The News Focus is an independent platform meant for sharing the progressive analysis of current events that is systemically left out of the larger media narrative. For now, that will take the form of short interviews which I’ll conduct as often as I can. The following essay, meanwhile, is specifically about my own views on how the news relates to race. I thought, as a White person with a website talking about the news, it was important to be transparent about these views. I also wanted to give credit to some of the writers, researchers, and others whose work I think would be useful for anyone looking to learn more about media studies.
{Trigger warning: this entire piece contains constant references to racism in a variety of forms, including deadly racist violence, though I’ve tried to avoid prolonged descriptions.}
1. The Invented World
I think the news doesn’t just provide a platform for racism. I’d like to argue here that, in terms of how both affect us psychologically, the news and racism are the same thing. Both involve learning about the world along racialized lines, drawn by those in power – internalizing a set of White supremacist ideologies, and subsequently accepting a constructed version of reality which ultimately benefits the oppressor class.
When I talk here about “the news,” I’m mostly referring to content produced by what progressive media critics like Janine Jackson call the “corporate media.” That’s the small set of corporations which create, distribute, and surveil the majority of media on the planet. This label emphasizes the bias of the news towards existing power structures, and rejects the idea that its content reflects the values of the public, like the more common term “mainstream media” suggests . Likewise, I generally do not use the term “alternative” media when referring to independent news outlets, whose content I think more closely aligns with the concerns of real people – rather than an imagined “target audience.” I like the “corporate media” label a lot, but I’ll often be using it interchangeably with “the news” – partly because I think that’s how most people refer to it, but also because I want to talk about material that might not be directly produced by corporations, but still embodies the values of that same harmful media ecosystem. Please also note that, due to their massive influence on how the public consumes information, most of my references to “the news” are intended to include social media platforms, search engines, and other staples of the tech industry.
Anyway, in “The Spectacle of Accumulation,” Sut Jhally writes that the transnational capitalist class maintains the wealth gap partly by convincing members of the public to “live their own domination as freedom.” Peter Phillips and others have detailed how this is accomplished through direct investments in the public’s main sources of information. It’s likely that the motivation here is primarily economic; as Shoshana Zuboff writes in the “Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” the “surest way to predict behavior is to intervene at its source and shape it.” But regardless of whether there is also an intentional ideological motivation, there is clearly an ideological effect: the public’s widespread acceptance of an oppressive status quo, one which benefits those in power. And one of the main pillars of that status quo is White supremacy – the always-evolving set of lies which fuels the belief that the lives of those designated as “White” have more value than those of the racialized “other.” I will stress before moving on that the normalization of such beliefs is not necessarily the result of some kind of direct conspiracy – a common “straw man” argument propped up by the corporate media to misrepresent its critics. Really, it’s not more complicated than this: the same transnational capitalist class which controls the rest of society also controls the news industry, and their values simply influence the finished product.
A more thorough analysis of how the news enables oppression would obviously involve a more intersectional approach, involving gender, disability, and more. Due to time constraints, I chose to limit this analysis to White supremacy, to serve as an entry point to that larger dicussion, primarily because I think it has a particularly strong historical link to the U.S. news industry. White supremacist content, from the most extreme to the most commonplace, has always been central to helping that industry grow. The news, meanwhile, has always been a key method for not just spreading, but also refining specific ideologies of White supremacy – which are then used by those in power to justify specific political actions. There are many examples of this throughout history, ranging from so-called “manifest destiny,” enslavement, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, to more modern ones like the so-called “war on terror,” and so-called “crisis at the U.S. border.”
While the intertwined history of White supremacy and the U.S. news industry is important to acknowledge, I’m going to be talking here primarily about the psychological link between the two instead. The use of news by those in power, to create ideologies of White supremacy with which to warp public sentiment to suit their needs, is less obvious than the use or threat of physical violence. The primary method, refined over many years, is to instead shape perception itself through suggestion so omnipresent that it goes unnoticed. A metaphor you’ll encounter in media studies is that a fish likely wouldn’t be the first to “discover” water, since he’s spent his whole life completely submerged in it.
The world we find in news, to use a phrase from Margaret Morse, is an “invented world.” Rather than present the world we live in, the news represents an intentionally constructed version of that world. To make a parallel, Andrea Dworkin says that with pornography, men invent a world where they can express what they need to believe is true about themselves and women in relation to each other, so that they can “sustain themselves as they are” in the real world. More broadly, as Stuart Hall puts it, “power intervenes in representation,” to privilege the definitions of the powerful – “(naturalizing)” those definitions so they become the “only meaning (an image) can possibly carry.” Ideology, Hall says, attempts to “close meaning,” so that the public comes to automatically associate certain outcomes with certain actions, or certain characteristics with certain groups of people.
To give a specific example, the “conflation of (B)lackness with crime,” as Michelle Alexander provides ample evidence for in “The New Jim Crow,” didn’t “happen organically; rather it was constructed by political and media elites.” While “it is no longer permissible” in the modern U.S. to openly hate Black people, we are encouraged to hate “criminals” – a highly racialized label. Carol Stabile points out that this conflation relies not just on dominant ideologies of race, but also gender: The “practices of (W)hite masculinity” are decriminalized, while femininity as a whole becomes “premised on (W)hiteness.” And because White men cannot consider Black men a threat to themselves – since that would undermine ideologies of White supremacy – they channel the imagined threat of widespread Black violence targeting White people into rhetoric around protecting the heteronormative family, particularly women and girls.
