How racial issues should be covered, including whether news organizations should have a beat dedicated to covering racial issues—or whether that portrays race as outside of reporters’ common beats such as education or politics, topics in which race is deeply implicated—is a question about which there is little agreement. However, prominent journalists who cover racial issues seem to agree that their field has neglected and ignored coverage of these topics. In a special issue of Nieman Reports dedicated to the coverage of race, NPR Television Critic and author Eric Deggans noted that The New York Times has a wine critic, but had eliminated its new position for a national reporter covering race. Deggans wrote, “it’s tough for beat reporters to fully cover their subjects, let alone for a newspaper to ensure full and fair coverage of a subject when no one is directly responsible for it.”1 Deggans argued that coverage of race, culture, and poverty should be regular feature and something news organizations monitor and update. “If the weather and stock market tell us about the health of our environment and economy, then race, culture, and poverty tell us about the health of our society,” Deggans wrote. That type of coverage has never been a priority for US news outlets, which have tended to cover controversial events or provide one-time, deep-dive investigations that illustrate larger problems.
This chapter begins by tracing the roots of journalism about race from the 1890s through to contemporary coverage. It focuses on one of Traditional journalism’s most entrenched norms—objectivity—as a root cause of problematic coverage. It also overviews the lack of newsroom diversity as a contributing factor. Next, the chapter explores how Traditional news narratives have described racism as something rare and interpersonal rather than as manifest in systems of power. The proliferation of technology in the hands of a growing, more racially diverse audience has the power to disrupt those narratives. Contemporary coverage of racial issues must be examined in the context of digital tools that allow the audience a new voice and also provide journalists with new tools. These new affordances clash with Traditional journalists’ values, but enable the two emerging paradigms to do journalism differently. This chapter puts those competing values into conversation and examines influences on journalists. Finally, the chapter turns to an overview of the three contemporary racial inflection points at the heart of the narrative analysis in Chap. 3: the post-racial question journalists embraced as valid during and after President Barack Obama’s successful candidacy, the birth and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement as a new civil rights movement, and the killing of Michael Brown , Jr., in Ferguson, Missouri, and the protests that ensued.
History Repeats Itself: Stereotyping and Ignoring
A substantial body of research over several decades has shown how US news coverage has ignored racial issues and that when race has been covered, coverage has reproduced stereotypes. This has held true as legal systems have changed from Jim Crow-era legal segregation to a more de facto segregation reflected in housing, employment, and education sectors. Despite some advances in building more racially diverse newsrooms, Traditional journalists still work in newsrooms that are largely white.2 Their work continues to rely on elite sources who are also white.3 When journalists report on racial topics, the coverage has centered on events rather than issues.4 Journalists have done a poor job of identifying the underlying systemic issues that contribute to oppression. Coverage has framed people of color as responsible for the events that affect them, which reinforces stereotyping.5 Little has changed in Traditional news coverage of race over the past 50 years. To understand how journalists today cover race, it is important to examine how racial issues have been covered in the past and how new institutionalism has maintained Traditional journalism norms.
Objectivity as Part of the Problem
When identifying problems with coverage of racial issues, there is a remarkable through line that stretches from journalist and abolitionist Ida B. Wells’ 1890s critique of The New York Times’s failure to cover lynchings, through the 1968 Kerner Commission report that called out the news media for ignoring the daily lives of people of color, to the 2015 Ferguson Commission report that asserted journalists needed anti-bias training. That through line is the concept of objectivity. Veteran Associated Press General Manager Kent Cooper dedicated his 1942 memoir, Barriers Down, to “True and Unbiased News—the highest original moral concept ever developed in America and given to the world.”6 Cooper’s notion of “unbiased” news speaks to the fiercely held journalistic notion of objectivity, or the idea that journalists who choose what to cover, whom to interview, which questions to ask, and which facts to include and exclude, is free of bias. This view of objectivity has been a central professional norm of US journalists since the 1920s7 and persists today in Traditional journalism. This conception of objectivity is particularly important in the context of news coverage of race, something socially constructed, experienced at an individual level, and impossible to measure or “prove.”
Objectivity became a declared rule for journalists after World War I, a conflict in which “yellow journalism,” or emphasis on propaganda and sensationalism rather than facts, influenced political and public opinion.8 The mandate that journalists be objective was written into the profession’s first governing code, the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, in 1926. It stated, “News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.” The term “objectivity” appeared nearly 50 years later in a revised code that noted, “Objectivity in reporting the news is another goal which serves as the mark of an experienced professional. It is a standard of performance toward which we strive. We honor those who achieve it.”9 In other words, a journalist who could be unbiased was a true professional, and objectivity was promoted as achievable. “Objectivity” disappeared from the SPJ Code of Ethics during a 1996 revision that called on journalists to instead “Boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear,” and “Avoid stereotyping. Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting.”10 The governing code has evolved to begin to acknowledge the social construction of news, but that does not mean that practitioners are ready to accept that neutrality is unachievable.
Objectivity persists as a norm today because it is central both to journalists’ sense of purpose and to the ideals of the institution in which they work. This is because journalists see themselves as belonging to a trustworthy institution of democracy, want to protect their profession as one that demonstrates non-partisanship, desire to lay claim to consistent professional standards, and view themselves as acting on the part of the people as government watchdogs.11 Journalists also rely on the ideal of objectivity as a norm that emphasizes their expertise.12 Objectivity legitimates journalists’ claim that they are a “mirror of society,”13 reporting the news, as The New York Times founder Adolph Ochs put it, “without fear or favor.”14 From the standpoint of the folks in the newsroom, objectivity is what separates journalists from pundits and rabble-rousers, rumormongers, and other special interests. However, newsroom sociologists understand the concept to be significantly more complicated. Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese observed, “Thus, journalists have been understood to be objective when they let prominent sources dictate the news, but they were considered biased when they used their own expertise to draw conclusions.”15 That sense of objectivity, then, is not based on impartiality, but on privileging elite and detached opinions rather than the reporter’s own experiences. That view of objectivity has also served to obscure the presence of racism in news narratives.
The Black Press Speaks Back
Objectivity has been responsible for skewed coverage of racial violence reaching as far back as 1890 when journalist, suffragist, and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells pushed back against The New York Times coverage of lynchings of African Americans. Wells said the coverage presumed African American men guilty of crimes of which they had not been convicted, portrayed African American men as biologically dispositioned to sexually assault white women, and fed on stereotypes while ignoring key facts that might point readers to a different conclusion.16 Wells’s coverage for Black Press newspapers, one of which had its office burned in response to an anti-racism editorial she wrote, resulted in The New York Times coverage attacking her personally. Journalism historian David T. Z. Mindich called this “a fascinating historical moment in which racism and ‘objectivity’ meet and clash” and said it showed how objectivity “can be compromised by racism and other factors.”17 The ideal of objectivity, Mindich wrote, “helped to obscure an important piece of reality, the perceptions of Ida B. Wells and other African Americans.”18 Wells and other journalists working for the Black Press pushed back on Traditional news narratives that spread and heightened stereotypes of African American men as dangerous. Wells popularized what she called “public journalism,” which relied on the voices of sources living the issues, rather than on elite sources.19 Wells’s public journalism connects to the ideals articulated more than 100 years later to describe Constructionist journalism that maps on to Journalism 3.0 values.
