The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television NewsLibby Lew

The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television News
Libby Lewis has provided an essential tool in giving agency and
voice
to the many Black journalists who have tirelessly worked to
provide
complex representations of people of color in their stories and
news
organizations.
—Akil Housten, Ohio University, USA
This book explores the written and unwritten requirements
Black journalists
face in their efforts to get and keep jobs in television news.
Informed by
interviews with journalists themselves, Lewis examines how
raced Black
journalists and their journalism organizations process their
circumstances
and choose to respond to the corporate and institutional
constraints they
face. She uncovers the social construction and attempted control
of
“Blackness” in news production and its subversion by Black
journalists
negotiating issues of objectivity, authority, voice, and
appearance along
sites of multiple differences of race, gender, and sexuality.

Libby Lewis is a Lecturer in African American Studies at the
University of
California, Los Angeles, USA. She earned a Ph.D. in African
Diaspora
Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and
Sexuality
Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
2
Routledge Transformations in Race and Media
Series Editors: Robin R. Means Coleman University of
Michigan, Ann
Arbor Charlton D. McIlwain New York University
1 Interpreting Tyler Perry
Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality
Edited by Jamel Santa Cruze Bell and Ronald L. Jackson II
2 Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press
Framing Dissent
Sarah J. Jackson
3 The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting
Kristen J. Warner
4 The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television News
Libby Lewis
3

The Myth of Post-Racialism in
Television News
Libby Lewis
4
First published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of Libby Lewis to be identified as author of this work
has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lewis, Libby, 1967-
The myth of post-racialism in television news / Libby Lewis.
pages cm. — (Routledge transformations in race and media ;
4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Racism in the press—United States. 2. Television
broadcasting of
news—Political aspects—United States. 3. Mass media and race
relations—United States. 4. African American journalists—
Social
conditions. 5. Race discrimination—United States. I. Title.
PN4888.R3L49 2015
070.4'493058—dc23 2015015167
ISBN: 978-1-138-81241-3 (hbk)
5
ISBN: 978-1-315-74883-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra

6
This book is dedicated to journalists struggling against the
powers that be
who tell them that their voices are not valid. Your vigilance is
our greatest
asset.
7
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Professionalizing and Palatable “Blackness”
2 Branding and Marketing “Blackness”
3 From Stumbling Block to Stepping Stone
4 Owning the “Ghetto” Shows
5 Rules of Engagement: The Politics of Race, Gender, and
Sexuality
6 Barack and Michelle Obama as Signs of Progress and Threat
Concluding Remarks

Index
8
List of Figures
4.1 Percentage of Black Journalists Employed by Selected
Television News
Agencies in 2012.
4.2 Percentage of Black Journalists in Senior Management
Positions.
9
Preface
I got my start in journalism as an intern for KCBS-TV in Los
Angeles and
decided to pursue a Master’s degree at the Graduate School of
Journalism at
the University of California, Berkeley. Once there, I
experimented with
different news mediums. I worked as a photographer for the
small, graduate,
student-run newspaper at U.C. Berkeley. I was hired as a
newspaper
reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, which was then owned
by the
Hearst Corporation. I later earned a position as an intern for the
San

Francisco NBC affiliate television news station working for the
Target 4
Investigative Unit. Working in television felt right; I enjoyed
researching
information and decided to pursue reporting. I later worked as
an
anchor/reporter, producer, and in other capacities for CBS, and
much later I
came back to NBC but in another state. At the time, I came to
understand the
importance of the sales department in the news business,
particularly for
media managers whose job security relies on maintaining and
exceeding the
bottom line of higher ratings and revenue. I soon discovered
that before I
could receive acceptance from corporate television news
management, I
would have to conform to their vision of “professionalism.” I
learned that
objectivity translated into an emphasis on everyone checking
difference at
the door. It also became painfully obvious that some of us were
under more
scrutiny than others.
Despite these circumstances, the explanations given for
checking one’s
difference at the door always seemed to make sense. We were
told that
stories mattered, not the reporters who tell them. We were told
that our
bodies must not become distractions, and therefore we must
maintain
continuity in our “look” and “image” because the audience is
easily

confused and distracted. As a result of my attempts to fit into
this
environment, I became interested in how other Black journalists
met the
challenges of their careers in the face of management
imperatives and an
ongoing politics of representation within television news. In
turn, I began
networking with other Black journalists as an attempt to
understand what I
had thought to be unique to my experience.
I soon found out that my experience was not unique at all and
that it is
indicative of a dilemma shared by many Black journalists
attempting to
10
remain employed while maintaining some degree of authenticity
in their
work. Following my review of media studies literature, I
became
increasingly interested in situating the experiences of Black
journalists
within television news because the literature at the time lacked
attention to
how journalists who are operating from positions of difference
produce,
circulate, and enact (Gray 1995, 2) a particular genre of the
human (Wynter
2006, 119) within these social institutions. Contrary to the
conventional
story in the Media Studies literature, this study does not take

the position
that journalists approach the news in the same way because the
United
States consists of complex individuals who do not experience
North
America in the same way. I chose to take a different approach in
my analysis
of the television news industry. By analyzing how Black
reporters and
anchors meet the challenges of their jobs, I uncover the
disruptive moments
and innovation that emerges in their responses to what is at
times described
by journalists as a hostile work environment.
While I do so, I illustrate in this study how Black journalists
make escape
routes, contingency strategies, and cultural moves while
engaging in a
struggle over representations of “Blackness” in television news.
The
significance of this study is that it offers a glimpse of the inner
workings of
corporate television news media that privileges marginalized
perspectives.
The experiences of Black journalists are also telling because
they expose an
ongoing struggle over representations of “Blackness” that
betray the myth of
meritocracy and objectivity that the journalism profession so
desperately
clings to in its attempts to mass produce television news for the
public
good.
Gray, Herman S. Watching Race – Television and the Struggle
for