The myth of the “Black rapist,” for instance, has its origins in the campaign of anti-Black terrorism which followed the Civil War. As Angela Davis explains, lynching was at that time becoming a “valuable political weapon,” but before it could be “consolidated as a popularly accepted institution… its savagery and its horrors had to be convincingly justified.” This logic is why Donald Trump and his allies worked since the launch of his first presidential campaign to portray immigrants as “rapists” – to justify the savagery and horrors of U.S. immigration policy. Power, as Hall would say, had closed the meaning of “immigrant,” and the news went along with the Trump team’s misdirection. The entire identity of “immigrant” became limited to a person that White people could call “a rapist” or “not a rapist” – rarely someone with other qualities, and almost never someone to be heard from directly. Even supposedly positive news coverage was limited to combating claims which were obviously never true to begin with, and were not worth debating – with any defense of immigrants generally reducing their value as human beings to their contributions to the U.S. economy. As intended, the spectrum of media discussion had been almost entirely constricted to what immigrants could hypothetically do to the U.S. – not what the U.S. actually does to them.
2. The Myth of Objectivity
Journalists would likely push back against the idea that they can be manipulated by so-called “newsmakers” into simply spreading their propaganda, as decribed above. In the language they use, journalists argue they can view the world “objectively.” On the issue of racism specifically, White journalists seem to believe there are “real racists” out there on one side, and then there are people of color on the other, and they – the “objective” journalists – are “above the fray,” able to look down on it all with cool detachment. I’d compare this to what Farai Chideya has referred to as “racial essentialism”: the false idea that White people have no race, while racialized people are thought to “only (see) the world via race.” White journalists appear to assume, not only a permanent bias on the part of racialized people, but that they themselves can set aside their own biases through simple, “objective” introspection. Carol Schick says White people believe they can “change at will the significance of their embodied status,” to “pass through” the “walls of contested space” – performing, when required, that they are “not really” White.
I think objectivity is completely misrepresented by professional journalists. As I understand it, the concept has its origins in scientific experimentation: testing the durability of different materials, for example, might involve applying the same amount of pressure to all of them. A journalist can similarly attempt to use objective methods of information-gathering, such as conducting a poll with the same set questions for every person. But the idea that journalists (or any human being) are themselves “objective” is inaccurate. It would be impossible to construct a poll (or even decide the topic), for instance, without some level of subjective decision-making.
However, even if it was somehow possible for humans to convey information “objectively,” I still wouldn’t believe that information whose gathering or delivery was instead influenced by a person’s subjective experience would be inherently less reliable. One could read statistics about the human or economic toll of a wildfire, for example, as a way to learn about what happened, but wouldn’t also reading the firsthand account of a survivor – an account which would clearly be influenced by their own subjective experience of feeling afraid during such a dangerous situation – help the reader have a better understanding of the reality of that wildfire?
The harms of White supremacy, as experienced by its racialized victims, are as real as the impacts of a natural disaster, yet the news considers those victims disqualified from having the final say on what the facts of racism are. A journalist likely wouldn’t second-guess including a quote from a flood survivor that the experience was “terrifying.” Yet that same journalist might hesitate to include a quote from a person describing the obstacles they faced in trying to get financial assistance afterwards as “racist.” The victims of racism are, without question, the authorities on the realities of racism, yet the news considers them too “biased” to say what that reality is; that task is instead left to the “objective” journalist.
Often, what journalists are actually referring to when discussing their “objectivity” is really a kind of moral neutrality. Personally, I’d argue that remaining neutral in the face of immorality is itself also immoral, and that the assumption a person can be “neutral” at all when it comes to racism, comes from an ignorance born out of White privilege. Regardless, corporate media journalists consider not “taking sides” to be their professional, if not moral responsibility. To the benefit of the broader corporate media system, whose power and influence derives from a racist status quo, these journalists will likely never give up on the dogma that they must not conduct their work in direct opposition to racism.
Rather, the news takes the facts of racism directly experienced by its racialized victims, and instead frames them as opinions that those people are expressing about racism. It then shoves this “opinion” into a “both sides” framing, where it is not just further misrepresented, but even worse: exploited to the strengthen the “other side,” racism. That’s because if “both sides” are given equal weight by the news (as is the professional standard of corporate media journalists), then racism is treated as the reflection – equal in proportion – of anti-racism. The larger the collection of evidence used to support anti-racist thought, the larger the assumed collection of so-called “evidence” used to support White supremacist thought.
Crucial to understanding how “objectivity” furthers White supremacy is understanding how it’s used to turn racialized groups against each other – a key White supremacist tactic. To give just one example, Catherine Ceniza Choy points out how rich histories of Black and Asian American solidarity have been obscured in the media by decades of “model minority” framing. The goal of this (and again, many other examples) is to hide the White monopoly on racist oppression. While White people systemically benefit from racism, the news often cherry-picks small, individualized acts of prejudice commited by people of color against one another and gives them disproportionate weight – distorting racism from something systemic, which ultimately benefits Whiteness, into a set of simple prejudices “everybody” supposedly has. The thinking goes like this: if “everybody” is prejudiced, then maybe that means there’s some truth to those prejudices. It’s why legal strategist Edward Blum, after failing with 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas, openly said he “needed Asian plaintiffs” instead of just White ones before he could take affirmative action back to the Supreme Court – which he did, with catastrophic results for the U.S., in 2023.
More broadly, White supremacists exploit the “objectivity” of both journalists and those working in “Big Tech” to ensure their propaganda always has a platform. That propaganda can take many forms, such as appropriating anti-racist framings (as seen with the campaign against affirmative action), making authoritarian populist appeals to “common sense,” or openly employing Fascist language and symbols (though often, as seen with figures like Elon Musk, insisting they’re being used “ironically”). I’ll note here that, while the focus of this essay will continue to primarily be the way news content itself is created, and how that furthers White supremacy, the specific ways that the tech industry platforms that content is just as important to understand – with Safiya U. Noble’s “Algorithms of Oppression” being what I’d consider a very useful starting point for that branch of this discussion.
