public opinion, so as to correctly guide and maintain social stability. At the same time, the emerging industry of new media has sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, with a rapid momentum. With the advent of the era of big data, the development of new media presents characteristics and advantages that are different from traditional media, but we should also note that the era of big data has both advantages and disadvantages for the development of new media. In this paper, LDA and ARIMA models can be used to calculate and analyze the popularity measurement and trend analysis of new media reports under the background of big data mining. The model designed in this paper has a conclusion: the missed detection rate is reduced by 75.4%. Through experiments, it is found that the accuracy of heat topic detection of the model designed in this paper can reach 84.6%. In trend analysis, the first stage of transmission is called the incubation period. Then after a certain critical point, it will come to the outbreak period. The outbreak period lasted for a period of time, entered a period of plateau, and finally came to a subsidence period.
... There is a dire need for the public health community to call greater attention to racism's role in producing and maintaining health disparities in the US, particularly when researchers and advocates have the opportunity to speak with news outlets (Orr et al., 2021). Yet at the same time, more research is needed about both when and how media coverage should emphasize racism in coverage (Kilgo, 2021), and the impact of the explicit linkages between race and health on the public's attitudes and opinions (Gollust et al., 2022). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted health and social outcomes for people of color in the United States. This study examined how local TV news stories attributed causes and solutions for COVID-19-related racial health and social disparities, and whether coverage of such disparities changed after George Floyd’s murder, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We systematically validated keywords to extract relevant news content and conducted a content analysis of 169 discrete local TV news stories aired between March and June 2020 from 80 broadcast networks within 22 purposefully selected media markets. We found that social determinants of COVID-19 related racial disparities have been part of the discussion in local TV news, but racism as a public health crisis was rarely mentioned. Coverage of racial disparities focused far more attention on physical health outcomes than broader social impacts. Stories cited more structural factors than individual factors, as causes of these disparities. After the murder of George Floyd, stories were more likely to mention Black and Latinx people than other populations impacted by COVID-19. Only 9% of local news stories referenced racism, and stories referenced politicians more frequently than public health experts.
... Typically, newspapers, in an attempt to present two sides of a story, equate racially demeaning and bigoted statements as objective reporting and, in doing so, publish various forms of microaggressions and often uphold racist beliefs (Caliendo & McIlwain, 2006). These practices are documented in news coverage of Willie Horton during the Bush campaign (Hurwitz & Peffley, 2005) and more recently regarding the 45 th presidential administration and the numerous dog whistles and subsequent news coverage that highlighted numerous Black racial stereotypes (Kilgo, 2021). Like decades of news coverage that promoted racial stereotypes, the same practices were prevalent in the data set. ...
Newspapers often play a significant role in providing knowledge about political matters and may shape public opinion about political figures. However, a focus on newspaper coverage of some of the first Black mayors of major US cities and themes related to racial identity and policy is under-examined. The current investigation adopts an ethnographic content analysis and examines 30 days of major daily newspaper coverage of Black mayoral campaigns in Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Chicago before each mayoral election. Findings reveal that news coverage draws attention to overt racial narratives and emphasizes racial stereotypes. However, news coverage of the candidates’ policy proposals was present and often non-racialized. The outcomes suggest that the inclusion of racial identity and policies, while not entirely favorable, may increase awareness of each candidate’s policies, potentially contributing to their electability.
Understandings of racism are produced and circulated in contemporary networked media forms, contributing new opportunities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images and frameworks. This study investigated how the concept of racism is used in Finnish public debate by employing a computational text analysis technique to derive topics related to racism from a large corpus of news media content and online discussion forum comments. Our findings show that discourses about racism are different in legacy media and online platform regarding both their prominence and framings. While social media produce various discourses of ‘reverse racism’, news media connects racism to historical and international contexts. We conclude that what racism is understood to be is not only an intensely political process but also one shaped by the type of media platform, specificities of Finnish language and national ideological battles.
