Why Blacks Call it The White Media
--Ways that We Think--

In an article last year, Gibbs reported on the SF Chronicle's move to the East Bay and its attempt to garner a greater market share. In that article, a number of people interviewed said that the SF Chronicle only covers African American stories when they are bad, grotesque, or they want to promote some Black person, like a John McWhorters, who is saying something antithetical to the Black community, like the sort of things White conservatives would like to say.

At the beginning of Black History month, the SF Chronicle ran another story on John McWhorters from Berkeley in a disguised way of promoting him and his book. They had written a story promoting his book earlier that year; one need only imagine what his book is saying to have the SF Chronicle give him, a Black person, free publicity.

About six months ago, Haki Madhubuti (formerly Don Lee) was at the College of Contra Costa, but there was no coverage of his visit by the major news media. Yet he has sold over a million copies of his latest book. Haki Madhubuti is an Afrocentric teacher who promotes the positive abilities and history of Black people. The coverage of this type of positive Black news does not seem to merit coverage by the SF Chronicle Newspaper and many other White Media.

Often a number of Whites are offended when Blacks use the term White Media to label the popular media, and these media operate on a canard they would like Blacks to honor. That canard is this: the major news media are not the White Media but they are the major unbiased and objective media. 

But last Saturday, Travis Smiley, an author, TV commentator, and noted national Black celebrity was at Laney College in Oakland, promoting a conference his Travis Smiley Foundation sponsors to develop future leadership in Black youths. It may surprise you to know that the Chronicle and other White Media were nowhere to be found. This, of course, is not new, but it is the traditional coverage the White Media gives to Black events and activities.

Their lack of coverage is not new; nor is it incidental or non-deliberate. The SF Chronicle sent its Technology reporter to savagely report on Ted Fang’s newly acquired Examiner, in an attempt to degrade it in the eyes of all the Bay Area. Most of the flaws they cited in the new Examiner were mistakes and flaws of the old Examiner, and those who now own the new SF Chronicle then owned the old SF Examiner.

Some years ago, I wrote a guest editorial in the Oakland Tribune on the Importance of  Angle in Reporting. There is still the same degree of importance to how a story is reported, or not reported, as it was when I wrote that editorial. The way a story is reported will fashion how we think about those who are involved in the story and even about those who are not involved in the story, if the story establishes a class or grouping into which those not in the story can be included.

Writer Brent Staple has written of how the literature on Black males has generated and given structure to much of the fear society has of young Black males. That literature and reporting on Black males have not only structured an unreasonable fear of young Black males, but nudged that fear to cover all Black males. And, sadly, many of the young Black males actually believe the hyperbolized literature and reporting done on them. I once confronted a young man who characterized his negative, lower class depiction of Black Americans as real life. He said, "This is the way we are, man. This is real life." I assured him that it may be real life for him and his friends, but it is not real life for the 73% of Black America. His assertion indicated that he had accepted the Jamie Fox and the White Media's characterizations of Black Americans, and he had not really seen and did not really know who we are.

As CEO of a San Francisco corporation, my accountant was a man from Taiwan who had been in this country seven years. We would talk about business and matters financial. One day he said to me, "Frank, you are not like other Blacks. You talk about business and saving...." This shallow perception about Blacks did not startle me nor did it make me view him with any less esteem. I simply asked him, "How many Blacks do you know?" Of course he knew only me. Yet he viewed me as the exception--Blacks were somehow different from me, or I was different from them. Why couldn't he view other Blacks through his experience with me, since it was the only real experience he had?

The answer is simple: his views of Black people had been structured by the White Media's images and from stereotypes and hearsay. So strong were those images within him that they structured his way of thinking, and he was unwilling to see Blacks through his positive experience with me--the stereotypes and anecdotal examples of Black people were his reality. He assumed that I represented the exception, not the rule. This is the flawed way many Americans, new Americans, and non-Americans think. They prefer the diet of stereotypes and negative images propagated by a biased media to function instead of the reality before them. My accountant, here in America for all of seven years, assumed he knew Black people, having viewed us through the White Media's prism--a prism that allows only negative stereotypes and negative TV and newspaper images. But these negative images are not always wittingly given by the media, yet they are always consistently given by the media--the media has a prescribed way of looking at Blacks that is no different than America's learned way of looking at us. It is a sad cycle: the White Media feeds contorted images to America about Black people, and they hire people who have had a diet of those images.

The above prescribed way of thinking is harmful to those misinformed by the media and to the persons they are misinformed about. The misinformed is deceived by unreal images and information, and the objects of that misinformation are mischaracterized and not allowed to be themselves, only the stereotyped characteristics a biased White Media has given. 

Dr Pete Mesa, former Superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, at a conference sponsored by the Alameda County's Superior Court, once said, "I hear Whites talking about how they are afraid of young Black males. Well, I grew up in Texas, and the most dangerous group that we knew was the young White male. They could do anything they wanted, and the consequences of the law would never come to bear on them. They were out of control." This truth is never portrayed by the White Media; or if it is portrayed, it is not portrayed with the degree of frequency that it occurs. If the FBI's average mass murderer profile were that of a Black male, instead of a White male, that fact would be a  media mantra. But since the FBI's profile of the mass murder is a White male, one has to research that information to know it. Of course, that is only incidental and not planned thought-structuring. (See The Unraveling of America's Finest.)

The African American community knows all too well that the rule for coverage used by the White Media when it comes to the Black community is this: devalue that community in the coverage of its stories; not cover positive stories as much as possible; and promote Black people who are antithetical to the Black community. This rule can be seen by any study of the media's coverage of our community. Yet, this practicing principle is always denied when media executives are confronted with the facts. 

On The Media confronted a few media executives about a report that Av Westin, a veteran TV producer, did that showed this negative imagining of Black people. Westin talked to over 100 TV executives, reporters and producers and found the same principle at work on 60-Minutes and other TV programs. Of course, White Media's  executives denied it, could not believe its existence, etc., but denial is only the first line of a defense; one must move on from the first line. Truth is always a good second line of defense. "But how horrible truth can be when there is no deliverance in it."

In July, the Mirror-Gibbs Publications will publish the memoirs of a retired Black Bay Area journalist who writes candidly, as Av Westin does, from the inside, of the White Media’s refusal to cover positive Black stories, even when there was no other news to cover. No, it is not accidental or incidental that the White Media is called the White Media--they are owned by large, White corporations, their focus is primarily on White stories, and they historically, deliberately, and sometimes unwittingly do not cover positive Black events or matters that relate to our Black community.

No one, but the most unsophisticated can objectively look at the White Media and not see that it exercises a planned bias against Black and ethnic minority communities in its coverage. That is the rule, and there are few exceptions to their rule. This way of reporting is actually a way of thinking. 

When reporting is continuously slanted and volitionally biased, that methodology structures the thoughts and perceptions of others. And that methodology represents a significant way of thinking and influencing the thoughts of others with and without their consent. Consequently, many assume that they are well-informed and objective thinkers, yet their thoughts are within a prescribed paradigm and a structured frame of reference that are manipulated by others. And this is one of the ways we think.[]

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