Anyway, former Ronald Reagan adviser Lee Atwater admitted, that even by the late 60s, the tactic was to replace the more openly racist appeals of the previous decades with more “abstract” discussions of economic issues or so-called “states rights” – avoiding explicit reference to race. Thus, a slightly-coded racist term like “welfare queen,” which Reagan helped popularize, could be repeated over and over again like a slur – the goal of which was to equate even just the concept of welfare with moral depravity. We can draw a parallel with the vitriol that White supremacists today use when referencing DEI, while decades before all of this, the more openly violent methods of segregationists were subsumed into racist dogwhistling about “property values” – a framing which still persists, and continues to help enable segregation.
Essentially, as long as racist rhetoric limits itself to the seemingly abstract and seemingly neutral, the news systemically fails to put its institutional weight behind calling it what it actually is. Instead, it presents it in a so-called “objective” way – which is to say, largely uncritically. What in reality is racist language, in the invented world of news is instead referred to as “language some have called racist.” The faux neutrality of the news actually hides a firmly established moral stance – one which legitimizes expressions of hatred or ideologies of superiority when it presents them without explicit condemnation.
To be clear, it’s not that journalists aren’t aware of the institutional weight the news possesses. They’ll generally omit phrases like “I think,” or really any language that indicates the words used in an article or script were chosen by a person. Journalists say that within the industry, this style of writing is even referred to as the “God voice.” I believe their goal with writing this way is to subconsciously give the reader the impression that what’s being read is purely the essence of fact, not an interpretation of fact – which all communication technically is. So typical corporate media jargon like “NATO must bolster its defenses against its enemies before it can expand itself as needed,” which is loaded will all kinds of subjective value-judgements, is presented as an unquestionable truth. Yet domestic and foreign policies which are rooted in ideologies of White supremacy, and have been consistently proven to harm racialized populations, are never called “racist.”
Whatever journalists think their societal role is, or why they might believe they must not openly take clear moral stances, doesn’t matter; in practice, they simply become bystanders to racist harm. And the traumas of racism can never be healed if its bystanders do not own up to their role in its perpetuation, acknowledge that its victims have never deserved to be victimized, and permanently center the demands of those victims – all while openly and clearly calling out opposition to those demands as racism.
3. The Normative Spectator
So far, I’ve been mainly talking about journalists and so-called “newsmakers.” But what about the audience? Why do White people, the corporate media’s obvious target audience, fail to see through the racist distortions of the news?
Earlier I said that, to sustain the invented world of news, racialized people cannot be allowed to decide what is or isn’t racism. They can only present an opinion: “I think that’s racist.” And because White people feel, not just that they’re qualified to talk about racism, but that they’re the only ones qualified to do so (again, think racial essentialism), they view answering the question of whether something is racist as a kind of societal obligation.
But White people generally seem to assume that something is not racist unless they can find some kind of “evidence” that satisfies them. The racist cruelty of Sonya Massey’s murder was apparent immediately after she was shot dead in her home back in 2024, and the ensuing public outrage informed the level of dignity with which the independent, citizen, and Black news spheres covered it. Yet for the corporate news media, there was endless room for speculation, in order to create a spectrum of opinions the White audience could feel comfortable with. In this context, the overt racism of figures like Donald Trump grants an entire subset of White people less obvious with their racism the ability to deflect scrutiny through comparison, arguing “Well, I’m not like that.” This is all reinforced by the collective defense mechanism of White people to become each others’ apologists: systemically prioritizing the reputation and emotional well-being of any White person accused of racism, rather than that of the racialized person who has been harmed.
Basically, White people treat the act of calling someone a racist as a serious accusation, with a high burden of proof. Now, I also said earlier that the victims of racism are the authorities on what racism actually is – and I mean this very literally. Without implying there are no material impacts of racism, I’m arguing that the subjective experience of the racialized person who was harmed in a racist occurrence is what makes it a racist occurrence to begin with. If a racialized person believes racist harm has been done to them, then they have already been harmed.
I believe that, at least on some level, White people understand this. White supremacy is, after all, a social construct we are all taught to accept as natural, rather than something that actually is naturally occurring. I believe that most or even all White people know deep down that people of color are telling the truth about racism: that we all live in a world currently built to value White life above all others, and that the advantages of White people exist, not in spite of, but specifically because of the disadvantages of others.
But, even though White people may understand this, they systemically refuse to accept it. As a kind of existential survival tactic, White people cannot admit the truth about racism – even if just to themselves. It’s why, through methods extreme and subtle, they have to silence people of color at all costs. In line with Charles W. Mills’ concept of “epistemological ignorance,” any openness by White people to the “potentially subversive perspectives of the subordinated” would be “fatal” to the hierarchies which sustain the privileges they enjoy. These privileges, I’d argue, are what make a person “White” to begin with (hence why I used the phrase “existential survival”). Because of this, according to Mills, knowledge-seeking by White people must also include built-in methods of knowledge-avoidance – a perfect illustration of how the news functions.
Remember Dworkin’s framing: constructed worlds exist to express what their architects must believe about themselves and their relationships to others, in order to maintain those relationships (or hierarchies, if we’re talking about large groups). From psychology, we get the idea of “cognitive dissonance” – conflicts between our beliefs about reality and reality itself, which our brains consciously or subconsciously try to resolve. To resolve the cognitive dissonance of Whitness (the simultaneous understanding, but refusal to accept that, White supremacy is a lie), White people approach the news with what’s called a “confirmation bias.” It might be a small, unconscious desire, but what White people are often looking for when they consume news is even the smallest bit of “evidence” to confirm their private ideologies of White supremacy: that life is fair and, aside from overt acts of prejudice committed by “real racists,” we live in a world where one’s race is a mostly neutral factor, and what actually determines one’s station in life is hard work.