“Blackness.” Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press,
1995.
Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the
Territory, and Re-
Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being,
of Désêtre
Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In Not Only the
Master’s Tools:
African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited with
an
introduction by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon,
Boulder, London:
Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
11
Acknowledgments
This book in its original conception would not have been
possible without
the support and generosity of the Graduate Opportunity Program
Fellowship, the Academic Year and Summer Foreign Language
and Area
Studies Fellowship, Graduate Division Travel Grants, and the
Dean’s
Normative Time Grant at U.C. Berkeley, as well as the
Fulbright-Hays
Fellowship from Yale University. The Institute of American
Cultures
Postdoctoral Scholar Program and Professional Development
Fund at
UCLA were instrumental in the completion of this book. The

California
Social Welfare Education Center showed interest and support
for the project
in its infancy. Faculty with the Bournemouth University Media
School in
London, England, offered opportunities to present my research
through guest
lectures, talks, and panel discussions, which proved very useful
to further
developing the ideas of the book.
A variety of sources contributed to the book within and outside
of
academe and across the African Diaspora. I observed interview
participants
fighting for hard-earned careers while working to improve the
journalism
profession. I witnessed moments of personal and professional
crisis for
highly qualified journalists being pushed out of well-earned
positions. I
have also seen journalists across the country meet the
challenges of working
in television news. This book would not have been possible
without the
individuals who contributed their experiences and sharing
histories and
insights on the television news industr y, which further
developed my
primary archive. Your help in further developing the interview
questions, as
well as your candor, patience, and generosity of time humble
me. Know that
I struggle with you and for you; my deep appreciation cannot be
stated
enough for what you contribute to this book. You are

courageous, hard-
working, and most of all loved! It has been an honor to record
your
experiences so that we may remember your tenacity, wisdom,
and grit in the
face of power. A sincere thanks to the National Association of
Black
Journalists; UNITY Journalists of Color, Inc.; the National
Lesbian and Gay
Journalists Association; the Online News Association; the
Media Image
Coalition; the American Studies Association; Society for
Cinema and Media
Studies; the Institute for Media & Communication Research;
and National
12
Association for Women’s Studies; the Brixton Library; Stuart
Hall Library;
and the Sir Michael Cobham Library, Bournemouth University.
Warm regards to my UCLA family—the Ralph J. Bunche Center
for
African American Studies and the African American Studies
Department—I
very much appreciate the faculty, administrators, and staff
whose continued
support sustained me during challenging times. Darnell M.
Hunt, thank you
for your mentorship during my tenure as an Institute of
American Cultures
Postdoctoral Scholar hosted by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for
African

American Studies. The chair of the African American Studies
Department,
Dr. Cheryl I. Harris, and former chair, Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley,
your support
was right on time! Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and M. Belinda
Tucker, thank
you for supporting this project by offering words of
encouragement when
needed the most and attending my talks on campus that helped
the research
and writing process. I am also very grateful for my CSULA
support network
that encouraged me during the editing process.
I am deeply thankful for individuals who mentored me and
assisted with
framing the research questions of this study, they include:
Herman Gray,
Paola Bacchetta, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Robert Allen, Margaret
Wilkerson, and
Jocelyn Guilbault. I cannot possibly mention all of the scholars
who have
made a major impression on my work, but I would like to
acknowledge
some of the scholars who have influenced my work and life
including:
Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Roy Thomas, Sylvia Wynter,
Cornel West,
Stuart Hall, and Catherine Hall. I had the honor of meeting
Catherine Hall
and had engaging conversations with Stuart Hall at their home
in London,
England, to discuss this book and Dr. Hall’s contributions to it.
The late Dr.
Stuart Hall is much appreciated and missed.

Many thanks to my U.C. Berkeley cohort. I also owe a debt of
gratitude to
the faculty and staff of Gender and Women’s Studies, the
Designated
Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program,
the Beatrice
Bain Research Group, and the Affiliated Scholars from all over
the world
with whom I had the joy of collaborating on projects that helped
with the
research of the book. I am thankful to the African American
Studies
Department for the education I received inside and outside of
the classroom
as an undergraduate and graduate student. A very special thanks
to the U.C.
Berkeley staff of the African American Studies Department and
the
Graduate Division for your tireless assistance. Carla Trujillo
and Cassandra
Hill, I will never forget your efforts and assistance along the
way. My very
best regards to the Graduate Division’s former Associate Dean
Joseph
Duggan, Dean Andrew Szeri, and Dean Pello-Fernandez. USC
Associate
Senior Vice President of Civic Engagement & Economic
Development,
13
Craig Keys, Esq., thank you for the encouragement!
My Grandmother Vivian Smith tells me, “A heap see, but few
know.”