Before World War II, Negro newspapers drew such little notice from their white counterparts that even when they clearly had the inside track on a story of national importance, the white press tended to ignore it… Across the South, almost without limitation, Negroes had access to black weeklies that ridiculed white hypocrisy, spoke out bitterly against racial injustice, reinterpreted the mainstream press, and covered Negro social and religious organizations in detail.20
Roberts, a former New York Times national editor and Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor, was born and raised in the South, as was Klibanoff, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution managing editor. Both spent decades working in Traditional newsrooms. Their work chronicles how Traditional newspapers, particularly in the South, had ignored coverage of racial issues until court rulings challenged “separate but equal” structures and inflamed a white audience. Rulings spurred considerable coverage—one labeled the University of Texas’s separate law school for African American students insufficient, another decreed that an African American graduate student in Oklahoma could not be forced to sit outside his classrooms and the main cafeteria, a third declared unconstitutional the Southern Railway’s use of separating African American patrons in rail cars.21 Traditional journalism has a well-established reputation for centering conflict and framing stories in terms of winners and losers.22 These narratives of racial lines meshed well with that model. Traditional journalism was called to attend to racial issues it could no longer ignore because the white audience demanded coverage.
The 1954 US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled de jure school segregation unconstitutional, brought coverage of racial violence to the front pages of Traditional newspapers in ways never before seen.23 The Black Press had long been at the forefront of documenting race-based violence. Such coverage in Traditional newspapers was rare until liberal, white Southern editors began documenting what would later become historic events such as the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott. About this same time, the Black Press in the South struggled against Jim Crow-era violence, lack of advertising, and more rural landscapes that made distribution difficult. Although it had enjoyed a loyal audience, by the early 1950s, the number of Black Press newspapers had shrunk from almost 2700 to 175.24 Thus, it was Traditional journalists who told the stories of white mob violence and police water cannons. Those stories served as the catalyst to bring national attention to the civil rights struggles of the South and later to the rest of the nation.25 So, although the Black Press had been covering important issues for decades, racial violence did not become a national conversation until journalists working for Traditional news media brought it to the fore.
Kerner Commission: Stop Ignoring Communities of Color
The nation watched as unrest erupted in major cities across the country in the summer of 1967. The race-based clashes from Tampa to Detroit, Cincinnati to Newark, were “the nation’s worst domestic crisis since the Civil War,”26 making them the largest racial uprisings to have been televised. News coverage showed a nation that was racially and economically segregated. The following summer, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly called the Kerner Commission after chairman and former Ohio Gov. Otto Kerner, Jr. The commission’s job was to investigate what had happened, why it had happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. The underlying cause was both simple and complex. It was exemplified in the report’s summary: “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”27 The report recognized, in the strongest and starkest terms, the role of institutions in creating the divide, asserting, “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans…What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”28 The report then called on the government to fund programs and strategies “that will produce quick and visible progress” and recognized both the enormity of the request and the moral urgency to fulfill it, stating, “These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation’s conscience.”29 Noted among the institutions implicated as both a root of the problem and a potential solution were the news media.
The commission absolved journalists of contributing to the unrest by simply reporting on it, thus countering a public accusation still popular today that news coverage fans the flames of dissension. However, the commission condemned reporters for misrepresenting the violence in the streets and for failing to explore its symptoms. The report was the first to set a standard for news coverage of race.30 It devoted all 12 pages of Chapter 15, “The News Media and the Disorders,” to addressing what the field should do. The recommendations were based on a content analysis of newspaper, television, and radio coverage that so alarmed committee members they were moved to visit communities and conduct their own interviews of eyewitnesses and participants. In talking with people, they concluded that the news reports had mischaracterized the disturbances and overstated their level of destruction. They wrote, “We are deeply concerned that millions of other Americans, who must rely on the mass media, likewise formed incorrect impressions and judgements about what went on in many American cities last summer.”31 Unlike the Hutchins Report from two decades earlier, the Kerner Commission report put forth specific suggestions for what the news media should be doing better. It admonished newspapers to better reflect the fabric of society by ensuring people of all races appeared in news items that had nothing to do with race (the society pages, events, comic strips, etc.) and to show that African American families “read the newspapers, watch television, give birth, marry, die, and go to PTA meetings.”32 It exhorted journalists who covered African Americans living in urban, low-income neighborhoods to humanize rather than demonize their sources. It called for coverage to get beyond the recounting of events to explore their potential causes and even possible solutions, something at odds with Traditional journalism norms. The commission called for reporters to investigate the structures that underpinned the problems. Then it called for news organizations to diversify, asking for reporters to cover beats in those neighborhoods. In sum, the commission asked reporters to pay attention to impoverished communities of color even when there were no violent events to televise, and it asked journalists to make visible the everyday lived experience of people of color, who had been symbolically annihilated from news coverage for decades. It’s worth noting here that the twelve-member Kerner Commission, dominated by elected officials, included one former member of the Black Press. Roy Wilkins is now remembered as the executive director of the NAACP, but Wilkins began his life as a journalist with St. Paul, Minnesota’s The Appeal and Kansas City, Missouri’s The Call.33
Wilkins’s autobiography tells not only of purposeful censorship of news about African American communities but also of ignorance surrounding even major stories that happened in Kansas City. Wilkins recounts the 1925 story of an African American physician, Dr. Ossian Sweet, who had purchased a home in a white neighborhood. One night, the doctor’s home was surrounded by a white mob. Shots were fired and a white man was killed. The entire Sweet family was arrested. The NAACP hired Clarence Darrow to defend the doctor. Wilkins recalled, “One night, while the jury was still out, I went down to the Kansas City Star to see if any of the wire services had word of a verdict. It was the most important housing case of the twenties, but when I asked a white news editor about the story, he looked up at me blankly and mumbled, ‘The Sweet Case? Never heard of it.’”36 The Kerner Commission’s report was making public things known and observed for decades by the Black Press and its audience.The Star had a similar blind spot for most black news in those days. It fulminated over bombings among racketeers in Chicago, and it ran a tough editorial when a bomb was thrown into a cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria, but when bombs exploded at black homes on Montgall Avenue and Park Avenue in Kansas City, the Star was silent. For years it refused to print even a photograph of a Negro. The first black to break this tradition was Tom Lee, a boatman from Memphis who rescued a group of white engineers from a sinking riverboat. To show the survivors, the Star had to show Lee, too: he was right there in the middle, and there was no way to get him out.35
Traditional journalism largely did not respond favorably to Kerner’s calls for it to reform itself. Those reactions ranged from staunch defensiveness peppered with racial epithets to critique of the recommendations, acceptance, and a promise to do better. For example, in his 2017 book examining Kerner, journalism historian Thomas Hrach highlights a March 6, 1968, editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser headlined “Whodunnit? Whitey, Of Course,” which asserted, “Since the ‘white press’ is one of the defendants in the indictments turned out by the Honkey Committee, we’re prejudiced. But no more prejudiced than the Commission was in merely tut-tutting rioters, looters and insurrectionists.”37 Among national publications, Time magazine critiqued the solutions offered and said they would not work. Three months prior to the release of Kerner’s final report, and reportedly spurred by the Kerner investigation, Newsweek magazine produced a Nov. 20, 1967, special issue that attempted to offer solutions journalism as the magic bullet the Kerner Commission ultimately suggested. This foray into providing solutions was seen as a radical departure and something new—although it mirrored Ida B. Wells’s recommendations from decades prior. The magazine described its own issue in glowing and (falsely) pioneering terms: “By laying down an action plan for solving America’s racial problems, NEWSWEEK crossed over traditional lines of objectivity and sought to become an advocate for what it considered the most critical issue of the era.”38 As might be expected, the reaction to the report was mixed. It began a conversation—however short-lived—and was the impetus for plans to diversify newsrooms.