Despite this, White people want to “have it both ways,” so to speak, and still enjoy the privileges which they claim Whiteness doesn’t grant them. So, as Harshia Walia points out, the anger they may have about their economic struggles is not directed at “poverty in general,” but instead, at “poverty as unfittingly experienced” by White people. The so-called “White working class” framing favored by authoritarian populism, and parroted by the news, exploits and feeds into this mindset – creating a White identity separate from a broader identification with labor movements or the poor. Americans are taught to celebrate the United States’ predatory economic practices – falsely believing they can only gain at the expense of others (domestically and abroad). Deepa Kumar argues that, despite the secondary nature of the nation state in a global power structure dominated by the transnational capitalist class, a nationalist media framing “(constructs) the public as members of a nation who share common interests” with that nation’s wealthiest people. This discourages international solidarity among those who are all subjugated (to notably varying degrees) by the same wealthy elite.
Ariella Azoulay argues that Israeli state violence against Palestinians implicates all citizens whom enjoy a “differential status,” which enables them the “right to retreat to private spaces” and “occupy the position of spectators” – a framing I’d argue applies to White people within the context of U.S. news. That’s because, despite the over-representation of White people in U.S. news, the news actually plays a major role in granting the White audience/ citizenry that same privilege of anonymity. The news subtly reinforces – day after day – how one needs to behave in order to be considered “normal” and left alone – and that normality generally aligns with Whiteness. In every context, people of color are somehow made to stand out in the corporate media (crucially, even through what are claimed to be neutral or positive depictions). The news creates a spectacle of the supposedly abnormal racialized “other,” and in doing so simultaneously creates the normative spectator.
To be absolutely clear, there is nothing “normal” about what U.S. media (both news and entertainment) generally presents to the public as the “average American.” Like heteronormativity, White Supremacy is the unnatural disguised as the natural. Whiteness itself is after all an invented social category – but it’s one that both White supremacist pseudoscience and pseudohistory frame as the “default.” And that default, as Gust Yep explains, can only identify itself in relation to something else: it is “not that,” something I will elaborate on shortly.
Before that, I want to acknowledge that here, it might be the White consumer of news that pushes back, saying they aren’t so easily manipulated. But consider this: elaborating on the invented world concept, Morse says it can often feel more “real” than our own life, because news (despite its disingenuous attempts to include the audience) is ultimately a one-way communication channel that erases the individual audience member’s selfhood. By addressing “you,” the news tries to “(disavow)” the medium. But really, the “you” in this exchange is not the real you – just part of a “population segment targeted as a commodity.”
Again, White people want to “have it both ways” – they want to enjoy the privileges of Whiteness without being marked as different. Or they might even want to untether themselves from their Whiteness, and thus from their White guilt. Either way, they go to the news to have their Whiteness erased. The transnational capitalist class, and the media which serves it, offer individual White people the chance to retreat from political life, and disappear into the amorphous “audience.” From this new, collective vantage point, the news thus functions as an extension of the now-anonymous White audience member’s individual White gaze – reproducing the world they need to see, in order to justify living the way they do, and creating the powerful false impression that “everyone else” sees the world in that same way.
Boram Jeong describes the White gaze as “(systemically)” unable to “engage with the world outside of the perceptual scheme constructed around (W)hiteness.” Jeong frames Whiteness as a “form of perceptual dysfunction,” the mistaking of a “particular reading of social realities as a neutral act of seeing.” Thus, despite no “conscious effort or intent,” the “seemingly innocent and passive act of seeing” becomes an “often undetectable act of violence that (W)hiteness performs on bodies of color.”
4. Surveilling the Racialized “Other”
To recap everything that’s come so far: the oppressor class – either directly, through hierarchical media ownership, or indirectly, through “newsmakers” exploitating the “objectivity” of media professionals – imbues the representations found in news with White supremacist modes of thinking, which White individuals engaging with the news come to adopt as their own (generally without realizing it), trading their individual perception for the existential safety of a collective White identity, one whose gaze makes a permanent spectacle of the racialized “other.”
It’s important to point out that “othering” does not always require explicitly thinking about the “other” – just oneself. Likewise, White supremacy isn’t only about denying privileges to racialized people – it’s also about justifying why White people have those privileges. The phrase “White supremacy” for some White people may conjure up images of physical violence enacted against people of color, but in reality it doesn’t have to be more than a passing thought within the mind of the White person: that they are “good,” and that they “deserve” the advantages they enjoy. Even if they aren’t consciously thinking that racialized people are bad and don’t deserve those advantages, honest reflection would reveal that it’s not really possible to hold one of these beliefs without also holding the other. If White people have what they have because they are White, but instead think they have what they have because they are “good,” then disturbingly, they are conflating Whiteness with goodness. The news enables this self-aggrandizement, which in turn enables a kind of “morally righteous sadism” directed at the marginalized, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler. Without always resorting to overtly moral framings, the news uses its invented world (where the systemic nature of racial inequality is mostly obscured or diminished) to justify inequality as the “natural” result of supposed moral failings.
Like our concept of history, the news is an attempt to convert raw information about reality into stories, in order for us to understand things more easily. Personally, I’m not sure whether that’s inherently good or bad, but in the current corporate-dominated media system, the values of those in power are often reflected in the implied “moral” of the story. Good things are thought to happen to good people (again, a goodness built around Whiteness), while bad things are thought to happen to people who could have and should have made better choices.
Anthea Butler talks about how, for Christian fundamentalists, someone like Donald Trump embodies the idea of what’s called “prosperity gospel.” They view his wealth and power, not as something he gamed a system to acquire, but something that was granted to him by God, because he’s a “good” person. Similarly I think conservatives’ push to require that the “Ten Commandments” be displayed in schools, where students are also made to say the “Pledge of Allegiance” every day, provides a useful image for underscoring how the authority of the state is made synonymous with spirituality. However, even for White people who identify as liberal and would likely push back on such overtly Christian nationalist framings, it’s important to acknowledge that systemically (and once again, without always realizing it) White people police themselves and others, and – like how actual policing determines who belongs in a society, via criminalization – try to see who is following the “laws” of supposed goodness, i.e. Whiteness.