Writing a book is more than a notion. Thank you for your oral
history
lessons about life from 1919 onward! You fought so hard to be
here in a
world hostile to Black independent audacious women! Your
battle scars are
unseen, ever present, and an education in surviving and thriving
the Jim
Crow South. Many thanks to my mother, Catherine Lewis, for
showing me
early in life how to unflinchingly stand in the face of power and
to my father,
Tommie Lee Lewis, whose sense of humor and beautiful spirit
helped keep
the tough times in perspective. To my brother, Miles A. Lewis
and sister
LaMesha Lewis, who helped me develop a thick skin, which is
much
needed in this world! Helen Butler and family, you helped shape
me into the
woman I am today. Thank you for being my home away from
home! Your
unconditional love is very much appreciated. Joseph Antonio
Page,
Saundria Page, and family, we are persuaders as we’re known to
be,
continuing the pursuit to be free. Your love sustained me.
Special thanks to
family and friends who are constant reminders of what is
important in life
and the imperative of perseverance.
Dr. Antoinette & Randy Chevalier, your generosity of time and
space
helped me in the thick of the writing process. I will forever be

in your debt.
Dr. Katrinell M. Davis, what a joy it is to have a sister with
whom to share
the journey! You supported me through the toughest of times,
and I am
Blessed to have you in my life! In acknowledgment of my
ancestors:
constant reminders of our fortitude in the face of adversity.
14
Introduction
“A heap see, but few know” is what my now 96-year-old
Grandmother used
to tell me when I was a child. Her wisdom and oral history have
supported
me through years of a formal education that relies too heavily
on seeing as
evidence of knowing. The informal education in the form of
“life sharing
and consciousness raising”1 that my Grandmother offered
generously taught
me an epistemology that does not privilege the notion that
seeing is
believing—a concept that scholars struggle with in academe
today.
Researching for this book was challenging, precisely because of
the
difficulty of uncovering that which is in plain sight.
Television newsrooms across the country experienced a major
shift
between 1995 and 2005 in the proliferation of new media that

forever
changed the way we see the journalism profession. People who
see
television news media as monolithic and powerful are missing
how
relations of power operate in newsroom culture. Journalists
working from
the margins of North American newsrooms during this ten-year
period were
caught in the throes of shrinking budgets; they witnessed a mass
exodus of
predominantly Black journalists while the rest worked more for
less pay.
Black journalists experienced intensified policing of the
network affiliate
brand, their image, work schedules, career mobility, and the
rules of
objectivity. Increased policing and surveillance motivated new
strategies,
tactics, and spatialities of resistance to navigate the already
hostile terrain
of the television news industry. In Acting White: Rethinking
Race in Post-
Racial America, Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that
there is a
broader phenomenon called “Working Identity.” Carbado and
Gulati’s work
is used to discuss the double bind of racial performance that is
used to
screen out African American applicants deemed “too Black”2 or
being
expected to have interests limited to concerns of Black
communities.
Intensified policing to ensure Black journalists fit the network
news image
toward a “palatable Blackness” as argued in Chapter 1 would

not be
practiced if the media was monolithic and colorblind as the
rules of
objectivity suggest. As one journalist in the study put it, you
have to “play
that game or find another industry.” The game includes
negotiating race,
gender, and sexuality and using dress, image, speech pattern,
hair style, etc.,
15
to achieve “palatable Blackness.”
I understood early in my training as a television news journalist
that there
are written and unwritten rules of engagement involved in
getting a job in
corporate television news. The smell of burning hair remains
even after I
stopped straightening my hair with a hot iron comb for the sake
of
employment in television news; it is a constant reminder of
what the powers
that be deem wrong with me. As part of my “working identity” I
also made
sure to take an employed position of my speech pattern—often
talking more
White (Carbado and Gulati 2013, Chapter 2) than the whitest
White person
which means a White mid-Western speech pattern. The
alternative was to
work in fear of being sent to a voice coach or worse, fired for
breaking one

of the unwritten rules of adopting the White mid-Western
speech pattern.
The Black American tongues that re-member and trace their
Southern roots
are treated as problems needing to be fixed. Furthermore, it
always struck
me as strange how differently journalists with British accents
are treated
from journalists with Spanish accents in television news. I was
told by
management that the Midwestern (read White) speech pattern is
preferable
and that foreign accents are unintelli gible and distracting.
Failure to adopt
or to ignore signifiers of Whiteness in order to secure a more
stable position
of employment in the television news industry is a luxury that
only White
men and women can afford. White privilege (Wise, 2008; 2010)
allows
White individuals to be read differently from Black individuals.
I take a
close look at the unwritten rules that relate to challenges Black
anchors
and/or reporters face in negotiating race, gender, and sexuality
difference
within corporate television newsroom culture during these
volatile
economic times. In doing so, I explore how Black journalists
negotiate
difference from the dominant culture in their stories,
newsrooms, and bodies
in ways that contradict discourses of “the media”3 as monolithic
and
powerful. The debates in newsrooms surrounding Barack
Hussein Obama’s

presidency are particularly interesting, and the book therefore
addresses
how Black journalists intervene in coverage that reinforces the
stereotype of
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. In Chapter 6 I
examine
the strategies and tactics employed to include other perspectives
on the
ways in which the Obamas were typically represented before,
during, and
after the 2008 and 2012 Elections.
In the pages that follow, I identify three frameworks for
understanding
television news media today. One uncovers the fallacy of an
omnipotent
corporate television news media, focusing instead on the
contentiousness of
power through observations and interviews of Black journalists
from across
the country. Moving away from an all-powerful media paradigm
that some
16
media studies scholars depict brings a better understanding of
the intricacies
of the television newsroom culture. Another part of the
framework of this
volume takes up the issue of resistance and agency from within
television
news media and examines the complexities of negotiating race,
gender, and
sexuality in their stories, newsrooms, and body language. The