Newsroom Diversity Makes Small Gains, Then Falls Back
The lack of coverage of African American communities was at the heart of the Kerner Commission’s report. The report also noted a lack of newsroom diversity as contributing to this problem. In 1968, the report noted, only 5 percent of (Traditional) journalists were members of racial and/or ethnic “minorities.” The report said, “Slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls ‘the white press’—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.” Although the Kerner Commission’s report was blunt and supported by quantitative data, it took ten years for the industry to respond in any kind of systemic way. There were color-barrier gains to be celebrated as many newsrooms hired their first African American reporters, but the industry as a whole saw little change.
In 1978, the American Society of News Editors launched its Newsroom Employment Diversity Survey, citing a 3 percent “minority”39 population in newspaper newsrooms and adopting a goal of “parity” by 2000.40 ASNE was a leader in a concerted drive to diversify newsrooms.41 ASNE’s goal was to have the percentage of journalists of color match the percentage of people of color in the communities they served. (The parity goal was not specific to racial groups and did not, e.g., recommend that the percentage of Asian American reporters match the Asian American population in the circulation area). However, two things happened: the US population grew more racially diverse faster than expected, and the percentage of journalists of color decreased. The gap grew wider. It’s also important to note that the ASNE survey is voluntary. In 2017, for example, the survey had a 39.82 percent response rate, or 661 news organizations participating.42 It’s possible that newsrooms with more racial diversity might have been more inclined to respond to the survey, which could have resulted in data that would make newsrooms look more diverse than they are.
As the goal of parity grew more distant, ASNE changed the deadline to 2025. In 1999, the percentage of journalists of color in US newsrooms fell for the first time in 23 years, dropping to 11.64 percent, while the nation’s minority population had reached 30 percent. ASNE’s data showed 44 percent of its 950 newspapers employed no journalists of color.43 The parity gap widened with the faltering economy of the early 2000s when newspaper jobs declined 5.7 percent and reporters of color lost more than twice as many jobs as white reporters.44 The 2016 and 2017 surveys, which used a modified methodology and also focused on newsroom leadership as a separate category, showed the correlation between having people of color as newsroom leaders and a higher percentage of newsroom staffers who were people of color.
As Gwyneth Mellinger asserts in her book about the ASNE campaign, newsroom diversity efforts were also hampered by institutional racism.45 Attracting more reporters who are people of color is correlated with having managers who are also people of color. When people of color are not nurtured into management roles, that is less likely. Thus, although the 2017 study showed more diversity in many major newsrooms, the goal for newsroom parity has become farther out of reach.
Ferguson Commission Report Demands Outside Training
Echoes of the Kerner Commission report—and some key differences—can be found in the September 2015 Ferguson Commission report released 47 years later. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon convened the Ferguson Commission to examine the civil unrest in Ferguson after Michael Brown, Jr., was killed. Like Kerner, the Ferguson Commission report discussed racial oppression and urban poverty in African American communities and called out the news media for having misrepresented the civil unrest in the streets. Where it took a different direction was in asserting a need for anti-bias training, including a specific call for journalists to better learn how to cover racial issues. Rather than calling on journalism as an industry to do a better job, the Ferguson Commission report said that if journalists were to do a better job of covering racial issues, they needed diversity training from outside of the newsroom. In other words, rather than calling on journalists to do better journalism, the Ferguson Commission report cited Traditional journalism norms as a significant contributor to the problem and said training should come from outside of the field. The report said journalists needed “trauma-informed and anti-bias training…with specific focus on impoverished communities, people of color, and boys and men of color.”46 Saying that journalists needed anti-bias training was a direct indictment of Traditional journalism norms, including objectivity.
Unlike Kerner, the Ferguson Commission did not call on newsrooms to push for more diversity or to create “race beats,” but after the report was released, National Association of Black Journalists President Sarah Glover said, “My hope is that the Ferguson report causes all media managers, not just those in St. Louis, to take a moment to look around their own newsrooms and ask themselves whether their newsroom staff and content reflects the community they serve.”47 The Ferguson Commission report differed from the Kerner Commission report because it called on all reporters and others who work for institutions (i.e., government) to participate in diversity training, whereas Kerner positioned journalists as government watchdogs and posited hiring more journalists of color as the solution.
Contemporary Coverage: Incognizant, Color-Blind, Individualized Racism
The civil unrest of the 1960s was an important inflection point in US news coverage of racial issues. Although the Kerner Commission report called on the field of journalism to acknowledge its racial blindspots and take steps to improve coverage, that did not happen. The body of scholarship on US news and race is rich with examples showing how news media have, for decades, continued to play a role in othering people of color by their absence from the news, by reproducing racial stereotypes, and by using imbalanced coverage, biased word choices, and skewed framing that fails to acknowledge the systemic barriers faced by people of color. In 2000, Don Heider coined the term “incognizant racism” to explain how journalists habitually ignore issues and events affecting communities of color.48 He described it as unconscious and unintentional, something rooted in the habits, practices, and values of journalism as a field. From coverage of sports to crime, to poverty, to activism, these patterns have held true over decades.49
The body of research in this area provides clear and indefensible examples. For example, contemporary homicide coverage has statistically misrepresented whites as victims, African Americans as perpetrators, and Latinx as absent when compared to statistical data from police reports. Whites accounted for 13 percent of homicide victims in police statistics, but 43 percent of homicide victims in news coverage; Latinx comprised 54 percent of homicide victims, but were only shown as victims in 15 percent of news stories; African American victims made up 28 percent of the homicides, but 23 percent of the victims in news accounts.50 These representations follow the model of victim/villain myths in reproducing representations that are statistically inaccurate, but align with racial stereotypes.
