The News Focus is meant to be a quick and accessible recap of major events that happened during the week, written from a position of solidarity with the victims of what bell hooks called “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” The following essay is about my thoughts on the news more generally. The language here is more technical, and honestly it’s not necessary to read this in order to understand the newsletter. I’m mainly putting it on the website for the sake of transparency about how I approach story selection and more – and because I’m greatly indebted to the work of most of the people quoted here, so I’d like to give them credit.
1. Constructing Ideology
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 – without realizing that’s what we’re doing. Because of this, we internalize a set of White supremacist ideologies, and subsequently accept a version of reality which ultimately benefits the oppressor class.
When I talk about “the news,” I’m mostly referring to news 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 rejects the idea that their content reflects the values of the public, like the term “mainstream media” suggests. It also emphasizes the bias of the news towards existing power structures. I like the “corporate media” label a lot, but here I’ll generally just be saying “the news,” because I want to also include material that might not be made by corporations, but still contributes to that same harmful media ecosystem. Please also note that, due to their massive influence on how the public consumes news, I’m including social media platforms, search engines, and other staples of the tech industry within my definition of the larger news apparatus.
Anyway, in “The Spectacle of Accumulation,” Sut Jhally writes that the transnational capitalist class maintains the wealth gap partly by convincing 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 of the main pillars of which is White supremacy – the lie that the lives of people designated as “White” have more value than those of the racialized “other.”
I will stress once again before moving on that, even though the rich use news to normalize such beliefs, this is not necessarily the result of some kind of direct conspiracy – a common “straw man” argument propped up by media professionals to misrepresent their critics. Instead, the rich control our media system, and their values and economic goals (which are inherently oppressive and White supremacist) simply shape the finished product. To give just one example: journalists, like employees in any industry, know what kind of work their bosses like, and what work will get them fired.
A more thorough analysis of how the news enables oppression would involve an intersectional approach, taking into account gender, disability, and more. However, I think White supremacy 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 the U.S. news 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, ranging from so-called “manifest destiny,” slavery, 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 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 of threats or overt persuasion. The primary method, refined over many years, is to instead shape perception through suggestion so omnipresent that it goes unnoticed. A metaphor you’ll often encounter in media studies is that a fish would likely struggle to understand the concept of 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 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 how the U.S. treats immigrants. Power, as Hall would say, had closed meaning, and the news went along with the Trump team’s misdirection. The 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. Exploiting Neutrality
Journalists would likely push back against the idea that they can be manipulated by so-called “newsmakers” into simply spreading propaganda. In the language they use, they 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” White journalists – are “above the fray,” able to look down on it all with cool detachment. I’d compare this to what Farai Chideya calls “racial essentialism”: the 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 think 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.
But 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 less reliable. One could read about the human or economic toll of a wildfire to learn about what happened, but wouldn’t also reading the account of a survivor – which would clearly be influenced by the terror felt during such a dangerous situation – help the reader have a better understanding of the reality of that wildfire? The impacts of White supremacy, as experienced by its racialized victims, are as real as the impacts of a natural disaster, and yet the news considers those victims disqualified from having the final say on what the facts of racism are. They are without question the authorities on the reality of racism, yet the news considers them too “biased” to say what that reality is; that task is instead left to the “objective” journalists.
Often, what journalists are actually referring to when discussing their “objectivity” is really a kind of moral neutrality. One could 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 race comes from an ignorance born out of White privilege. But corporate media journalists consider not “taking sides” to be their professional, if not moral responsibility. To the delight of their employers, and the rest of the oppressor class, these journalists will likely never give up on the dogma that they must not conduct their work in direct opposition to racism. Instead, the news takes the fact of racism experienced by a racialized person, and transforms it into an opinion that the person is 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 histories of Black and Asian American solidarity are obscured by decades of “model minority” framing in the media – or even just framing which openly pits both groups against each other. The goal of this (and again, many other examples) is to hide the White monopoly on racist oppression. While White people use racism systemically for their own benefit, the news cherry-picks smaller, more individualized acts of prejudice 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 rely on the “objectivity” of journalists (and again, those working in “Big Tech”) to ensure their propaganda always has a platform. Whether appropriating anti-racist framings (such as the example with Blum), making authoritarian populist appeals to “common sense,” or openly trafficking in hateful or violent language and symbols (but then insisting they’re being used ironically), Fascists know their framings won’t be challenged. Former Ronald Reagan adviser Lee Atwater admitted, that even by the late 60s, the tactic was to replace the openly racist appeals of the previous decades with more “(abstract)” discussions of economic issues or so-called “states rights” – avoiding explicit reference to race. So a coded racist term like “welfare queen,” which Reagan helped popularize, could be repeated over and over again like an uncensored slur – the goal of which was to equate even just the concept of welfare with moral depravity. Many U.S. presidents have done the same with variations on the phrase “illegal immigrant,” while decades before all of this, the more openly violent methods of segregationists were subsumed into racist dogwhistling about “property values” – a framing which persists to this day.