third part of
the framework further disrupts the notion of Post-Racialism4 in
exploring
how journalists engage selected news media content, Internet
images, and
consumer products that constitute President Obama and First
Lady Michelle
Obama as both a sign of progress and as a threat to the
dominant culture
order. Conjoining the contentiousness of power through forms
of resistance
and agency with how journalists grapple with the notion of
objectivity that
relies on the fallacy of a colorblind society is critical to
understanding the
misguidedness of thinking of the media as monolithic.
Uncovering the
challenges faced by Black journalists who are part of the often-
evoked
descriptive, “the media,” speaks to discursive practices of
memory and
counter-memory and shows that such practices alternately mask
and expose
racist narratives of journalists and the world in which we live.
This book
explores the production process of television news and
possibilities of
intervention including various perspectives ‘raced’ Black
journalists have
to offer. The use of the term ‘raced’ refers to the ways in which
humans are
placed in particular race categories, whether or not they identify
with the
particular group in which they are placed. While this study does
not seek to
define “Blackness,” it does interrogate how “Blackness” is

represented and
written upon the bodies of journalists who are “raced Black”
(Hunt 1997,
23; 1999) and participate in newscasts, marketing, and
promotions that are
involved in the production, circulation, and enactment of
Blackness (Gray
1995, 2; 2005, 10, 18, 29).
Zora Neale Hurston describes research as “formalized curiosity”
(1942).
Interviews and field observations are major factors in
uncovering the
politics of race, gender, and sexuality both on-camera and
behind the scenes
of television news. I also wanted to know if my experience as a
television
news anchor/reporter for CBS and later NBC was anything
unique or
whether my experience was something shared by my colleagues
across the
United States. Transcribing interviews was rigorous because I
did not want
to simply transcribe the spoken word and moments of verbosity.
In order to
convey the true meaning, I needed to include body language
communicated
by facial gesture and expression, tone of voice, and laughter,
which is often
used to change the meaning of what is being expressed.
Individuals
communicate on many levels, making it necessary to accurately
transcribe
interviews. Laughter and other sound expressing emotion,
opinion, feeling,

17
or sentiment are useful in the analysis of this text. I call this
multilayered
method ‘thick transcription.’5
The usefulness of thick transcription is demonstrated by one of
my
interview participants named Frank—a veteran reporter/anchor,
who says in
his interview that he was “really pissed off”6 that management
had hired
White male main anchors who did not possess the same talent
he had.
During the interview, Frank signaled that there was something
more to his
verbalized anger. He described the times he would fill in for the
main
anchor during the week and stated that the average viewer
thought that Frank
was the main anchor and that the main anchor was filling in for
Frank. While
Frank said that he was “really pissed off,” the quick sharp
exhale out of his
nostrils, quick raising and lowering of his eyebrows that
expressed what I
call an amused “gotcha moment,” and his chuckling signified
something
other than anger. His talent was irrepressible. The moment of
the chuckle
marked the recognition of a double consciousness—that of
Frank seeing
how management chooses to see him—but the sound he made
also marked

his understanding of management power over his popularity as
contingent. If
he decided to take his talent to the competition, that same
average viewer of
the station would follow. Management continued to flex its
power and told
him that they “would never pay … over 100-thousand dollars to
do the
weekend with three-day” (weekend anchoring with three days
reporting),
but two years after making that statement, management began to
pay Frank
“well into the six figures.”7 Thick transcription helped find the
true meaning
in what could have been interpreted as just an angry rant
steeped in
powerlessness rather than a complex multiplicity of emotions
and the
feeling of triumph Frank expressed using his eyebrows and
laughter. This
research method also reveals the contentiousness of news
management’s
power.
I conducted more than 100 interviews ranging from 10 minutes
to two
hours using snow-ball sampling and media events at multiple
sites including
but not limited to television newsrooms, journalism
conferences, social
events, and entertainment and news-gathering sites on the East
Coast, West
Coast, Midwest, and the southern United States. The book
includes but is
not limited to news media and television networks, namely,
ABC, CBS,

FOX, NBC, CNN, and several affiliate stations. Half of the
respondents in
this study are men, and half are women; most of the respondents
identify as
heterosexual; a little less than one-fourth of respondents
identify as gay,
lesbian, and/or queer, and the others declined to identify. Their
experiences
range from top ten markets to bottom 50 markets. With only a
few
18
exceptions, the overwhelming majority of respondents report
ongoing
experiences of racism, sexism, and/or homophobia working in
television
news. The archive spans interviews, participant observations,
organizational documents, emails, blogs, webcasts, etc., and are
major tools
of analysis for monitoring the rapid changes in the television
news industry
including news culture and politics and their boundaries. These
references
act as a running record and help with updates on hiring, firing,
promotions,
and claims of harassment that at times have changed the
direction and/or
enhanced the major theoretical arguments of the book.
Monolithicizing “the media” is problematic because it does not
reflect the
differences amongst journalists particularly in terms of covering
the 2008