To be clear, I don’t mean White people are all literally patrolling their neighborhoods, waiting for an opportunity to call the police on people of color – though such racist paranoia is certainly way too common and a major problem. What I’m arguing is that, because Whiteness can only be defined in relation to the racialized “other,” White people are systemically monitoring the actions of those racialized people, because it determines how they perceive their own White identities. And once again, I mean whatever that perceived identity may be: including liberal White people who want to affirm their beliefs that they are “not racist.”
Basically, despite generally wanting to maintain their segregated lifestyles, White people want to watch people of color from a distance – a kind of mass surveillance, enabled by both segregation and the news. The news, and really media in all forms, lets White people consume representations of racialized people any time they want. This clearly makes White people forget just how segregated their real lives actually are – and the systemic failure of White people to recognize segregation as a method of social control (rather than a “natural” phenomenon) is a core component of White supremacy. Both segregation and the news work together to create and reinforce knowledge gaps among White people about the racialized “other.”
Patricia Hill Collins says one consequence of segregation is that it removes the agency of marginalized people in determining what is private and what is public life (which we can contrast with the ability that news grants White people to become “spectators”). As Jackie Wang writes in “Carceral Capitalism,” the “engineering and management” of space “demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable… urban ghettos and prisons,” along with reservations, are spaces “that (W)hite people can only access through the fantasy of media representations.” The flip-side of White people’s privileged assumption that they can “pass through” (as Schick put it) into any contested space, is their paternalistic assumption that racialized populations belong in or even want to be in isolated communities. To consider reservations specifically for a moment, White people assume these were spaces “given” to this land’s Indigenous peoples, to preserve their cultures, when really, this framing “(reverses) the facts of history,” Vine Deloria Jr. writes.
So White people are both physically and communicatively isolated (via segregation in all its forms) from racialized people, meaning rather than interpersonal contact, they rely enormously on media (in all its forms, most of which are controlled by those in power) to learn about those racialized people. But as I’ve tried to make clear, media – and specifically for my discussion, the news – does not present reality, but rather represents an interpretation of reality. It’s like if you imagine a wall separating two people, but rather than having a window in that wall (which would allow them to simply see the other person and possibly talk to them), they instead each just have a drawing of the other person hanging up – with the third party which made that drawing insisting on calling it a “window.” This may seem like a silly metaphor, but I feel strongly that the representations found in news are as far from reality as something that was completely created from scratch. If anything, I think their apparent connection to reality makes them even more confusing psychologically, and thus more dangerous.
For example, much of the U.S. public has little first-hand interaction with Muslims. Nazita Lajevardi points outs that because of this, they learn about Muslims mainly through the news, which “actively (processes) information about Muslim Americans along racialized lines.” The negative framing perpetuated here has “tangible effects” on public support for policies which discriminate against Muslims – such as the so-called “war on terror,” which targeted Muslims both domestically and abroad. This kind of propaganda against racialized “others” or “foreign enemies” is a cornerstone of U.S. imperialism more generally, and definitions of who isn’t American and who isn’t White align with whoever the military industrial complex needs the U.S. public to perceive as an “enemy” at any given time. Specific slurs against racialized populations entered the American lexicon at the same time the U.S. was committing atrocities in their countries of origin, for instance. The same White victimhood complex which inspired White empathy for Ahmaud Arbery’s killers, fuels the false narrative that the United States’ long history of aggression abroad is actually a history of righteous self-defense.
The international/ imperialist aspect mentioned above is beyond the scope of what I’d like to focus on here, though I will flag both Norman Solomon and David Vine’s work on the subect for those looking to learn more. For now, I bring all of this up mainly to illustrate that the construct of a foreign “enemy” is what the news uses to create a broader American identity – the same way the construct of a racialized “other” within a domestic context also creates a specifically White American identity.
Like Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which is rooted more in the imperialist context, I think – now returning to the domestic context – that the desire for White America to consume media representations of people of color moves beyond just wanting to be “entertained” or satisfy one’s “curiosity,” and into the realm of obsession. The news enables this obsession. The cruel, voyeuristic quality of news can turn racialized people into punchlines, an unknowable and mysterious concept, or even cautionary tales of what behavior invites state punishment (as seen with with coverage of political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil). Regardless of the exact framing, White people can’t seem to look away.
Crucially though, as bell hooks writes in “Reel to Real” (here specifically referring to how Blackness is commodified), the desire of some White people to “enjoy’” images of Black people is “often in no way related to a desire to know” real Black people. Meanwhile, in “Black Meme,” Legacy Russell explores White people’s obsession with subsequently appropriating those representations, for different kinds of personal gain. As Russell details, this extends to images shared on social media to supposedly honor the victims of police violence – images which might make liberal White people feel better about the situation, like they contributed something by momentarily thinking about racism, but in actuality contribute little more than an acknowledgment of dignity which should have been provided to the victim in life, not just death.
The “but-I’m-not-like-other-White-people” mindset is a common defensive stance for liberal White people who are confronted with evidence of systemic racism, but refuse to acknowledge the extent to which they benefit from it. These White people seek refuge in the more liberal wing of the corporate media – one that is ineffectual at providing systemic change, but is designed to seem sensible when compared to the corporate media’s openly White supremacist wing. On the liberal side of the corporate media, news anchors and columnists might use phrases like “this story is troubling,” or talk show hosts might crack jokes about the racism of specific politicians. Ultimately, it’s all to make the liberal White audience member feel comfortable with themselves: “I can’t be racist; if I was, why would I be watching this?” It’s emotional manipulation – just maybe slightly less obvious than its flipside: the hateful scapegoating that characterizes conservative propaganda.