Another way journalists’ coverage contributes to the maintenance of negative stereotypes is by reporting on systemic issues and linking them to racial modifiers. For example, an examination of 43 years’ worth of newsmagazines—Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report—between 1950 and 1992 found that fewer than 5 percent of the articles about poverty contained statistical information about the racial demographics of people living in poverty, yet in the images accompanying the articles, the face of poverty was overwhelmingly African American. African Americans accounted for about 27 percent of the poor over the study period, but accounted for as much as 75 percent of the images of poverty in newsmagazines.51
Additionally, although the poverty rate was steadily declining, the number of stories about poverty as a problem sharply increased, peaking in the 1970s. Thus, over a period of more than four decades, three major newsmagazines showcased poverty as an increasing problem, and the face of that problem was African American. Another example of this is commonly found in education reporting. We can know empirically that intelligence is not racially based, yet, each spring, when states release the results of standardized test scores, we can read news accounts about how African American children have lower test scores than white children, making it appear as though race is the causal factor. Because our laws “ensure” “equal access” to quality education, this feeds a narrative that somehow the problem is rooted in the individual. When the issue is generalized to African American children, the test scores are tied to race without exploring other factors such as socioeconomics or cultural biases in the tests. The coverage relies on and reinforces commonly held stereotypes.
Modern racial ideology does not thrive on the ugliness of the past or on the language and tropes typical of slavery and Jim Crow… Whites believe minorities have the opportunities to succeed and that, if they do not, it is because they do not try hard. And if minorities dare talk about discrimination, they are rebuked with statements such as “Discrimination ended in the sixties, man,” or, “You guys are hypersensitive.”53
That intangibility and the removal of overtly racist policies made it difficult for Traditional journalists to write about racism while remaining objective. The response has been to turn racism into something that is always situational and questionable and most often at the individual level.
The newer forms of racism are less obvious at the structural level, the level least often explored in Traditional news coverage. Laws mandating things such as “color blindness” in hiring practices, for example, have served to institutionalize it as a concept—as something not only achievable but required. In Traditional news narratives, which rely on facts and privilege detached, elite experts over those living the issue, discrimination is all but impossible to prove, because although journalists can read laws, they cannot read minds. The Traditional journalism norm of objectivity also compels a “both sides” approach that leads one side to assert racism and the other to refute it. This pushes the consequences into the background and obscures larger power structures.
Individual-Level Racism Versus Systemic Awareness
Qualitative analyses have shown how Traditional coverage of racial issues has exhibited a distinct pattern of skewed coverage that treats racism as occurring during isolated interpersonal interactions rather than manifesting more broadly as a systemic issue. A team of scholars at Race Forward, the Center for Racial Justice Innovation, created a taxonomy that is helpful in showing the difference and categorizing news media content. In their taxonomy, individual-level racism breaks into two categories: internalized and interpersonal. Internalized racism manifests in a system of beliefs about racial superiority and inferiority and/or essentialism. Interpersonal racism happens when those beliefs are expressed to another person, such as via a racial slur. Systemic-level racism is also broken into two categories: institutional and structural. Institutional-level racism is found in places such as schools, workplaces, healthcare settings, and so on that generate inferior outcomes for people of color. Structural racism is the larger and less tangible amalgamation of forces that repress people of color. These include history, ideology, the combined influence of institutions, and news media. The report notes, “An example is the overwhelming number of depictions of people of color as criminals in mainstream media, which can influence how various institutions and individuals treat people of color with suspicion when they are shopping, traveling, or seeking housing and employment—all of which can result in discriminatory treatment and unequal outcomes.”54 Using this taxonomy, it becomes evident that simply covering racial issues, as Kerner recommended decades ago, is not necessarily helpful and can even be detrimental if coverage focuses at the individual level. Doing so treats racism as a surprising thing done by a bad actor, which also gives the misperception that it can be avoided.
Race Forward’s 2013 analysis of more than 1200 newspaper articles and broadcast transcripts found that two-thirds of news coverage about racial issues relied on individual-level racism and failed to address systemic-level racism. The results were slightly better for stories covering the economy or criminal justice reporting, while the topics of education and politics were less systemically aware. When news narratives fail to take a systemic approach to covering racism, it obscures the depth and all-encompassing nature of systems that benefit white people and produce negative outcomes for people of color.
Moreover, coverage of racial issues that involves a controversy and emerges as breaking news (a shooting, a demonstration, a trial) tends to receive the most coverage, and that coverage lasts the longest. Covering news about race in ways that are episodic and “focused largely on exploding controversies and breaking news stories” conditions audiences “to see race as a hot-button topic only worthy of the most blockbuster stories, making it tougher for journalists to tell subtler, more complex tales.”55 Those everyday tales map on to key concepts of Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory and News Narratives
Journalists’ treatment of racism casts it as surprising, infrequent, and most often occurring at the individual level; but Critical Race Theory has long said otherwise. For decades, Critical Race Theory scholars have described how racism is a regular part of US life and not something aberrant or questionable.56 Legal scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic asserted that “Whiteness is also normative… Literature and the media reinforce this view of minorities as the exotic other” and define people of color by what they are not—white.57 Unlike the Traditional news norm of relying on elite sources, Critical Race Theory emphasizes how telling the stories of people who have experienced oppression, rather than privileging voices who talk about it in theory, can cause the audience to question common beliefs or stereotypes, particularly beliefs espoused by dominant groups.58 Everyday Racism author Philomena Essed described it this way: “When racism is transmitted in routine practices that seem ‘normal,’ at least for the dominant group, this can only mean that racism is often not recognized, not acknowledged—let alone problematized—by the dominant group.”59 Resistance to seeing or talking about racism, or explaining it away, is well explained by Whiteness Studies scholar Robin DiAngelo, who writes about white fragility. Because white people are socialized to see themselves as individuals rather than as part of a racialized group, they also do not see the ways in which systems of power have historically oppressed other racial groups in terms of distribution of wealth, something that has impacts over decades.60 Critical Race Theory is particularly relevant in the context of Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 because the former values the complexity of a narrative that reaches beyond events to explore systems and the latter privileges the voices of the oppressed.
This book draws on key tenets of Critical Race Theory and employs the Race Forward taxonomy to investigate systemic awareness in coverage of three contemporary moments of racial inflection across three paradigms of journalism. Concepts from Critical Race Theory are baked into the values of those paradigms. They map to the values that guide how journalists use technology and interact with the audience. To understand these relationships among journalists, audience, technology, and coverage of racial issues, and to explore where this might go in the future, requires first looking back at Traditional journalism’s relationship with technology and how it has evolved—or stayed the same—then looking at how things have manifested differently in emerging paradigms. When it comes to exploring today’s journalism ecology in the context of coverage of racial issues, issues of race and technology cannot be separated.