and 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections. The final chapter of the
book is
concerned with representations of the President and First Lady.
It explores
the ways in which journalists confront traditional and new
media outlets that
contribute to reifying stereotypes reconfigured by new
technologies and
consumer culture in the 21st century, as well as the notion of
objectivity. The
nation’s fixation with colorblindness in our so-called Post-
Racial society
has impaired our vision of a society open to diverse
perspectives.
This book speaks to the racialization of work in the post-
industrial era,
work that relies on a vision of the lived realities of Black
subjects under the
terms and conditions of Whiteness.8 What this means for Black
people—
particularly Black journalists in the United States—is a major
focus of the
chapters ahead. In order to understand the U.S. government’s
initial
influence on opportunities for Black journalists, we have to
revisit The
Moynihan Report and The Kerner Commission. The Moynihan
Report9
resonated with White Americans looking to blame Black
Americans for
causing their living conditions instead of seriously consider ing
the socio-
economic disparities between Blacks and Whites and the
systems of White

supremacy operating in the United States. The Report claimed
that the
“matriarchal” makeup of Black low-income families was at the
root of the
widening “gap between the Negro and other groups in American
society.”
President Lyndon Baines Johnson supported and promoted the
ideas10
expressed in the Report, and his support worked to further
solidify
stereotypical notions of “Blackness” in the White imagination.
In other
words, the problem with Black America was Black America.
“Blackness”
became a metonymy for “crisis,” “criminality,” “deterioration,”
“dependency,” “illegitimacy,” “laziness,” and “cultural
deprivation.”
Pathologizing “Blackness” and racializing public policy had its
consequences in how people thought about Black America,
which in turn
19
affected the ways in which institutions, corporations, and other
structures of
power responded to the socio-economic realities operating in
the U.S.
Fueled by the racist doctrine of the Moynihan Report, Johnson
sought to
better understand how to prevent a repeat of the race riots of the
1960s in a
seven-month study known as The Kerner Commission.11

The Commission found that the “racial disturbance” in North
America
was largely due to severe economic and social disadvantages of
Blacks
compared to Whites. In an effort to mend the racial divide in the
U.S., the
Federal government addressed the Commission’s findings in an
effort to
improve public services including housing, education,
employment
opportunities, and social services for African Americans. Most
notably the
Commission sought to better understand the effect of the mass
media on the
coverage of the riots. The conclusion of the study was that the
media failed
to adequately report the causes and consequences of civil
disorder and race
relations, as well as the violence witnessed during the riots.
Among other
diversity enhancements, the Commission recommended that the
news media
“Integrate Negroes and Negro activities into all aspects of
coverage and
content, including newspaper articles and television
programming. …
Recruit more Negroes into journalism and broadcasting and
promote those
who are qualified to positions of significant responsibility.
…”12 As a
result, the news media slowly began opening opportunities for
Black
journalists. This chapter and the chapters following examine the
racialization of the television news media as a backlash
stemming from the
government’s pressure on White men to diversify newsrooms

across the
U.S. White men holding dominant positions in the media
developed new
forms of control in response to government diversity
interventions. The
ways that Black journalists continue to struggle against this
backlash is
exposed in the very candid conversations with people working
in the
television news industry. This book foregrounds the experiences
of Black
journalists.
Juan González and Joseph Torres, in News for All of the
People: The
Epic Story of Race and the American Media, point to the
groundbreaking
moment when the Kerner Commission charged the news media
with
contributing to the Black-White schism in the country.
Advocacy groups
organized to reform communications policy; African American
and Latino
groups organized protests, boycotts, and other federal actions
that eventually
“cracked the longstanding color line in the mass media”13 in
the 1960s and
1970s. Despite various strategies of containment, most networks
had to
decide what to do with the thousands of newly hired journalists
of color.14
20

While González and Torres discuss at length the important
contributions of
“the citizen movement,” the focus of my book is the daily
skirmishes and
struggle over representation in which Black journalists are
engaging. I pick
up where González and Torres leave off in discussing the
current situation
among minority journalism associations, which has changed
drastically in a
short time.
Although various personal narratives written by Black
journalists
provide a window into the individual experience of working in
television
and/or print news media, such as Gil Noble’s, Black is the Color
of My TV
Tube; Jerri Lang’s, A Black Woman’s Life in the Media; Belva
Davis’s,
Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Women’s Life in
Journalism; and
Jill Nelson’s, Volunteer Slavery, this interdisciplinary study of
race, gender,
sexuality, nation building and notions of belonging offers
insight into the
complexities of Black journalists working from the margins of
corporate
television news. I also bring an understanding of how one’s
body is marked
with the dominant culture’s notion of “Blackness,” using
traditional and new
media reports of President Obama and First Lady Michelle
Obama and
explore the interventions of Black journalists who struggle over
being

branded and “locked into the infernal circle” (Fanon 1967) of
representation in corporate newsroom culture.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is used to understand
the
dynamics of newsroom culture. Black journalists devise
strategies and
tactics in the mental production of the news to include
otherwise denied or
defused marginalized perspectives. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 will
discuss the
thwarting of monolithic expressions of the dominant culture
order:
Strategies and tactics range from blocking management
knowledge and
access to a journalist’s intellectual property and sources to
flipping the
script and feigning confusion about the scripted live shot in an
effort to be
more inclusive of perspectives. Although race and ethnicity as
we think
about them today are not a focus of Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony, which
came out of the context of his native Italy, Gramsci’s concepts
contribute
significantly to discussions and analyses of Black journalists’
negotiation of
complex identities and racism.
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony argues that social groups attempt
to
persuade other groups to consent to a particular ideology and
practice,
which goes beyond Marxism by reducing the struggle to that of
economic
interests and a class model of society. In this section, I build on