Once again, Whiteness does not exist in a vaccum: all forms of Whiteness (including the “good White person”) require watching the racialized “other,” in order to define what that Whiteness is and call it into being. Imagine a White man who brings his friend of color into an all-White space – likely downplaying her concerns that this would be uncomfortable, with some kind of defense of that space (such as “Don’t worry, my family isn’t racist”). The White man, possibly to an obsessive degree, would likely keep “checking in” on his friend – talking to her, or even just glancing over at her – and in doing so places the burden of emotional labor on her, to appear for him as though she’s not as uncomfortable as she actually is, and thus “confirm” his naive and false beliefs about his White self, his White family, and the White world he lives in.
While the pornographic nature of media images of racialized people takes on many forms, I think the specific function of those images in a news context is to allow White people to similarly perform this kind of “check in” function on a much larger scale. Again, we can compare this to mass surveillance, considering how the omnipresent, White media gaze operates without the consent of the racialized people subjected to it. Essentialy, White people use the news to “check in” on racialized communities, in the hopes of seeing what they want to see. Otto Santa Ana points out that, rather than think of a story first, and then find appropriate images, journalists often let the availability of images determine their choice of stories. This is true in a literal sense, like with stock footage, but it’s also true that journalists use stereotypes (or what Collins calls “controlling images,” meant to maintain social hierarchies) as a conceptual starting point for approaching their coverage of real life people. Part of how the White gaze enacts and reproduces what Jeong rightly described as its violence, is how a journalist’s own racialized assuptions are projected onto not just the specific subjects of that article (or video, etc.) but all racialized people that the White audience will subsequently encounter.
As I’ve tried to keep emphasizing, the controlling images of the news do not need to be overtly negative in order to have a negative impact, and are often produced by journalists unaware that they will even have that negative impact. As Isabel Molina-Guzmán points out, for example, an overemphasis on supposedly positive portrayals of domestic life can still disempower racialized communities, by making their status as a political group invisible. Similarly, as Koa Beck writes in “White Feminism,” capitalist messaging op-opts language of empowerment – covertly isolating marginalized people by advocating a “process of being an optimized individual in the face of gender or racial discrimination, not part of a collective uprising or an assembled body against systems or institutions.”
5. The Spectrum of “Debate”
Ultimately, I can only speak for myself, but I’ve reached a point where I feel that journalism which systemically refuses to openly oppose racist oppression or empower the oppressed is not what journalism should be. White supremacy has simply gained too much ground through the normalization that the news provides for it every time it doesn’t name White supremacy what it actually is.
Thankfully, the U.S. has a strong history of independent and citizen journalism, which continues to thrive today – even as Fascism “floods the zone,” so to speak. Whereas the corporate-dominated media system is a maze that limits understanding, stalls progress, and uphold the status quo, the grassroots media system can become a space where information-sharing enables people to stay safe under oppression – or even draw a map of shared solutions, pointing toward a better future. This progressive vision of journalism involves a recalibration of the “spectrum of debate” – deplatforming hate speech and centering the real-world concerns of the marginalized.
Earlier, I mentioned the “both sides” framing one often encounters in the news. Based on what I’ve read from accounts by journalists, it’s a common refrain in American newsrooms: “Are we telling both sides of the story here?” But the idea that any issue can be appropriately represented or understood by simply mentioning or considering two opposite, zero-sum positions is a serious distortion of reality. The statements “A dog is a canine,” and “A dog is a reptile,” cannot both be true simultaneously; the first is a fact which invalidates the second, a falsehood. In real life, the facts of White supremacist harm invalidate the faleshoods that fuel White supremacist logic. But in the invented world of news, the facts and falsehoods of racism coexist, because as mentioned earlier, the news treats the fact that something is racist as an opinion: “The man accused the officer of racist behavior,” or “the Senator’s controversial views on race.” Those who write the news – and want their audience to believe the words they’ve written are the purely factual, final say on any given topic – refuse to establish a clear definition of racism, beyond its most extreme and obvious incarnations. This leaves the definition up for “debate,” with White supremacists confident they can always find a platform for their hate speech within the “both sides” binary of news.
Journalists believe their work represents a range of viewpoints, within what they claim is the public’s spectrum of debate. But I’d argue the guide posts of that spectrum are actually set by those in power, and thus skewed. That’s because this spectrum maps onto another binary designed to limit the political imagination: the two-party monopoly that controls the U.S. government. On the “right,” we have White supremacist authoritarian figures spreading a “populist” message of hatred, in order to deputize White people across class boundaries to their destructive cause. On the “left,” we have a meek defense of an already oppressive status quo, disguised in the language of tolerance. Because the left offers the public nothing in terms of real abolition to address worsening systemic issues, it’s easy within this framework for the right to swoop in offering a kind of religious salvation, to an audience primed to believe in it.
Searching to retain and expand its audience at all costs, the corporate media provides a platform for the right’s bigotry – hate speech that in a hypothetical media system completely controlled by the actual public would just be quarantined and ignored. But the news consistently allows its already skewed spectrum of “debate” to be pulled further and further toward Fascism, as hate speech forces itself into the conversation (or is simply invited in) under the guise of “free speech.”
Hate speech, no matter how cloaked it is in rhetoric around protecting the family, or whatever other disingenuous justifications the right comes up with, is never a good faith contribution to genuine consensus building. The goal of these bad actors isn’t to provide actual proof to back up their claims, because the “proof” they allude to doesn’t actually exist. Authoritarianism simply imagines a desired result, and then works backwards: bending reality to justify it. Facist scapegoats, like the myth that transgender people target cisgender people (either with violence, unwanted sexual advances, or attempts at “indoctrination”), are literally just a complete inversion of the well-documented reality that marginalized people endure every day.
White supremacists will never stop trying to keep the “debate” alive on any issue, whether that’s to further specific political goals (like providing legal cover for forced pregnancy), or just generally to make the “truth” seem like a murky concept. As the authors of “Merchants of Doubt” remind us, it makes little sense to dismiss consensus “because someone, somewhere, doesn’t agree” – particularly when “in many cases, that person has already received due consideration.” The lies that fuel White supremacy have received far more consideration in the news than was ever warranted to begin with, and should not be given any more. White supremacist “speech” isn’t speech at all in any kind of traditional sense – just an ideological extension of the physical violence inflicted on marginalized communities.
