May 2024: Countering Racism in Media
If you experienced April showers…we sure hope they are bringing you May flowers - whether literally or metaphorically!
Thank you to all who were able to join us at an April gathering. In the What’s In It For Me? conversations, it was common to hear that the question feels counter to what we’ve learned about allyship. And yet we’ve come to recognize that answering it is critical to our anti-racism efforts becoming sustainable and reliable. As you continue to identify your personal stake in the work of dismantling racism, we hope you will share your expanding insights at future gatherings.
This month we're going to shift to look at bias in the media and how it might affect us as individuals. We talk about "racial conditioning" and most of us have recognized that in one way or another our outlooks have been influenced by the news around us. This Interactive Media Chart gives a general idea of the range that exists among online news sources and no matter where your favorite lands on the political spectrum, it's likely they perpetuate bias, especially when reporting on crime.
For example, a recent cover story of Denver’s weekly independent news publication caught heat - and eventually apologized - for choices they made with the accompanying cover art. This story is not an outlier. In fact, the Equal Justice Institute and Global Strategy Group conducted research and published a 2021 report on the role of racial bias in the media as it pertains to coverage of people prosecuted in the criminal court system. In applying more generous assumptions, if our media professionals are unaware of their unconscious racial bias in reporting crime…how powerful are their chosen words and imagery in influencing our own implicit racial biases?
To support conversation about the ways what we view, read and listen to impacts our own biases, we offer the following questions:
What came up for you after seeing the video and the statistics about racial bias in the media?
Beyond news reports of crime, where else am I exposed to racialized language and imagery?
How has racial bias in the media been a roadblock on your antiracism journey, if at all?
How do/can I challenge problematic language and images from my local, regional or national news outlets?
Beyond our primary news, true crime shows/podcasts and police procedural dramas are all the rave. For some of us, we may even enjoy this kind of info-tainment. With this in mind, we look forward to your ideas on how to navigate the roadblocks such stories and imagery can bring to our antiracist journeys.We look forward to seeing you soon!
“As humans, we all have subjective, ingrained beliefs that inform our decision-making, even if we aren’t aware of them. The problem is that the one-sided media we consume can end up confirming our perspectives rather than challenging them.” -- Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity
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