the work of
Stuart Hall and Gramsci to discuss how the media and its power
to
represent may act as an instrument of hegemony. In linking
Hall’s discussion
of knowledge, power, and regimes of truth (Hall 1997, 49), to
address the
21
hegemonic forces shaping our worldview, all of the chapters
highlight the
ways in which Black journalists both on camera and behind the
scenes
challenge hegemonic forces, putting into question the notion of
an all-
powerful media. While Hall’s discussion of Gramsci and
Foucault (Hall
1997, 49, 259–61, 348) suggests that knowledge linked to power
assumes
the authority of “the truth” and has the power to manufacture
what is true and
what is not, the chapters ahead bring a better understanding of
how Black
journalists, producers, and in some cases media managers
confront the
challenges of hegemony in the television news business.
Marginalized
journalists15 utilize strategies and tactics—toward moments of
intervention
within the hegemonic newsroom culture. Such journalists act as
agents of
change against the hegemonic forces of news production that
promote a

fixed “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980) within the television
news industry.
A few scholarly works discuss hegemony and the news media
and highlight
key struggles against the media power structure. There is also
scant
literature foregrounding the relations of power among television
media
managers, producers, and journalists and the contentiousness of
power in
the everyday skirmishes, strategies, and tactics taken up by
marginalized
broadcast journalists.
This text illuminates what is at stake for Black journalists
stepping
outside the boundaries into which they are written, scripted, and
branded in
television news. The three frameworks share the psychic and
symbolic
violence of the exercise of power in newsroom culture and the
extent to
which journalists engage in forms of resistance that create space
to convey a
more diverse perspective in the stories they report, in their body
language
(Hall 1997), and in the “live” introduction and reporter tag of
stories they
share with the public. More important, Black journalists grapple
with the
notion of objectivity, the nation, and their sense of belonging
under the terms
and conditions of Whiteness. Challenges confronting Black
journalists and
their lived experience as Black subjects are the norm stitched
into the very

fabric of what it means to survive and thrive being Black in
America,
whether one is a Black journalist or President of the United
States. Black
subjectivity is rife with examples of North American racism and
what is at
stake for Black individuals regardless of class or social status.
A CNN headline suggests that America “must move past
Obama’s race”16
while another CNN headline reads, “White Teen Drives over
Black Man
Killing Him,” reportedly yelling, “No niggers for President!”
The
Huffington Post recently reported on “The never ending racist
assault on
Michelle Obama.”17 Black celebrities have even stepped
forward to clear
22
up any confusion about whether or not racism exists in North
American
politics.18 Discursive practices of memory and counter-memory
in reports
of various depictions and representations of President and First
Lady
Obama expose the muck of persistent racist narratives
disseminated under
the guise of objectivity Black journalists must trudge through
despite being
in a so-called “Post-Racial America.” The question of whether
racism is

alive and well in North America is remarkable, given what
history and
headlines tell us. Even more remarkable is how little is written
on this
issue.
I draw from several areas of study including Critical Media
Studies,
African American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Cultural
Studies,
Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Resistance and Queer
Theories. My
analysis of the interconnectedness of race, gender, and sexuality
in
traditional and new media forms owes much to the work of
media critics
who have studied commercial television and broadcast news.
The book
highlights the ways in which the practices of professionalizing,
branding,
and placing “Blackness” reinforce and police constructions of
race that
reproduce fixed notions of “Blackness.” I take up some of the
resistance
(Pile 1997; Hooks 1992; Trinh 1989; Scott 1985; De Certeau
1984) and
queer theories literature (Stryker 2006; Johnson 2003; Muñoz
1999; Lorde
1984) to bring a better understanding of how adversary
positions and
intervening moments of change disrupt notions of static
“Blackness” and
develop a more robust journalism praxis that takes us beyond
the constraints
of an objectivity that denies different perspectives. Such
constraints are part

of what is crippling the television news industry and the
competitive edge it
once enjoyed against alternative news media outlets.
Several Critical Media Studies scholars (Meyers 2013; González
and
Torres 2011; Rhodes 2007; Squires 2007; Pritchard and
Stonebely 2007;
Shah and Thornton 2004; Newkirk 2000; Entman and Rojecki
2000; Fiske
1987, 1996; Gans 1972; Gitlin 1980; Gray 1995, 2005; Hunt
1997, 1999;
Hall 1997; Dates and Barlow 1990; McChesney 1999;
Greenwald and
Douglass 2004; Zook 2008; Wanzo 2009; González and Torres
2011;
Carbado and Gulati 2013) have made significant contributions
toward
understanding the rules of engagement in commercial television
and
broadcast news and how that structure shapes media content and
influences
how we think about the world in which we live. Media critics of
the 1960s
and 1970s focused on the overpowering “flow”19 of television
and its
programs, advertisements, flow of words and images, and
process of
movement and interaction through sequence and flow that taken
together
make up our experience of television, implying a particular grid
of
23

intelligibility—a cultural milieu with which we understand the
world.
Media critics of the time also detailed the routinized tasks20 of
journalists to
better understand how stories are managed and heavily shaped
by
organizational requirements21 using observations and
interviews. According
to the critics, the structure of the news influences journalists
from childhood
in the socialization process and the definition of objectivity.
While this may
be true, there are other critical factors in a North American grid
of
intelligibility about the world that is not dismissive of the
heterogeneity of
North American culture. One of the top media critics of his
time, Herbert
Gans, even went as far as to say that television news and
newsmagazines
“are selected and produced by journalists who, for a variety of
reasons,
look at America in much the same way” (Gans 1979). This book
takes up
issues of race, gender, and sexuality in the television news
industry to get a
clearer picture of the types of individuals working in television
news,
including media management who are in positions of power that
enable them
to participate more readily in shaping news content in a variety
of ways.
This is particularly important in terms of hiring and firing, how
the news is
selected, what is left out, how stories are reported, and how

