Image 01 Image 03

U. Pennsylvania Profs Believe Media Has an Anti-Black Bias

U. Pennsylvania Profs Believe Media Has an Anti-Black Bias

“We often only are able to translate racial dynamics into representations that are hard and fast”

If this is true, why does it seem like the media bends over backward to prove they don’t have such a bias?

The College Fix reports:

Univ. of Pennsylvania professors discuss media’s alleged anti-black bias

At a virtual event this past Monday, several University of Pennsylvania academics chatted about the prevalence of racial bias in the media.

The discussion “Voice, Representation, and Collective Memory in Mass Media, Digital Media, and Technology” was part of the series “Racism and Anti-Racism in Contemporary America,” The Daily Pennsylvanian reports.

Postdoctoral fellow Matthew Miller claimed “the structure of storytelling has created a specific narrative of the Black male,” and ignores individuals’ specific attributes.

Annenberg School for Communication Dean John Jackson Jr. followed up on that point by claiming people’s beliefs about “racial difference and hierarchy” are so “baked into” the media and social media that it’s hard to excise them.

“We often only are able to translate racial dynamics into representations that are hard and fast — good guys over here with white hats, and the bad guys over there with black hats on full time,” the dean said. The media has been part of creating “racialized violence, racial segregation, [and] racial stereotypes.”

Both Miller and Jackson Jr. noted that since networks are “largely controlled by white men,” they have substantial influence over what Americans see and hear. Jackson said we “must dismantle” the bias which been “built in, [and] serves powerful constituencies and serves institutional inequalities.”

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

The Friendly Grizzly | April 9, 2021 at 8:13 am

“ We often only are able to translate racial dynamics into representations that are hard and fast[.]”

Exactly the sort of word salad claptrap one hears from so many professors these days.

    I reacted more to the hyperbole and slanginess more to the second half of that sentence: “good guys over here with white hats, and the bad guys over there with black hats on full time,”

    Oh, you’re so intimidatingly fresh!

And the fact that in many newspaper crime reports, the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned when he is a black man is part of this anti-black bias? The papers go out of their way, to the detriment of the news story, to avoid identifying the race of the perpetrator. It has gotten so bad that we have to read the story to see if the reporter mentions a non-black racial identification to infer that it was a black male.

Similar to when an article on a mass killing fails to mention the name, race or religion of the killer, we infer that it was a Muslim.

    randian in reply to Geologist. | April 10, 2021 at 2:12 am

    The media bizarrely thinks that not saying anything says nothing.

    Sometimes they will use a Western name to hide the fact that a perpetrator was Muslim.

Let the lefties have at it!
And they should also have at it against Hollywood and celebrities. An all-lefty food fight! Grab the popcorn.