Media 2070: An Invitation to Dream Up Media Reparations - Article / Essay - Page 56
XI. How Public Policy Has Entrenched
Anti-Blackness in the Media
A MATTER OF INJUSTICE
More than half a century since the release of the Kerner
report, the “painful process of readjustment” that the
commission called for has yet to be fully realized.
Black journalists remain underrepresented in our nation’s
newsrooms, making up just 5.6 percent of all newsroom
staffers working at daily publications and online sites
in 2017 and 4.6 percent of newsroom leaders that same
year, according to the American Society of News Editors’
annual study, which was first conducted in 1978.1 And the
number of Black journalists working at local newspapers
has likely declined in 2020 due to the number of reporters
who have been laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic.2
But the American Society of News Editors — now known
as the News Leaders Association — has been unable to
produce a reliable study since 2017 because not enough
news organizations have chosen to participate. In June, the
group announced it was revamping the diversity survey.3
While a 2019 broadcast-industry study found that Black
employees made up 12 percent of the TV-newsroom
workforce, they remain underrepresented in leadership
positions, making up just 5.5 percent of TV news directors
and just 2.3 percent of general managers.4
The lack of Black journalists and newsroom leaders
explains why so much news coverage still insidiously
promotes the myth of Black inferiority and works to
uphold a white-racial hierarchy. Media outlets such as
CNN and Fox News, for example, underrepresent the
percentage of poor white families in their coverage but
“exaggerate the proportion of families receiving welfare
who are Black while also wrongly attributing the use
of (and need for) government programs to laziness,
dependency or dysfunction,” according to a 2017 Color Of
Change and Family Story study.5
The study found that Black families represented 59
percent of coverage in “news and opinion media” about
56
poverty even though they made up just 27 percent of
poor families. However, white families represented just
17 percent of the poor in news coverage even though they
made up 66 percent of all poor families.6
In addition, local news still stereotypes the Black
community. A 2020 Heinz Endowments study found that
72.4 percent of local Pittsburgh television and newspaper
stories that featured Black people over a two-month period
in 2019 focused on crime and sports. A similar Heinz
study conducted nearly a decade ago found that 71.5
percent of local-news stories about Black men and boys
focused on crime and sports.7 The president of the Heinz
Endowments called the lack of progress “disheartening
and intolerable.”8
At the same time, federal policies have paved the way for
massive consolidation over the past four decades and have
further entrenched our media system’s racial inequities.
Runaway media consolidation, coupled with an economic
crisis in the newspaper industry, have resulted in the
layoffs of thousands of journalists. Our nation “lost nearly
326,000 newspaper industry jobs between 1990–2019
— a staggering 71-percent decline.” And the number of
newspaper-reporting jobs declined 55 percent from 37,480
in 2005 to 16,800 in 2019.9 In addition, the coronavirus
pandemic has resulted in an economic crisis that has
forced a number of newspapers to further reduce their
already depleted newsrooms.10
Sara Lomax-Reese, president and CEO of Philadelphia’s
WURD Radio — one of the few Black-owned talk-radio
stations in the country — spoke to the BBC in June about
the impact of consolidation. “There used to be this really
powerful legacy of Black talk radio,” she said. “There were
absolutely way more African American talk radio stations,
African American-owned stations in previous years. And
when the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed,
black-owned radio stations were gobbled up and kind of
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