Psychologically speaking, attempts by journalists to “balance out” White supremacist content by presenting it alongside anti-racist content (again, the facts and falsehoods of racism coexisting in the news) simply has the effect of normalizing White supremacy in the mind of the audience – signaling to them that it’s somehow a “viewpoint” worthy of serious thought, rather than what it actually is: a form of violence from which people should be protected.
Politically speaking, constantly wasting time that could be spent proactively expanding on proven grassroots solutions, by instead reactively refuting every bad faith claim put forth by White supremacists, plays right into the hands of the oppressor class. And in any case, the more evidence used to refute White supremacists’ repackaged lies, the more they’ll simply fall back on their White victimhood complex, and false claims that their hateful talking points are being “censored” due to the ridiculous bogeyman of “anti-White racism.”
The real censorship, and one of the defining characteristics of the corporate media, is its systemic exclusion of marginalized voices. This censorship is achieved in part by the “chilling effect” caused by White supremacist terrorism. Those targeted by racist violence and threats are understandably too scared to publicly respond, for fear of retaliation. This then creates a void that is subsequently filled with, at best, corporate media filler, and at worst, racist disinformation. To give just one example of the consequences of this: legislation wildly out of touch with the public’s actual needs or views is often adopted, with lawmakers citing the perceived public sentiment created by a news where the political “center” has been drastically shifted, due to the disproportionate weight given to extremism.
6. Finding Platforms for the Public
So if the news consistently misrepresents racialized people, and even plays a major role in their racialization to begin with, where do we go next? I think the need for the marginalized to have proper platforms to speak their own truth (and have the public hear that truth) was summed up well two centuries ago, by the abolitionist newspaper Freedom’s Journal:
“We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly.”
More recently, Dolores Huerta put it like this: “The people who are suffering the problems are the ones that have the solutions.” If the news can’t become a platform that centers those solutions, then honestly, what purpose does it serve? As Angela Davis writes, disestablishing regimes of racial segregation requires that the public adopts a “critical stance in the way in which (it perceives its) relationship to reality.” Doesn’t this become impossible if the systemic role of the news – and again, corporately-controlled social media, search engines, etc. – is to maintain the status quo?
Since the days of Freedom’s Journal, communication technology has come a long way toward making it far easier to “plead (one’s) own cause.” Sources of information are now so decentralized that White supremacists thankfully can’t just send mobs to destroy a few printing presses. I aready mentioned how censorship in its modern incarnation relies heavily on creating a chilling effect, but as FAIR, Project Censored, and other watchdogs consistently warn us, it also relies on attempts to discredit more democratic sources of information. The corporate media has tried to convince us that, contrary to common sense, the public (and specifically its most marginalized people) are unable to speak for themselves. This is partly accomplished through what Jamie Capuzza, discussing the systemic exclusion of transgender voices from coverage of transgender people, calls a “hierarchy of credibility.” The news establishes this hierarchy through “sourcing” – essentially, who it relies on as sources of information and analysis.
Sourcing, I would argue, is one of the most subtle but effective ways the news can influence its audience, because it subconsciously suggests what kinds of people are and are not “experts” on any given topic – or trustworthy in general. As Grace Bulltail points out, here discussing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women specifically, “(o)ur own research and analysis does not need to be validated by some ‘expert’ for it to be told on television.” But that requirement for “expert” validation in the news (which generally aligns with the same racist hierarchy that’s also infected education, healthcare, etc.) is built into the very structure of the news industry. As Gaye Tuchman explains in “Making News,” professional newsgathering generally relies on a “pattern of centralization at legitimated institutions” (institutions which the news plays a major role in legitimating to begin with). Tuchman says distinctions between “legitimate news makers” and the “amorphous public” imply “gradations in whose truth-claims may be framed as fact.”
{Trigger warning: the hyperlink in the following paragraph leads to a page which includes an image from Abu Ghraib prison. I disagree with the decision to use the photo for the book cover, on the grounds that it was originally taken nonconsensually by the American torturers there, but I still wanted to give the book and its author credit, because I consider it to be an important work on a relevant topic.}
In “The Language of Empire,” Lila Rajiva recounts how evidence of torture by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison evolved into a months-long media event. From the beginning, the military was allowed to set the terms of discussion, with the evidence even initially withheld from the public temporarily at the Pentagon’s request. While the coverage that eventually followed might have seemed critical on the surface, it ultimately served to further legitimize state violence. That’s because those specific human rights violations were framed by the “experts” as something abnormal in an otherwise “just” war.
For a more recent example, during the first month of the U.S. and Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza, Joe Biden told reporters: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Here, Biden was establishing the hierarchy of credibility. The truth-claims of the ones behind the bombing might be considered “facts,” but the truth-claims of the ones being bombed were “opinions,” and he was dismissing them. But Biden, likely knowing modern information-sharing would make the mounting evidence of war crimes increasingly difficult to obscure, added: “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” Thus, Biden laid out a template for subsequent news coverage, amounting to a three-step plan for censorship: either don’t mention the death toll at all, mention it but discredit it, or mention it but justify it.
So considering the scope of how marginalized voices are censored, should the goal then be to completely replace the modern system of news with a model built entirely around citizen journalism? I think a mixed model, which still includes news produced by professional outlets, is probably more helpful. Crucially though, these outlets would have to be structurally independent from the institutions which, economically and politically, control the country – outlets like Common Dreams. The reason I don’t feel comfortable calling for the total elimination of journalism as a profession is because I think true investigative journalism (where information that is actively hidden from the public is revealed, sometimes through months or years of work) is something a society needs, but is very difficult for members of the public to produce on their own, while also handling whatever their separate professional obligations might be. I’d highlight ProPublica as a fairly well-known example of an outlet which I think regularly produces the kind of proactive, investigative work most efficiently accomplished using professional journalistic skills and resources that are honed and collected over time.