Ignore, Adapt, Rebuff: Digital Technology in the Newsroom
Digital technologies have (1) enabled new ways for the audience and journalists to interact, (2) allowed for the creation of born-digital news paradigms that leverage technology for that interaction, (3) provided the audience a way to speak back to coverage and avoid gathering around topics outside of journalism gatekeepers. But whether journalists are listening is another question. Navigating these phenomena requires starting with an overview of the advent of online journalism in Traditional newsrooms in the 1990s, a time when “newsroom dinosaurs” resisted online audience engagement and sought to retain a sense of top-down professional control over an audience they judged had little to offer. The two emerging paradigms are the opposite.
Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 have leveraged technology to initiate conversations with the audience, better understand what the audience wants, and allow the audience to participate in the narrative. How each paradigm uses digital technologies is important in examining an emerging journalism ecology as it turns its attention to coverage of racial conflict.
Online Journalism: Old Norms, New Platforms
Well before the birth and rise of social media, the late 1990s ushered in a new era in US online journalism. New digital technologies allowed news organizations unprecedented ways to instantly publish or broadcast to a global audience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Technology dominates discussions of journalism in the twenty-first century. Journalists and academics expound on the ways digital media have upended the news industry while prognosticating about its future directions. This is not mere talk—the material consequences of technological changes have been acutely felt by the journalism industry. Digital media have opened new means for news distribution and consumption, and the proliferation of new devices further complicates this environment.65
Digital technologies also challenged Traditional journalism at the level of the platform. The Internet removed barriers to entry for people who didn’t own printing presses or broadcast licenses. This was the cause for considerable debate about whether anyone with an Internet connection could now be a journalist; and it challenged long-held journalism ideals.66
Traditional journalists have reacted to technological changes in three ways: by ignoring them, by looking for ways technology could improve journalism, or by actively seeking to keep the audience at arm’s length and in a subordinate role.67 Matthew Powers described the field’s strong reaction as ranging from no influence to “possibilities for journalistic reinvention” to a “threat to be subordinated.”68 Studies of Traditional journalists have shown how they view audience participation as a threat to their independence and professionalism69 or something that should be ignored.70 Traditional journalists have also eschewed technology in their reporting.
The reasons most often cited in newsroom studies include a reluctance to learn new skills, viewing audience contributions as not valuable, a lack of trust in online information, or because they choose to continue to rely on elite sources.71 Most of these reasons represent values rooted in institutional norms.
What followed was a reluctant and constrained effort to allow limited audience participation in ways journalists controlled. The degree to which the audience may play a role in this new media environment is known as interactivity.72 Early attempts at interactivity most commonly took two forms: they gave the audience the ability to contribute on the news organizations’ platforms, and they gave the audience the power to customize their user experience. Examples of these included the ability for readers to search archived articles, access curated links to related content, upload their photos from a snowstorm, search a sortable database of public employees’ salaries, engage with other audience members in forums about teaching science in public schools, or click a link to share an article on social media. These options are all digitally enabled, were not previously possible, and are largely unmonitored by newsroom staff.73
Traditional journalism took a more participatory turn when news organizations began to allow the audience to comment (most often anonymously) on articles. Readers’ comments were posted instantly and most often unfiltered to news organizations’ platforms, typically in a space that appeared at the end of an article. In previous decades, audience comments were limited to signed letters to the editor that were subject to editing and vetting processes. Whether these new comments sections were a space for readers to engage with other readers, to engage with reporters, or for the reporter to solicit reader opinions or sources or news tips was never specified. As with all technology, how the comments sections were viewed and used depended upon the values of those using them. Journalists might read the comments, engage in dialogue with commenters, take guidance from reader feedback, or ignore all of it. Mostly, they ignored all of it.74 Journalists were not opposed to the existence of the comments sections, nor were they opposed to anonymity; and they didn’t ignore them due to a lack of time.75 Most journalists said they didn’t read online comments because they felt the audience was ill-informed and had little of value to offer.76 One reporter said his doctor wouldn’t seek his advice on how to conduct a heart surgery, so he didn’t need his doctor’s advice on how to write a news article.77 Journalists also felt online comments were a “cesspool” of hate and bigotry.78 As of 2014, many news organizations began to shut down online commenting,79 while others turned it off for certain “sensitive” topics such as stories about immigration or racial issues, which seemed to elicit more racist responses.80 In those cases, it appears that Traditional journalism’s experiment with engaging with more popular voices on its own platforms has ended—and that the “engagement” was mostly a one-sided effort.
By the second decade of the 2000s, audience participation centered on audience engagement. Traditional outlets began experimenting with online journalism as an opportunity for audience participation. This included launching new paradigms of journalism housed within Traditional news organizations.81 But the ways in which the new technologies would be incorporated, and who could use them, remained an open question.
Journalism on the “Hinge”
In recent years, scholars interested more in the transformative power of the Internet to influence Traditional journalism have made different cases about interactivity and participation. Some post-2010 research has suggested that Traditional journalism may be on a “hinge” between tradition and change as journalists begin to interact with technology.82 This scholarship is not contradictory; it shows that Traditional newspapers have reacted differently to the influences of technology. For example, Nikki Usher’s 2014 newsroom ethnography of The New York Times showed how journalists at this venerated newspaper spanned a spectrum from ignoring technology and performing their jobs the same ways they always had (i.e., write an article, send it to an editor) to incorporating it into their daily routines (i.e., using Twitter to link to their work or to find sources, posting regular updates on the newspaper’s website).83 There is an important distinction to be made here. Journalists who use Twitter to post a link to their articles are not interacting with audiences or ceding any type of professional control, which aligns with “the professional impulse toward one-way publishing control.”84 The role the audience may play is still at least somewhat dependent on what the news organization allows. Thus, while Traditional news organizations have followed similar patterns in using technology to publish online and have adopted the premise of a new, 24/7 news cycle to meet the more frequent demands for updated content, the idea of audience participation, or interactivity, stands out as a place where news organizations have adapted in distinct ways.
New Paradigms, New Values
The two new paradigms in this book, Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0, leverage the same technologies, but do so in different ways based on different values. Without these technologies, Interactive Race Beat journalism and Journalism 3.0 wouldn’t be what they are.