As long as racist rhetoric limits itself to the 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 called “language some have called racist.” The faux neutrality of news hides a firmly established moral stance – one which legitimize 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. Within the industry, this style of writing is even referred to as the “God voice” (a precursor to the semi-religious authority people seem to assume of AI). The goal of writing like this is to subconsciously give the impression that what’s being read is purely fact, not an interpretation of fact. So a statement like “NATO must bolster its defenses against its enemies before it can expand itself as needed,” which is loaded will all kinds of value-judgements, is presented as unquestionable truth. Yet domestic and foreign policies which by any objective metric 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 believe they must not take a clear moral stance, doesn’t matter; in practice, they simply become bystanders to racist harm. And the traumas of racism can never be healed if its bystanders to 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 – while openly calling out opposition to those demands.
3. Promising Anonymity
So far, I’ve been mainly talking about how the news interacts with the “newsmakers,” and vice versa. But what about the audience? Why do White people fail to see through the racist distortions of the news?
In 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.” 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 moral obligation. White people seem to assume as a default that something is not racist. Then, if they are unsure, instead of asking a person of color directly or consulting media produced by people of color, they will consult the so-called “objective,” so-called “mainstream” media (or “the internet,” i.e. the corporate tech giants which control information sharing online).
Now, I said earlier that the victims of racism are the authorities on what racism 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, and the event, no matter the scale of it, is a consequence of racism.
I believe that, at least on some level, White people understand this. White supremacy is, after all, a social construct we are 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 White supremacy – 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 metaphor for how the news functions.
This is all reinforced by the collective defense mechanism of White people to become each others’ apologists – which again, I’d like to frame as a survival tactic. The news acts as a fortress for Whiteness. 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,” which very loosely means that humans – even if we’re not fully aware of it – try to resolve conflicts between our beliefs about reality and reality itself. To resolve their cognitive dissonance (understanding, but refusing 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 often are looking for is even the smallest bit of “evidence” to confirm their private ideologies of White supremacy: that life is fair and, aside from overt prejudice committed by “real racists,” we live in a world where one’s race in a 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 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, feeds into this mindset – creating a White identity separate from a broader identification with labor movements or the poor.
Like heterosexuality, Whiteness is an invented social category that the U.S. privileges as the “default,” and has erased the history of. And that default, as Gust Yep explains, can only identify itself in relation to something else: it is “not that.” Ariella Azoulay argues that Israeli state violence against Palestinians implicates all citizens whom enjoy a “differential status” (and within a U.S. context I’d like to apply this label to White people), which enables them the “right to retreat to private spaces,” and “occupy the position of spectators.” When news creates a spectacle of the racialized “other” (even through what are claimed to be neutral or positive depictions), it simultaneously creates the normative spectator. Put more simply: when the news tells us what is “abnormal” behavior, what it’s really teaching us is how to behave “normally.” In this way, the over-representation of White people in the news actually grants the White audience anonymity – a valuable commodity in the modern era.
Morse says that the invented world which the news presents to us can feel more “real” than our own life, because news is a one-way communication channel which erases our 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 White guilt. Either way, they go to the news to have their Whiteness erased. They accept the state’s offer to retreat, and dispensary into the amorphous “audience.” From this new vantage point, the news functions as an extension of their individual white gaze – reproducing the world they need to see, in order to justify living the way they do, but now also 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,” mistaking 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 Morality
To recap everything that’s come so far: the oppressor class – either directly, through media ownership, or indirectly, through the exploitation of media professionals’ “objectivity” – has for years imbued the representations found in news with White supremacist modes of thinking, which White individuals engaging with the news – generally without realizing it – come to adopt as their own, trading their individual perception for the existential safety of a collective White identity, whose gaze makes a permanent spectacle of the racialized “other.”
