No good news about how the media covers Black people
This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham. Sign up to get this in your inbox a day early.
Clearly, there are lessons for the media to learn and deploy here. But with history as an unforgiving guide, expectations for action are, at best, muted.
Like most young reporters, I spent much of my nascent journalism career working nights and writing crime stories. That usually meant covering crime in Black communities — which, for the most part, was the only time the media covered Black communities. I’m sure there were remarkable tales those residents would have shared, if asked. But instead, year after year, these neighborhoods — and the people who lived in them — were reduced to little more than bullet casings, chalk outlines, and tear streaked faces.
Don’t think the people whose doors I only knocked on while looking for juicy details about this victim or that shooting didn’t notice.
“How come you only come around when something bad happens?” I would be asked. “How long have you been at the paper? I’ve never seen you here before,” someone would say. “We have good things in our community, too. How come you never come around and write about them?”
They were right. I was an accomplice in portraying their neighborhoods — not unlike the one I grew up in — only on their worst days. I deserved to get called out. This happened about 20 years after the Kerner report, authorized by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 during racial unrest in several cities, also called out the imbalanced and shallow coverage of this nation’s Black communities.
Released in 1968, it’s a more than 400-page vivisection of America buckling under the weight of what was bluntly called “white racism,” with a chapter devoted to media coverage of Black communities. What it found was “a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.
This may be understandable, but it is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.”
Nearly 60 years later, that disconnect between the media and Black people persists. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 63 percent of Black Americans surveyed — regardless of political affiliation — say news about Black people is more negative when compared to stories about other races and ethnicities. About 57 percent believe the news only “covers certain segments of Black communities,” and 43 percent said the media often stereotypes Black people.
Many of this survey’s conclusions echo the findings of the Kerner report, which were largely ignored. After George Floyd’s murder by a thenMinneapolis police officer led to worldwide protests against systemic racism and police violence in 2020, several newspapers engaged in autopsies examining how their own coverage of the Black community had repeatedly fallen short. Or, as The Kansas City Star put it in a self-lacerating editorial that year, “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”
But the Pew survey shows that much of that soul-searching after Floyd’s murder and the protests was more of what I call a hasty “God’s watching, look busy” response during the socalled racial reckoning that wasn’t and was never going to be. Clearly, there are lessons for the media to learn and deploy here. But with history as an unforgiving guide, expectations for action are, at best, muted.
For example, the Associated Press in 2019 issued guidelines in its stylebook — long a newspaper industry bible — instructing publications to avoid phrases like “racially charged” and “racially motivated.” And yet rarely a week goes by when a term like “racially tinged” doesn’t find its way into a news report, as if calling something racist is worse than racism itself.
It’s never been about “good” versus “bad” stories in Black communities. It’s about the balance, which has always been egregiously lacking. Have there been incremental improvements in coverage? Sure. But we also know that when it comes to America and race, change is glacial, and systemic change without white opposition is nearly nonexistent. That the Kerner report’s revelations or conversations like those I had with Black residents in Liberty City, Fla., and Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood haven’t moved the needle significantly is hardly breaking news. But it’s a dismaying headline that the mainstream media — which continues to lose viewers, readers, and trust — keeps ignoring at its own peril.