Most of what we call news is reactive: commentary, analysis, or follow-up reporting meant to fill out context. I think the vast majority of this is useless, or, as I’ve tried to make clear with some of the previous points, even worse than useless, because it actually decreases understanding by misrepresenting reality, notably regarding race. But by no means do I think reactive forms of news are useless by default – I just mean the current, corporate-dominated media ecosystem is extremely difficult to navigate in order to find what is useful. Interview-centered outlets like Democracy Now provide a vital service by platforming voices that are traditionally censored by corporate outlets, allowing them to react to the “news of the day” in a way that actually furthers public knowledge.
I think both the proactive and reactive news models are a perfect fit for social media, though corporate control of the most popular social media platforms is deeply problematic. In “News For All The People,” Juan Gonzalez explains that throughout history, with any new communication technology, there is generally a period where traditionally marginalized voices are able to leverage it to get their message out – before corporate interests centralize production and take control. The historical uniqueness of the internet seems to have given the public a relatively long grace period, and the reach it provides is still unprecedented. Sonali Kolhatkar argues, for instance, that a large part of why a “national narrative emerged about the atrocity of (George) Floyd’s killing” was that the original witness video “was posted swiftly and shared widely, without allowing time for news outlets, police, or politicians to establish their counternarrative.”
Contrast George Floyd’s public execution with other incidents of violence, which the public only learns about through body camera footage. The stated rationale behind body cameras is to increase law enforcement transparency – the assumption being that video allows you to “actually see what happened.” But there are many ways video directs us toward a specific interpretation of the real life events represented on that video, and there are components of body camera footage which I believe must be understood as strategic and deliberate. Notably, research suggests the first-person nature of such footage reduces our perception of officer intent – in part because we don’t see the officer.
Disturbingly, the way the corporate media frames killings by police or ICE often adopts a similar, “first-person” perspective as what’s established by body camera footage. Maybe this is because, through their mutually beneficial institutional relationship, members of the media more easily identify with police – asking themselves, would I also have “feared for my life” if I were in that position? The effect this has on the finished product of news is undeniable.
Imagine if, instead, we could experience every encounter with state and corporate violence, including the longer forms of violence less easily encapsulated by a single event, from the first-person perspectives of the victims. As Jesse Hagopian writes, the “social location of oppressed people is a more useful starting point for investigating society because it’s a perspective that is not invested in constructing knowledge to defend the existing social order or omitting realities that don’t validate the rule of those in power.” Grassroots media provide platforms for the shared, subjective experiences of the public – particularly its most marginalized people – which, in my view, is a more accurate way to depict reality than any institution which claims to construct one single, “objective” reality.
7. Consequences
Before wrapping up, I’d like to attempt to address artificial intelligence. I don’t think I have the technical expertise needed to go particularly in-depth, but given that AI will soon fundamentally alter the way news is produced and delivered, I think it wouldn’t be appropriate to not at least try.
I think AI-generated news will soon be marketed as even more “objective” than news as written now, presenting itself as an untarnished view of what “actually” happened – again, like how body camera footage is currently sold to the public. AI-generated news is, after all, probably the logical conclusion of centering institutional “objectivity” – an inhuman, “one-size-fits-all” approach to reality that represents the antithesis of the compassionate, collective subjectivity that independent and citizen journalism provides us. In any case, I’d guess one of the most likely directions this is heading is AI-powered, search engine-based news outlets – possibly where users can input the details of an event, in the hopes of getting an “objective” interpretation of that event, synthesized from a number of news articles – and eventually from the AI circumventing articles written by humans altogether, and simply extracting the data from police reports and more to produce its own article.
I don’t necessarily think incorporating AI into the news is problematic by default; every great leap in technology, such as the internet itself, has the potential for abolitionist applications. My concern however is always the institutional forces behind the process: who created the algorithm, the search engine, or the AI, and how might those institutional biases push you towards specific kinds of information, and push you towards processing that information in a specific way? If someone can own the mechanisms through which we learn what “reality” is, don’t they on some level own the very definition of reality?
In 1915, the White supremacist propagandist D.W. Griffith predicted a library of the then-near future, where children would learn history exclusively through the recently-developed technology of film. Rather than “consulting all the authorities and wading laboriously through a host of books,” Griffith said, children would sit in front of a box, press a button, and – according to Griffith – “actually see what happened.” Over a century later, a 21-year-old, White supremacist gunman killed nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. His indoctrination apparently began by searching Google for information regarding “Black on White crime” – which led him to White supremacist websites where he learned, what he called, the “true history of America.”
I bring this up not to single out one specific media company for enabling the spread of White supremacist propaganda, nor to associate White supremacy with only its most extreme incarnations. My point here – and what I’ve been trying to illustrate throughout – is that the invented world produced by our corporate-dominated media system, despite changing technologies, will always be subject to the biases of the institutional forces behind it, and that these representations of reality will very often be interpreted simply as reality itself by those who engage with them.
Hopefully I’ve made it clear that I don’t believe “the news” should be thought of as a description of “what’s going on in the world.” Instead, I think it’s a set of constructed symbols, which guide cognition toward a specific interpretation of how members of a society relate to one another – one that is currently geared towards valuing and privileging White life. Understanding the news involves understanding White supremacy, and vice versa.
George Yancy argues that White supremacy is so firmly embedded in U.S. culture that a White person cannot “arrive” at the state of being “an anti-racist.” Instead, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it, anti-racism is a “permanent war against racism and all its manifestations.” For White people in general, anti-racism is not an identity that we can ever claim to own, and then assume we are done working on ourselves. It’s a life-long process – an ideal we should always be aspiring toward. My advice to White journalists specifically, is that they can never be too careful when it comes to how they choose to represent the realities of race, because those choices always have consequences.
The News Focus 