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Showing posts from October 25, 2020

Prospero's country: race and political journalism

  The term “white privilege” has never been my favorite. It seems like teacher’s pet or something – some mild insult. It is a coinage that purifies a violent history of racism. But I have learned not to kick against the lingo du jour too hard. In the case of political reporting, it gives us a useful tool. It is the contention of the polls that Trump is the favored candidate of the white majority in this country. How favored? I’d take Pew’s poll, done in August, as a benchmark, which puts the support at 54 percent. It is through this mirror we must go in order to understand the peculiar liberal reporting about Trump. We have to remember that the media, while full of diversity hires, God bless em, is strongly moved by the white community. The Neiman lab recently studied seven surveys of newspapers, and reported: “About three-quarters of newsroom employees are non-Hispanic white, compared with about two-thirds of all U.S. workers, according to a  2018 analysis  from the Pew Research