It’s important to point out that “othering” does not always require thinking directly about the “other” – just oneself. 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 belief without 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) 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, so we’re able to understand things more easily. 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 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 the “Ten Commandments” be displayed in schools, where students are 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 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 each other, 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 literally always patrolling their neighborhoods, waiting for an opportunity to call the police on people of color – though this kind of racist paranoia is certainly 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 greatly informs how they view themselves (whatever that view may be). Despite generally wanting to maintain their segregated lifestyles, White people want to watch people of color from a distance. It enables them to perform a kind of moral surveillance. 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 create knowledge gaps among White people about the racialized “other,” and work together to reinforce those gaps.
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 (contrast this with the ability segregation grants White people, to use Azoulay’s framing, 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.
But segregation transcends physical isolation. Christian fundamentalists have for decades refined their methods of segregating education in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. That includes efforts to keep tax-exempt Christian schools predominantly White, but also their embrace of homeschooling curricula that center a Christian nationalist agenda. But the ideological segregation of education doesn’t always necessarily require the physical segregation of students. Self-proclaimed “grassroots” organizations try to re-shape public and higher education the way their billionaire benefactors want: devoid of the intellectual tools needed to critically analyze capitalism and White supremacy. In this context, White children, or even just the imagined White child of the future, are kept free from “encounters, or even the threat of potential encounters, with an ‘otherness’ of which its parents, its church, or its state do not approve,” as Lee Edelman 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.
To briefly elaborate on that international component, this kind of propaganda against racialized “others” is a cornerstone of U.S. imperialism, 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 that 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 victimhood complex which inspires 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. As Deepa Kumar points out, despite the secondary nature of the nation state in a global power structure dominated by a transnational capitalist class, a nationalistic media framing “(constructs) the public as members of a nation who share common interests” with that nation’s wealthiest people – intentionally discouraging international solidarity. Americans are taught to celebrate the harm their country inflicts abroad – militarily or economically – falsely believing they can only gain at the expense of others.
Like Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which is rooted more in an imperialist context, in a domestic context, I think the desire for White America to consume media representations of Black America (or Asian America, etc.) moves beyond passive enjoyment, into the realm of obsession. But as bell hooks says (here specifically referring to how Blackness is commodified), the desire of some White people to “see and ‘enjoy’ images” of Black people is “often in no way related to a desire to know real” Black people. 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. In “Black Meme,” Legacy Russell points out that White people’s obsessive consumption of representations of racialized people 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 “I’m-not-like-other-White-people” liberal mindset alluded to above is a common defensive stance for White people confronted with evidence of systemic racism – which they refuse to acknowledge they also benefit from. 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 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.
White people use the news to “check in” on racialized communities, in the hopes of seeing what they want to see. Journalists themselves do the same thing. 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 Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images,” meant to maintain social hierarchies) as a starting point for approaching their coverage of real life people.
These controlling images do not need to be overtly negative. As Isabel Molina-Guzmán points out, 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. Owning Reality
Ultimately, I can only speak for myself, but I’ve reached a point where I feel that journalism which systemically refuses to oppose oppression and empower the oppressed is useless. White supremacy has simply gained too much ground through the normalization that the news provides for it every time it doesn’t name it 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.” 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,” one which deplatforms hate speech and centers 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?” A good example is the use of what journalists refer to as “balancing quotes.” Imagine a protest against ICE, which draws 1,000 community members speaking out about people being disappeared in their neighborhood. If 50 counter-protestors show up as well, it’s not impossible to imagine that, in addition to quoting a protestor, a hypothetical article about the event might also quote one of the counter-protestors. If those two quotes are the only ones in the article, each group then represents 50% of the quotes – even though the counter-protestors accounted for less than 5% of the total gathering. Does this accurately convey the “reality” of the event? If no counter-protestors show up, so the article quotes a social media post from a lawmaker mocking the event, does that give an accurate impression?
The idea that any issue can be appropriately represented by simply mentioning two opposite, zero-sum positions is a serious distortion of reality. But even if journalists claim to be representing a range of opinions, within what they argue is the “spectrum of debate,” I’d argue the guide posts are set by those in power, and thus skewed. That’s because this spectrum aligns roughly with 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, built around the White supremacist scapegoating of marginalized people.