The paper examines racism's ‘debatability’ by looking at the interpellation of public acts of racism. The idea of racism as an event appears crucial to the judgment of its legitimacy. By examining racism as a disjointed series of public events that are often accompanied by elisions of the connections between racist ‘eruptions’ and systemic conditions, I shine light on what is meant by racism today. Racism can be theorized dually as both frozen and motile. This is due to emphasis being placed on what race is taken to be, rather than on what it does. Confusion over how to formulate anti-racism is based on this misconception of race at the core of much anti-racist thought, leading to an obscuration of racism. Critically examining some contemporary anti-racist activity, I briefly assess the role played by those who challenge racism in legitimizing or negating official interpretations of racism in contemporary Australia.
Using President Obama and his wife, who made history when they shattered racial and ethnic stereotypes, Ramirez and Dates directly and subtly raise the crucial question: what is the function of the media in Marshall McLuhan's budding village with "other" people gaining some power? Against the backdrop of media practices, Moody-Ramirez and Dates vividly discuss the role of communications in the current world with specific examples of how the Obamas fair in the media.
In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India's public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells' discussion of 'space of flows' informs our examination of journalists' social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.
Declarations of the end of race ignore the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality in ‘racial states’. Nevertheless, the idea of post-racialism has gained ground in a post-9/11 era, defined by a growing suspicion of diversity. Clearly racialized, this suspicion is couched in cultural-civilizational terms that attempt to avoid the charge of racism. Hence, attempts to counteract the purported failure of multiculturalism in Europe today pose culturalist solutions to problems deemed to originate from an excess of cultural diversity. This is part of a deepening culturalization of politics in which the post-race argument belongs to a post-political logic that shuns political explanations of unrest and widening disintegration in favour of reductive culturalist ones. The culturalization of politics is elaborated by relating it to the displacement of the political that originated with the nineteenth-century ascendance of race, thus setting ‘post-racialism’ firmly within the history of modern racism.
Assessing the role of television in mediating cultural change, this paper hypothesizes that local television news simultaneously depresses the legitimacy of old‐fashioned racism (beliefs that blacks are inferior and should be segregated) and stimulates the production of modern racism (anti‐black affect combined with resentment at the continuing claims of blacks on white resources and sympathies). The effects are not intentional; rather, the paper suggests, it is partly because they seek to overcome old‐fashioned racism and respond to the viewing tastes of black audiences that local TV news programs reinforce modern racism.
News coverage is fundamental to a protest’s viability, but research suggests media negatively portray protests and protesters that challenge the status quo (a pattern known as the protest paradigm). This study questions the validity of those claims within the context of digital newspaper coverage, interrogating how topic and region shape coverage. Using a content analysis of coverage from sixteen newspapers in various U.S. market types and regions, this research examines framing and sourcing features in articles about protests. Results suggest media coverage of protests centered on racial issues (discrimination of Indigenous people and anti-Black racism) follows more of a delegitimizing pattern than stories about protests related to immigrants’ rights, health, and environment. A model to understand news coverage of protest based on a hierarchy of social struggle is proposed.
IF... THEN provides an account of power and politics in the algorithmic media landscape that pays attention to the multiple realities of algorithms, and how these relate and coexist. The argument is made that algorithms do not merely have power and politics; they help to produce certain forms of acting and knowing in the world. In processing, classifying, sorting, and ranking data, algorithms are political in that they help to make the world appear in certain ways rather than others. Analyzing Facebook's news feed, social media user's everyday encounters with algorithmic systems, and the discourses and work practices of news professionals, the book makes a case for going beyond the narrow, technical definition of algorithms as step-by-step procedures for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. Drawing on a process-relational theoretical framework and empirical data from field observations and fifty-five interviews, the author demonstrates how algorithms exist in multiple ways beyond code. The analysis is concerned with the world-making capacities of algorithms, questioning how algorithmic systems shape encounters and orientations of different kinds, and how these systems are endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency. IF ... THEN argues that algorithmic power and politics is neither about algorithms determining how the social world is fabricated nor about what algorithms do per se. Rather it is about how and when different aspects of algorithms and the algorithmic become available to specific actors, under what circumstance, and who or what gets to be part of how algorithms are defined.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
In May 2016, two stories on Facebook’s Trending Topics news feature appeared on the site Gizmodo, the first exposing the human curators working surreptitiously to select news and the second containing accusations that certain curators censored conservative voices. These revelations led to public outcry, mostly from conservatives upset at possible bias and journalists critical of Facebook for its largely secretive and haphazard approach to news. This study examines the response to the controversy as metajournalistic discourse—talk about news that seeks to define appropriate practices and legitimate news forms. It identifies a fundamental divergence in the public articulation of Facebook’s role in the larger news ecosystem. Facebook reacted to the controversy by formulating an approach to news as a form of content that, like other content on the site, should be personalized, organized according to popularity in the form of user engagement, and free of editorial control from the social media site. By contrast, journalists positioned news as purposively selected and shared while placing Facebook as an active participant within the news ecosystem and therefore beholden to an enhanced institutional commitment to public responsibility.
