Reckoning with whiteness: the limits of desegregation in America’s newsrooms from the 1960s to the present

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a host of Black and minority journalists are spearheading a national conversation about how racism within the news media has resulted in its failure to adequately and accurately cover the Black community and to report on racial injustice. This article puts that conversation into historical context by considering its antecedents in calls to address the news media’s whiteness problem in the mid-1960s and beyond. Focusing predominately on the television news industry and the print press, it reveals how American newsrooms appeared to lower their colour barriers but did not commit to substantive change. The article shows how the journalists of colour speaking out today inherit a struggle waged by generations before them. The biggest obstacle they faced in turning desegregation into full-blown integration, however, has not been overt white supremacist racism in American news media, but the enduring commitment of white media owners, managers, and editors to white-defined ‘objectivity’.