These paradigms don’t view online as limited to a place to publish. They are designed to leverage technology to interact with the audience. Interactive Race Beat journalism, housed within Traditional news organizations, uses technology to create a conversation between the journalists and the audience, but that conversation is not platform dependent. In fact, when NPR, which houses Code Switch, shut down audience comments on its website, Code Switch simply moved the conversation to Twitter. Code Switch’s lead blogger, Gene Demby, said the team was happy to move the conversation to Twitter, because that is where Code Switch’s audience was already living.85 Interactive Race Beat journalism seeks to broaden the conversation and values popular inclusion of a wide variety of sources. Twitter, which is more racially diverse than other social media sites,86 is an ever-growing pool of potential participants. While Interactive Race Beat journalism leverages social media to create conversation around topics it defines, Journalism 3.0 uses technology to monitor the audience’s conversations to report on hot topics and relies on audience social media shares for its distribution.87 It also may curate the audience’s contributions as part of coverage. Allowing what the audience is talking about to guide news is a sharp departure from the gatekeeping legacy of Traditional journalism and is also distinct from the Interactive Race Beat approach.
Audience, Technology, and Empowerment
The proliferation of smartphone technology has bridged a former digital divide, marking a turn at a time when mobile access is now most prevalent in the hands of an audience that is more racially diverse, younger, and more interested than ever in public affairs news. In 1995, a Census Bureau study showed that Internet users were predominantly white and affluent. Over the next two decades, cell phone technology bridged that gap, allowing users to access the Internet and a host of new social media applications. By September 2018, 90 percent of African Americans lived in a household with a smartphone. That percentage is 6 percent higher than smartphone ownership in the general population and is a higher rate than any other demographic group.88 African Americans generally, and African American millennials specifically, are the most active demographic group on Twitter relative to population size.89 In 2018, African Americans comprised 28 percent of US Twitter users, and about 14 percent of the US population. That marked an increase in rate and size from 2012, when African Americans represented 25 percent of Twitter users and 13 percent of the population.90 Smartphone use also correlates with new patterns of news consumption among a younger demographic, one that has historically not shown an interest in civic affairs. The 18- to 24-year-old audience is using mobile devices to consume and share news as one of their top three priorities, marking an increased attention to civic affairs.91 That age demographic also represents a more racially diverse audience.92 Mobile technology has made news more readily available, and social media has provided a place for that younger, more racially diverse, more politically attuned audience to access news about current events, to gather around news and issues, and to form their own movements that leverage their voices outside of news media platforms.
One of the most prominent contemporary civil rights activists named mobile phones as the key to success in organizing a new civil rights movement. DeRay Mckesson, a leading Ferguson activist who now heads Campaign Zero, an organization dedicated to ending police brutality, has said mobile technology is at the heart of the new civil rights movement. In a January 2016 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert asked Mckesson how the civil rights movement has changed since the 1960s. Mckesson did not pause before saying the answer was “technology.” He said, “When we think about what’s different about the civil rights movement now, it’s really about technology. The issues are the same and we didn’t invent resistance, we didn’t discover injustice, but technology has allowed us to amplify these messages in ways that we couldn’t before and has accelerated the pace of organizing in ways that are really powerful.”93 Mckesson credited cell phones with growing the movement both online and in the streets. Part of the ability to “amplify the message” meant the audience’s widespread use of portable, instant communication without geographic hurdles—and the ability to spread a narrative independent of news media coverage.
Since its birth in 2006, Twitter has become a powerful tool in the political arena. Audience members may be leveraging the platform to share their views, to engage in conversation, to build a community/following/call to action, or to speak back to a dominant narrative. Twitter users may be anonymous or may identify themselves. They may also claim a false identity that can be difficult to verify. The platform allows users to interact instantly and globally with people they do not know. It allows for the sharing of words, images, and videos created by the user or by others. Users may build gravitas by having a large number of followers linked to their profiles or with the number of shares of a single post. Twitter enables users who may not know one another to gather around a topic using hashtags as a curation tool. Building a following around a hashtag has the potential to make the post viral whether or not journalists deem it newsworthy.
The affinity for personal connection and cultural interaction makes African Americans the most likely racial or ethnic group to get their news from social media, as well as the mostly likely group to use Twitter. Thus, the rise of Black Twitter has been a natural evolution. Black Twitter isn’t merely a series of hashtags or a subgroup of Twitter; it is a platform for African Americans to mobilize Black culture and identity, to speak out against injustice, to cover issues affecting their community, and to create social change.95
Black Twitter’s popularity and proliferation has driven conversations and increased awareness not just among African Americans but also among a broader national audience (inside and outside of news media), something the Nielsen report refers to as “forced conversations.” These forced conversations begin on Twitter, then become topics of news coverage.
The concept of online communities is important in discussions of social change because Twitter is not only a digital tool; it is also a place. Technology has enabled a new type of community that acts as “a site of affirmation, identification, and political expression”96 that can speak to elites, overcome geographic boundaries, and help organize social movements.97 These ideas mesh well with scholars who have, over the past decade, argued that the advent of new media technologies may serve as a democratizing force that allows for more grassroots participation.98 If technologies have the power to create communities centered on a common interest, they may also have the power to influence news coverage about those communities. However, those conceptions of power are also inextricably tied to the values of the users—in this case, journalists.
Technology Centers Users’ Values
The ways journalists have leveraged online technologies to meet different needs and to create new paradigms of journalism are neither unique to journalism nor confined to the context of the Internet. Assuming a tool will have a specific impact or cause a particular change is adopting a standpoint of technological determinism. Particularly when studying journalism paradigms built around different value systems, it’s imperative to ask how journalists ignore, adopt, or push back against technologies rather than assuming a specific use. Theories of social construction of technology, or how users foreground their values onto tools, show the importance of centering values rather than presuming impacts. A tool designed for one use may be leveraged in different ways to meet other needs, even if those needs were not part of the technology’s intended purpose.99 For example, although the automobile was designed to replace the horse and buggy as a means of more rapid and longer-distance transportation, not all users foregrounded transportation as the highest value of the new technology. Many rural residents were hostile to the loud, fast-moving machines that threatened their livestock. Others simply had no use to go long distances quickly, so they put blocks under the automobile’s wheels to keep it from moving, then hooked up the engines to run their farm equipment or washing machines.100 Users leveraged the technology in new ways that best met their own needs.
Similar phenomena have been seen in how journalists use social media technologies such as Twitter. Journalists may use Twitter to break news, link to their stories, seek sources, monitor what other journalists are doing,101 see what potential sources and the “people formerly known as the audience” are saying about news events,102 or to curate audience posts for incorporation into coverage. Journalists in the Traditional paradigm have been more likely to use Twitter to link to their stories as a source for elected officials and less likely to quote tweets from non-elite sources, even those with large followings.103 Traditional journalists have not leveraged Twitter to widen the conversation or rethink the role of audience and “still throw their news nets to the same spots as they did in the pre-Internet age.”104 This foregrounds Traditional journalism’s values. Traditional journalists working for less “elite” news organizations are less likely to “relinquish their gatekeeping role by sharing their stage with other news gatherers and commentators,” by entering into discussions with other tweeters, or by linking to content not on their own news platforms.105 Interactive Race Beat journalism and Journalism 3.0 journalists’ use of social media has not yet been extensively studied. How journalists use technology is important in the context of coverage of racial issues because new tools such as social media enable journalists to instantly monitor the audience and the work of other journalists outside of their circulation areas. That creates opportunities for journalists to make more systemic connections between racialized news events.