journalists
come to report the stories that are aired. I analyze power
relations among
journalists and the all-White and most often male management
in newsrooms
across the country to understand the ways in which
representations of race,
gender, and sexuality are negotiated in corporate newsroom
culture.
Exploring forms of resistance taken up by marginalized
journalists who do
not “look at America in much the same way” is critical to my
argument
against the notion of a Post-Racial America. The fact that one
of the
interview participants for the book, a Black reporter, said that
his White
news manager “couldn’t have stood having a Black male main
anchor”22
even when he outperformed the White male main anchor on
days he filled
in, speaks against this notion of journalists—indeed “the
media”—as a
monolithic group. The fact that White journalists neither view
America in
the same way nor are invested in similar viewpoints makes such
assumptions suspect. This book is critically important to how
we understand
the television news media and its eventual downfall if the
majority of media
moguls and management fail to embrace diversity by hiring
journalists who
bring different perspectives to the table of objectivity that is
purported to be
the bedrock of journalism.

Other media critics acknowledge that journalists have views
outside the
mainstream master narrative but contend that those views are so
policed that
there is no room for intervention. Media critics often
foreground the
problems within the social structure of television news and
highlight the
24
ways in which the media controls news and information using
textual
devices, framing objectivity, enforcing institutional procedures,
and
employing “strategies of containment” (Fiske 1987, 283, 287).
Such critics
devalue, discount, or overlook entirely the contentiousness of
power and
miss the major battles23 in an ongoing struggle over
representations of
“Blackness” in television news. For example, Fiske adeptly uses
Roland
Barthes’ concept of “exnomination” (1973) to point out how
textual and
visual devices are used to construct a framework of objectivity,
within
which the words and images that constitute other levels of
reporting are
situated. Practices of exnomination24 often masquerade as an
exercise of
objectivity. Journalists who may have more opportunities to
exercise

exnomination are what Fiske refers to as “news readers,”
commonly
referred to as “anchors” in the news business; indeed, they are
the
“anchors” who are expected to keep language25 and
representations of
people and events anchored in their “proper” place, under the
guise of
objectivity. A television news anchor holds a very powerful
albeit policed
position, which is one of the reasons we do not see very many
anchors of
color, much less Black anchors in the television news industry.
By widening
the lens through which we view “news readers,” we begin to see
the
importance of addressing issues of race, gender, and sexuality
without
implying that news anchors are willing agents of hegemony; we
thereby can
create space for understanding marginalized journalists as
possible active
agents of change. As we will see in Chapter 4, while there is an
overwhelming number of White male news anchors compared to
news
anchors of color—especially Black news anchors—there is no
homogeneous “news reader.” The chapters ahead bring race,
gender, and
sexuality to the forefront, painting a very different view of the
television
news media and ongoing struggle to include marginalized
perspectives.
Hegemony may operate through a complex web of social
activities and
institutional procedures, while highlighting the difficulties of

resistance
(Gitlin 1980), but it is also fragile in any political context and
thus open
space for counter-hegemonic tendencies (Williams 1985). In
examining the
construction of race, gender, and sexuality within newsroom
culture, we
begin to see the complex web of professionalizing, branding,
marketing, and
reinforcing the rules of engagement that produces, circulates,
and enacts a
particular genre of human in which fixed notions of “Blackness”
persist.
Strategies and tactics are used to combat the cookie-cutter
culture of “the
media” that seeks to render invisible the parts of journalists that
do not fit
within the boundaries and branding of the news organization.
We cannot
assume that journalists have similar views of the world, as is
Gans’s
25
argument, or that journalists are heavily influenced and guided
by a
similarity of views through socialization, as Gitlin suggests.26
A closer look
into the subtleties of constructing a particular image using
makeup, clothing,
voice, and tone and the setting up of work shift and
demographic boundaries
to create a televisual racial segregation, as well as examining
forms of

resistance to these and other constraints debunks the widely
held notion of
the media as a monolithic corporate entity. Opposition clearly
demonstrates
the ways in which individual journalists working in “the media”
need not be
of “the media” in service to “the political and economic elite
definitions of
reality” (Gitlin 1980). Black journalists, while small in number,
serve an
important function in a democracy and make up a large
contingent of
individuals confronting a pattern and practice of
professionalizing,
branding, marketing, and reinforcing rules of engagement that
promote static
notions of “Blackness”—indeed the human—that threaten
journalistic
integrity.
There are numerous scholarly works that rightfully and artfully
point to
the need for media reform. The film, Outfoxed: Rupert
Murdock’s War on
Journalism, produced and directed by Robert Greenwald,
discusses how
Roger Ailes, Fox News CEO and Chairman, helped the Fox
News Channel
push Rupert Murdoch’s political agenda in a more sophisticated
way.
Policing the political views of Fox News employees both on and
off air,
sending internal memos on issues deemed important to
Murdoch’s political
agenda including judicial nominations during the Bush era and
the 9/11