Searching to expand its audience at all costs, the news provides a platform for this bigotry – speech that in a media completely controlled by the actual public would just be quarantined and ignored. But the news consistently allows the spectrum to be pulled further toward Fascism, as hate speech forces itself into the conversation (or is simply invited in) under the guise of “free speech.” This is never a good faith contribution to genuine consensus building. The goal of bad actors isn’t to provide actual proof to back up their claims; authoritarianism simply imagines a desired result, and then bends reality to justify it. They will never stop trying to keep the “debate” alive on any issue, whether that’s to further specific goals (like forced pregnancy or fossil fuel extraction), or just generally to make the truth seem like a murky concept. But 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 (whether actual pseudo-science or just ideological distortion) 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 terror inflicted on marginalized communities through physical means. Psychologically speaking, attempts by journalists to “balance out” White supremacist content by presenting it alongside anti-racist content simply has the effect of normalizing it in the mind of the reader, signaling to them that it’s a point worthy of serious thought, rather than simply another form of violence. 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, the more they’ll simply fall back on their White victimhood complex, and false claims of “censorship.”
The real censorship, and one of the defining characteristics of the news, is the systemic exclusion of marginalized voices. One of the primary goals of White supremacist “speech” (or again, what we should simply think of as ideological violence) is to create what’s called a “chilling effect.” Those targeted by racist rhetoric are understandably too scared to publicly respond, for fear of retaliation. This then creates a void that is subsequently filled with even more 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.
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 a space 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 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 censorship can’t just rely on White mobs to destroy a few printing presses. So, as FAIR, Project Censored, and other watchdogs consistently warn us, censorship in its modern incarnation relies heavily on attempts to discredit more democratic sources of information. The news – along with those who know their messages, no matter how hateful or violent, will always be given disproportionate attention – has tried to convince us that, contrary to common sense, the public (and specifically its most marginalized people) are unable to represent themselves. Those in power enact their campaign of discrediting the public partly 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, which psychologically suggests to the public who is and isn’t trustworthy.
In discussing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Grace Bulltail says “(o)ur own research and analysis does not need to be validated by some ‘expert’ for it to be told on television.” But the very structure of the news does not allow this. As Gaye Tuchman explains in “Making News,” newsgathering 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.”
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 CBS News even withholding the evidence for two weeks at the Pentagon’s request. While the coverage throughout 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 “authorities” as something abnormal in an otherwise just war – the same logic often used to defend policing.
For a more recent example, during the first month of the U.S. and Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza, President Joe Biden told reporters: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” This was Biden defining the hierarchy of credibility. The truth-claims of the ones doing 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. The reason I don’t feel comfortable advocating 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 through sometimes 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 (while, thanks to its independent structure, not becoming a mouthpiece for the powerful like the New York Times is).
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 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. Personally, I think the reactive news model is really where citizen journalism shines though. Necessary for any kind of citizen journalism to grow, however, is to prevent corporate interests from further encroaching on both social media and the internet more broadly. 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; corporate ownership of the most popular ways the public communicates online is deeply problematic, but the reach the internet 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 police violence, captured instead by police body camera footage. The stated rationale behind body cameras is to increase transparency – the assumption being 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 video, and there are components of police body camera footage that, I think, 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 news frames police killings 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 his 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 “slow violence” (a term coined by Rob Nixon) 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 provides a platform for the shared, subjective experiences of the public – particularly its most marginalized people – which, in my view, is a more accurate depiction of reality than any institution which claims to construct a single, “objective” reality. That’s why, 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 fundamentally alter the way news is produced and delivered, I think it wouldn’t be appropriate to at least try.
I think AI-based news will be marketed as even more “objective” than news as written now, presenting itself as an untarnished view of what “actually” happened – again, like how police body camera footage is presented to us. AI 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 the most likely direction this is heading is AI-powered, news-oriented search engines – 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, or eventually from the AI simply extracting the data and producing its own “article.” I think this is a natural extension of how many people probably use the news now: hearing about an event, possibly through some kind of algorithm, and then using a search engine to find several articles on that event to skim.
I don’t necessarily think incorporating AI into the news is problematic by default; every new technology has the potential for abolitionist applications. But a quote from Keoni Mahelona, who co-runs a non-profit Māori radio station, has stuck with me: “Data is the last frontier of colonization.” My concern 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 own the very definition of reality?
In 1915, the White supremacist propagandist D.W. Griffith predicted a library of the near future, where children would learn history exclusively through the then-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 it. The consequences of this cannot be underestimated.
Hopefully I’ve made it clear that I don’t think “the news” should be thought of as a neutral 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 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, anti-racism is not an identity 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. White journalists 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 