Influences on How Journalists Work
The distinction among these levels is not between people and non-people, individuals or non-individuals—or even individuals and social structures. It is between the immediate actions of specific individuals, and the more organized and historically situated actions of larger collections of people. Ideology, after all, is the meanings that people have become accustomed to attaching to certain interests of collectivities in control of significant social resources, including power.107
Individual: defined broadly as “characteristics of the individual” and, in this study, operationalized at the level of the reporter.
Routine Practices: reporters’ work habits when covering issues. In this study, there is a focus on interacting with technology as part of a daily routine.
Media Organizations: the organization for which the reporter works, in this study focused on newsroom beat structure around racial coverage.
Social Institutions: in this study, defined as how journalism as a field has covered racial issues and whether there have been changes in coverage.
Social Systems: ideological forces that shape how we understand racial issues. This study centers the Traditional journalism norm of objectivity, which has been identified as a problematic structuring force in coverage of racial issues, to see how reporters covering race across paradigms conceptualize it.
The Hierarchy of Influences Model has thus far been applied to studies of Traditional journalism. Because this book examines values, it also evaluates whether journalists who left Traditional newsrooms carried Traditional values into emerging paradigms (or, indeed, whether they ever subscribed to Traditional values and practices). Much of the work of this book is to examine how the same tool that has enabled a new civil rights movement may also be influencing journalists and new paradigms of journalism. This work explores how journalists ignore, interact with, or rebuff a virtual crowd of users focused on a topic of common interest and who can instantly post user-generated content that does not go through a news media filter. All of these affordances push back strongly against Traditional field norms such as setting the agenda, gatekeeping, and verifying sources and facts. However, they align with the values of the emerging paradigms that widen the conversation, provide coverage that follows the audience’s concerns, and privilege the voices of those most affected by the issues. Chapter 3 examines how this might manifest in coverage. Chapter 4 foregrounds the voices of the journalists who talk about their relationship to technology.
Inflection Moments of Race
The election of the nation’s first African American president, the birth and growth of a new civil rights movement, and journalists attending to issues of racial violence after Ferguson were watershed events. These “firsts” occurred in a new context that included online journalism, the advent of social media, and the peak use of smartphones. In this unprecedented environment, new technologies afforded journalists and the audience direct access to a larger public and to one another. These technologies presented opportunities for Traditional journalists and collided with long-held norms and practices. They also enabled Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 to come into being.
The Post-Racial Question
A new national conversation about race reached one zenith with the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. That historic event fueled a wave of “post-racial” questioning that asked, “If we have a black president, then how can racism still be a problem?” The term “post-racial” appeared in only 12 headlines or first sentences of Traditional news stories in US newspapers between 1990 and 2007, but in 2008 it appeared in Traditional news coverage 226 times in one year.108
A New York magazine article published seven months before Obama announced his candidacy asked, “The junior senator from Illinois might take the country to a place it’s never been, past the baby boom, beyond race. To many Democrats, and even a lot of Republicans, the prospect is thrilling—but is it for real?”109 The effect of this post-racial questioning discourse was to erase the US history of enslavement and discrimination from the public and news media narrative.110 Examples of this type of discourse are not difficult to find in Traditional journalism; they span from the emergence of Obama’s first hint of candidacy through much of his two terms as president. These narratives define “post-racial” in myriad, and sometimes oppositional, ways, as shown in Chap. 3’s analysis of news coverage. In Traditional journalism, they begin with a tone of earnest questioning and evolve into an unfulfilled promise or a ruse. The racial narrative underlying this question had been set long before most people had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois.
The victory was heralded as the arrival of a “post-racial” America, one in which the nation’s original sin of racial slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow discrimination had finally been absolved by the election of a black man as commander in chief. For a while, the nation basked in a racially harmonious afterglow…
Seven years later, such profound optimism seems misplaced. Almost immediately, the Obama presidency unleashed racial furies that have only multiplied over time. From the tea party’s racially tinged attacks on the president’s policy agenda to the “birther” movement’s more overtly racist fantasies asserting that Obama was not even an American citizen, the national racial climate grew more, and not less, fraught.111
Part of the post-racial question, as Joseph identified, was prompted by the hope that Obama’s election signaled that the nation as a whole had become less racially prejudiced. Obama, of course, never asserted that his election made the country post-racial. Throughout his presidency, he was both praised and criticized for not regularly talking about race. Although the president wasn’t calling forth this narrative, Traditional journalists seized on it at the forefront of coverage.
The post-racial question itself exemplified color-blind racism.112 Bonilla-Silva described how the seeds of thought planted decades before came to bear fruit with Obama’s election. He wrote, “In the 2008 election cycle, Americans did not see what was in front of their noses; they saw what they wanted and longed to see. Whereas blacks and other people of color saw in Obama the impossible dream come true, whites saw the confirmation of their belief that America is indeed a color-blind nation.”113 This “new racism” had supplanted what had existed in legally sanctioned ways. It is more difficult to recognize, easier to excuse, and more difficult to challenge in formal or informal ways.
The Birth and Growth of #BlackLivesMatter
The Black Lives Matter movement has been called “the most significant political challenge in decades to institutional racism and the status quo.”114 The movement, founded as a Twitter hashtag in 2013, became an online platform around which regional grassroots groups gathered. The movement began in response to the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man accused of shooting unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, who is white or Latino depending upon the news account,115 was serving as a neighborhood watch volunteer and felt it was suspicious that an African American teen in a hoodie was walking through his neighborhood. Zimmerman shot and killed Martin after an altercation on Feb. 26, 2012. The acquittal sparked protests both online and in person. Celebrities, activists, and elected officials flooded Twitter with posts of themselves wearing hoodies. Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush of Illinois, who is African American and a longtime civil rights activist, made headlines for being removed from the US House floor because he was wearing a gray, hooded sweatshirt to speak about racial profiling and Martin’s death.116 (House rules prevent the wearing of hats in the chambers and the presiding officer ruled that the hood was like a hat.) A group of African American New York State senators also wore hoodies on the Senate floor. As a tribute to Martin and a political statement, the Miami Heat basketball team tweeted a photo of themselves wearing hoodies over bowed heads, their faces obscured.
In A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, co-founder Alicia Garza explained that she, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi launched the movement as a response to anti-black racism embedded throughout US society. She wrote, “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”117 The movement’s founders wanted to create something decentralized rather than hierarchical. A longitudinal body of research has shown that Traditional journalism has ignored, discredited, disdained, and dismissed grassroots protest movements.118 For a movement to also not have discernible leaders presented a particular challenge for Traditional journalists accustomed to interviewing sources who were people in positions of power. Further, the movement purposefully avoided coalescing around one issue.