People increasingly visit online news sites not directly, but by following links on social network sites. Drawing on news value theory and integrating theories about online identities and self-representation, we develop a concept of shareworthiness, with which we seek to understand how the number of shares an article receives on such sites can be predicted. Findings suggest that traditional criteria of newsworthiness indeed play a role in predicting the number of shares, and that further development of a theory of shareworthiness based on the foundations of newsworthiness can offer fruitful insights in news dissemination processes.
This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of news, producing a social media news agenda which has important differences from its traditional counterpart. The discussion suggests that this may be consequential for perceptions of crime and engagement with politics; it might even stimulate a partial reversal of the tabloidization of news outlets.
What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.
With the advent of Web 2.0 applications, practices of news spreading have changed. Now, not only journalists but also average Internet users are able to spread news. This paper examines criteria that influence the forwarding of information in microblogging systems such as Twitter. To test whether and how two different kinds of criteria (contextual criteria and message inherent-criteria) interact in influencing selection decisions of sharing information with others, a 2 × 2 × 2 laboratory experiment was conducted. Awareness information about one’s audience (guiding vs. non-guiding), news topic (educational vs. non-educational), and informational value of the message (high vs. low) were systematically varied. It was hypothesized that participants who received guiding awareness information would show audience design (i.e., adapting communication behavior towards the audience) while disregarding informational value. In contrast, participants who received non-guiding awareness information would not show audience design, but would forward according to informational value. Results confirmed that participants indeed adapted their communication behavior to their audience’s interests. However, participants still preferred messages with high informational value over messages with low informational value. Results are discussed and implications are drawn.
Written by a renowned scholar of critical race theory, The Threat of Race explores how the concept of race has been historically produced and how it continues to be articulated, if often denied, in today's world. A major new study of race and racism by a renowned scholar of critical race theory. Explores how the concept of race has been historically produced and how it continues to be articulated - if often denied - in today's world. Argues that it is the neoliberal society that fuels new forms of racism. Surveys race dynamics throughout various regions of the world - from Western and Northern Europe, South Africa and Latin America, and from Israel and Palestine to the United States.
This article examines what race has meant in and to Europe. If Europe has different, if related, histories of racial thinking, expression, imposi-tion, and exclusion, how has it been shaped, in part, as specific region in the figure of race even as race, in the aftermath of World War II, is largely denied as a category applicable to human groups? And what today does Europe as a region, and the societies constituting it with all their internal variations, contribute, especially in the popular imaginary, to the extensions of racial meanings and to thinking critically about the racial ordering of social structure, racist exclusions, and social markings? This study is concerned with mapping the racial contours of contemporary European self-conception, historically understood, tracing the figures in the European imaginary of the European, the black, the Jew, and the Muslim.
Two experiments examined the extent to which U.S. viewers’ perceptions that Blacks face structural limitations to success, support for the death penalty, and culpability judgments could be influenced by exposure to racialized crime news. Participants were exposed to a majority of Black suspects, a majority of White suspects, unidentified suspects, and noncrime news stories. In addition, participants’ prior news viewing was assessed. In Study 1, heavy news viewers exposed to unidentified perpetrators were less likely than heavy news viewers exposed to noncrime stories to perceive that Blacks face structural limitations to success. In addition, heavy news viewers exposed to unidentified perpetrators were more likely than heavy news viewers exposed to noncrime stories to support the death penalty. In Study 2, participants exposed to a majority of Black suspects were more likely than participants exposed to noncrime stories to find a subsequent race-unidentified criminal culpable for his offense. In addition, heavy news viewers were more likely to exhibit the above effect than light news viewers. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in light of chronic activation and the priming paradigm.
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