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I closed last week's entry on this topic with communication theorist Oscar Gandy's charge that the media system is responsible for perpetuating "the structural influence of racism." Lisa was quick to ask what I thought of Gandy's charge and what we could do about it. My simple answers are first, I think Gandy has a point, and second, that there is a lot that we can do, both as news consumers and as bloggers.
First, let me say what I think Gandy means by his statement. He's talking about the media as a social system. The decisions that Gandy sees as perpetuating racism are not necessarily made out of racial animus. I think this is an important distinction, because, so often discussions about racism degenerate into cold wars in which people feel that their own ethics are under attack. In a social system, people function as they have been socialized to function.
For example, a classroom is a social system. We who have been socialized as modern people can walk into most classrooms any where in the world and understand the behavior expected of us. We can usually figure out who is teaching and who is the student, just by watching where the individuals in the class sit, and how they act in relation to each other. And we can also draw some conclusions about how power is exercised in the room.
In the same way, individuals function in the media system as products of our socialization. And part of that socialization involves learning to function in ways that perpetuate certain power relationships between groups in society. Gandy identifies the media as an important tool in that socialization process.
When it comes to matters of race and gender, most of us have learned since childhood to separate and classify people by racial and ethnic categories, along with whatever stereotypes our culture attaches to those categories. According to a 2002 survey, the average American journalist was born around 1961. (And since that average is a median number, half the newsroom staff was born before that.) That’s old enough to have spent a childhood watching old cartoons with bug-eyed black cannibals and “Indians� that say “Ugh!� and “How!� Not to mention “inscrutiable� Asians, “hot-blooded� Latins, Archie-Bunker-ignorant white working-class men, “man-hating� feminists,“troubled� young black men, black women who are “naked, neutered or noble� as writer-photographer Carla Williams put it. On the flip side, someone born in 1961 has also grown up with, “I Have a Dream,� “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby,� and “Do the Right Thing.� These embedded notions not only can affect the way we classify people and what we think of them, they can help to condition the way we view information about the behavior and life chances of members of these groups.
If that person works in a traditional news organization, the business structure of the organization can introduce further bias. For example, although newspapers technically separate their advertising and editorial operations, editors often skew their coverage toward the most affluent, advertiser-attractive readers: typically suburban, mostly white. The advertisers whom they are trying to please generally have few people of color in management, spend less on marketing to people of color, and pay lower ad rates for media targeted to people of color. In this 2004 post from my blog, I spun out the implications of this focus:
Journalism takes place in the context of a patriarchal white supremacist system of representation that was originally created to justify the existence of slavery and Jim Crow in an ostensibly democratic society. Today, it supports a marketplace ethos that assigns value to peoples' stories based largely on their pecuniary value. Nothing better exemplifies that ethos than all the trivial celebrity news that dominates our headlines, as well as the traditional way in which murder coverage is handled.
The convention of allocating little or no coverage to "small" murders is a case in point. In one way, this is is a perfectly libertarian and neutral notion to the extent that it triages coverage according to what is perceived to be readers' interests, and according to their perceived impact on the community.
However, the readers that editors have in mind are those readers thought to be advertiser-attractive. Thus, the rape and attempted murder of the Central Park jogger was considered more important than the rape, beating and hanging of a black woman in Harlem that same week (The video of this speech by former New