Although it was born in response to acquittal of the man charged with murdering Trayvon Martin, the movement sought an intersectional approach that focused on racial identity, gender identity, sexual identity, citizenship, and class. The fact that it did not focus on police brutality against African Americans brought it under fire from scholars and a previous generation of civil rights activists who wanted the movement to look more like the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s.119 In addition, the hashtag spurred a counternarrative of #AllLivesMatter that played into the narrative of a “color-blind” nation.
In the ten-year history of Twitter, #BlackLivesMatter was the third most-used hashtag on the platform. #Ferguson was the first.120 #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter on July 13, 2013, four years after the platform began linking hashtags.121 While most hashtags swell and wane with the headlines of the day, #BlackLivesMatter persisted. It was used 11.8 million times, or about 17,002 per day, from its first appearance in 2013 through March 2016.122 The growth of the Black Lives Matter movement shows how Twitter, online news, and cell phone technologies converged to speak back to the question of post-racialism and the reality of everyday racism.
That data also notes that the hashtag, created after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the murder of Trayvon Martin, tends to spike in relationship to news coverage of police killings of African Americans. For example, for ten days in July 2016, #BlackLivesMatter was used on Twitter nearly half a million times every day. That was the same week Alton Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in the suburbs or Saint Paul, Minnesota; and gunmen in separate attacks killed five police officers in Dallas, Texas, and three in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Pew data showed similar spikes when the officer who killed Castile was acquitted and when President Donald Trump called on the National Football League to fire players who did not stand for the national anthem.123 These spikes correlate with the news events, but also seek to bring attention to and gather an audience around issues that are systemic rather than episodic.
An alarming number of news articles analyzed for this book, including those appearing in The New York Times and The Washington Post, have falsely stated that the Black Lives Matter movement began in Ferguson. Although news coverage of Ferguson was the first time the movement received sustained coverage, it had been born more than a year earlier. Like previous civil rights movements, it earned attention after people took to the streets. But the movement was not born in the streets. It was born on social media.
#Ferguson
The killing of African American teen Michael Brown, Jr., by white police officer Darren Wilson in the afternoon of August 9, 2014, on a Ferguson, Missouri, street captured and held the attention of the news media in ways not seen in decades. The circumstances—white cop kills unarmed African American man—were not new. Ferguson represented the first time race had been covered with such attention in the nation’s so-called post-racial presidency, since the advent of cell phone technology that enabled Twitter, consumption of online news, and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Washington Post reporters Mark Fisher and Wesley Lowery wrote that “Ferguson forces the country out of the fantasy that America had entered a ‘post-racial’ era.”124
Twitter played a key role in gathering the audience around issues, calling attention to events, and distributing first-person accounts, images, and videos outside of news platforms. #Ferguson was the most-used hashtag in Twitter’s ten-year history.125 AJ+ producer Shadi Rahimi noted that in the middle of the protests, “Activists were scooping the media on Twitter, photos and raw video were being tweeted in rapid succession to tell a full story on timelines.”126 The audience’s images of Michael Brown , Jr., lying dead in the street hit Twitter three days before national journalists began covering the story.127 St. Louis Alderman Antonio French became a go-to Twitter account for both activists and journalists, who began quoting his feed and referring to him as a “citizen journalist” although French never sought that title.128 Ferguson marked a key period in which journalists and activists were using the tool in similar ways.
Ferguson also marked the first widespread use of #BlackLivesMatter, although the hashtag was a year old. Many of the popular hashtags connected to the Black Lives Matter movement persisted over several years decoupled from previous news events. The hashtags #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, #HandsUpDontShoot, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, and #ICantBreathe all spiked on Twitter in the days, weeks, months, and even years following Brown’s death129 and created “forced conversations”130 when the audience spoke back to problematic journalistic narratives. For example, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown was used more than 100,000 times in 24 hours131 following the death of Michael Brown, Jr. Men and women of color tweeted photos of themselves drinking alcohol, flipping off the camera, or trying to “look tough” aside photos of themselves holding babies, hugging their smiling mothers, or holding college degrees, the contrasts reflecting how a single image could reduce a person of color to a racial stereotype. The hashtag was a direct response to the images the news media chose to portray Brown’s life—and to judge him as a victim who was either innocent or worthy of police suspicion. In some of the most widely used images from news coverage, Brown was either posing in his green satin high-school graduation gown and cap or standing in front of a building, scowling and making a sign with his hand that was widely interpreted as him throwing a gang sign. Twitter users sent a strong message to journalists: the image you choose shapes public perception of the person killed. Stop portraying people of color in stereotypical ways.
Social media gave the audience agency to immediately and publicly provide counternarratives that spoke to Traditional news coverage and were then covered in major news media outlets, something explored in depth in the next chapter.
Ferguson coverage also highlighted anew a lack of newsroom diversity. As the protests that ensued over the following weeks made national and international headlines, Traditional newsrooms realized they had a dearth of non-white reporters to cover Ferguson, which we now know they understood to be a major news story—the biggest news story of the year. Public opinion polls about Ferguson coverage showed a strong racial divide between how white respondents and African American respondents viewed the role of race in the death of Michael Brown, Jr. An August 2014 Pew Research Center Survey showed that 80 percent of African American respondents agreed that the death and demonstrations in Ferguson raised “important issues about race that need to be discussed,” while only 37 percent of white respondents felt that way.132 Moreover, 47 percent of whites felt “race is getting more attention than it deserves,” but only 18 percent of African American respondents agreed with that statement. The percentage of white respondents who felt race was “getting too much” attention was lower after Ferguson than it was a year prior during the trial of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin.133 These poll numbers are important in two ways: one, they show how audiences interpret news at an individual level, and two, they show the ability of the white audience to change its mind.
These three key events—the post-racial question emerging into news discourse with Obama’s candidacy, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the response to the killing of Michael Brown , Jr., in Ferguson—constitute important moments in journalism about racial issues. Examining coverage across the three paradigms of journalism—Traditional, Interactive Race Beat, and Journalism 3.0—provides important insights into whether news coverage of race might be changing or have stayed the same in an era in which technology affords unprecedented opportunities for non-elite voices to help co-create the stories we tell about race. For example, does Traditional journalism continue to rely on elite voices in an era of Twitter? Do journalists enter into conversations with the audience via social media? Has Interactive Race Beat journalism widened the conversation by including more popular voices, or is the conversation, while more inclusive, still centered around what the elites are talking about? Does Journalism 3.0 produce something qualitatively different than the paradigms from which it evolved? Are the new paradigms adopting some of the practices and norms of Traditional journalism—or, as these new digital-first outlets become increasingly popular, is Traditional journalism adapting to be more like the newer paradigms? Are there differences in the narratives across the three paradigms, for example, in telling what is at stake and identifying the causes of conflict? Is racism viewed as a question or a given?