Redefining Black Power by Joanne Griffith

Author:Joanne Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2012-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Probing the President: The Media’s Paralysis of Analysis?

Race, the Press, and the White House with Linn Washington Jr.

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.—Malcolm X, 1963

Journalists are human and come complete with personal preferences, bias, and worldviews that can, and often do, creep into the news agenda. In a twenty-four-hour news world where image and sound bites reign supreme, the thoughts and decisions of the journalist can have powerful influence on the shaping of public views for those who do not read, listen, and watch widely to form their own independent opinions.

To retain this power, today’s media are fighting a never-ending wave of battles. Just as the latest recession placed a monetary stranglehold on a diverse array of industries, so too did the long arm of the economic downturn begin to squeeze the lifeblood out of the press. Sharp declines in advertising revenue for newspapers25 has forced decades-old publications such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to reimagine their existence. It’s also led to visitations from the grim reaper of layoffs at the New York Times and LA Times.

Advances in technology place an added burden on the news industry. Media outlets have been forced to offer free content online while fending off competition from niche publications filling in the gaps of mainstream news operations. After all, why pay for a newspaper when the content inside may be old news by the time you sit down to read it? The immediacy of Internet-driven electronic media not only poses a threat to print, but television and radio as well.

Social networking is one of the most powerful game changers in today’s news landscape. Information is increasingly percolated through online communities and the social media hubs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. People now have the power to curate their own radio and TV stations via podcasts and video-hosting sites such as YouTube and Hulu, allowing them to tune in at their leisure; an appointment to view is no longer required.

Yet even with these current challenges and changes, traditional media retain a powerful seat at the table of U.S. society, as enshrined in the United States Constitution.26

But as comic Bill Maher once said, “We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.”

Veteran journalist Linn Washington Jr. has many concerns about the way media professionals execute their responsibilities. With a career spanning thirty years investigating legal wrongs against African Americans, in our conversation Washington questions the media’s analysis of the workings of government and the coverage of race, racism, and the African American experience. A graduate of the Yale School of Law, Washington teaches journalism as an associate professor at Temple University, exercising the minds of the next generation of media makers and content creators. Linn Washington Jr. doesn’t teach in a vacuum. His detailed columns are regularly published in the Philadelphia Tribune, the longest continually running African American newspaper in the nation, dating back to 1884.

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