Commission meetings, diverting attention to the content of
speeches of
potential Democratic hopefuls for the Presidency, insisting on
calling U.S.
Marines “sharpshooters” instead of “snipers,” and using
managing editors
(like Moody) and others to disseminate Murdoch’s demands,
was what
Ailes called a restoration of objectivity in the news.27
Strategies of
containment also include manipulation of graphics, music, catch
phrases (for
example, “some people say”) associated with practices of
objectivity to
mask opinions about the world according to Rupert Murdoch.
Both the film
and Robert W. McChesney’s book, Rich Media Poor
Democracy:
Communication Politics in Dubious Times adeptly provides
substantial
evidence of the importance of citizens pushing for media reform
if we are to
reconcile claims of a sustainable North American Democracy
with actions
toward realizing its potential. However, McChesney’s premise
that “editors
and reporters … tend to be more conservative and probusiness
than the
balance of the population on issues of taxation, trade policy,
corporate
power, and government spending priorities”28 is overlooking
the
experiences and perspectives of individual journalists working
from the
26

margins of television newsrooms across the country. While
media reform is
a key component to becoming the Democracy our U.S.
Presidents past and
present have promised, the book foregrounds the marginal ized
perspectives
of Black journalists and shows the actions taken by minority
journalism
organizations against the system as an instrument of
domination.
My study on Black journalists does, however, provide a critical
interdisciplinary bridge to McChesne y’s book in his discussion
of market
concentration and conglomeration as “necessary for
profitability” but not
something that assures it (27). McChesney correctly points out
that the U.S.
media represents the interests of corporate America, yet “in the
eyes of
investors, the main problem with the existing media system is
that there is
too much competition” (27). The book acknowledges the
challenges while
foregrounding how Black journalists meet the challenges that
are
symptomatic of an “oligopolistic market structure and
overlapping
ownership” (28) with primary focus on media prosperity. In
arguing for the
contentiousness of media power, the book does not suggest that
the media
system’s influence is exaggerated (295); it does, however, argue

that the
system is not beyond compromise and significant change,
especially
considering the ongoing drop in ratings and revenue as
individuals meet
their needs through alternative sources for news and
information.
Furthermore, marginalized journalists and journalism
organizations identify
tactical moments and strategies against the hegemonic system,
utilizing the
tools at hand: overt, covert, organized, unorganized, and other
forms of
resistance. Such a stance builds a critical interdisciplinary
bridge to the
very real challenges McChesney examines.
Pamela Newkirk’s book, Within the Veil, exposes racism in
White-
dominated newspapers and the response of the Black press to
racism in the
newspaper business and other alternative media. Newkirk’s
book serves as
a useful point of departure for discussing the ways in which
racism, sexism,
and homophobia create hostile work environments for Black
journalists in
the mainstream television news industry. Newkirk’s book is also
a point of
departure for examining how journalists struggle against the
obstacles
presented by hostile work environments and the ways in which
they use
strategy and tactics to include diverse perspectives in their
stories, develop
their own complicated identities as Black journalists, and

rethink the notion
of objectivity. This notion currently tends to exclude
perspectives outside
the norm in the news industry and often acts as an instrument of
hegemony—
questioning some journalists’ ability to maintain objectivity
while trusting
journalists who subscribe to the dominant culture order. What
this looks like
on the ground will be explored in Chapter 5. The ways in which
Newkirk
27
describes the “high wire act across a pool of sharks” (159) in
the
newspaper business may well be said of the television news
industry,
particularly within television newsroom culture. Given an
image-conscious
television news industry, much of the book delves into the
skirmishes,
strategic and tactical moves, and outright battles over how some
management choose to reconcile “Blackness” with the network
brand of
professionalism, objectivity, and journalistic ability. Newkirk’s
book
primarily focuses on the newspaper industry and offers insight
into the early
challenges of Black journalists in television news.29
The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television News builds on
Newkirk’s
work and explores the condition of Black journalists rendered

invisible by
newsroom hierarchy while engaging strategies and tactics under
the radar,
or as Newkirk suggests, “within the veil.” This book discusses
the different
challenges in television news and how racism operates in a
seemingly
glamorous image-conscious industry founded on the notion of
objectivity
and operating under the assumption of post-racialism. Several
chapters
address how Black journalists navigate the undercurrents of
inherent racism
within television newsroom culture. The ways in which Black
journalists
negotiate their race, gender, and sexuality in the newsroom, in
their stories,
and upon their bodies challenge the notion of an all-powerful
media.
Newkirk discusses challenges to racism in the newspaper
industry and
suggests the need for “some kind of epiphany” (2000, 13) for
journalists to
consider their White privilege, “racial honesty” (2000, 16), and
a
dismantling of the newsroom hierarchy as ways of confronting
racism in the
news media. Building on Newkirk’s grim reminder of the high
price the
nation has already paid, the book shows how journalists meet
the challenges
of racism and news media power by foregrounding subtle forms
of
resistance that Black journalists take up. Behind-the-scenes
battles and

struggles over representations of “Blackness” continue to pave
the way
toward racial progress and inclusiveness of diverse
perspectives. The
following chapters use ethnographic methods to uncover
strategies and
tactics Black journalists working in the major network affiliate
stations
(ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN) employ while negotiating
selfhood. Black
journalists’ experience in television news continues to
demonstrate news
media power as contentious. Such contentiousness does not rely
on White
journalists’ enlightenment via honesty, epiphany, or a total
dismantling of the
newsroom hierarchy. The subtle forms of resistance30 to
newsroom
hegemony and the strategies and tactics Black journalists use
are tracked to
bring a better understanding of their collective experience as
raced,
gendered, sexualized subjectivities.
28
In Dispatches from the Color Line, Catherine Squires presents a
strong
argument that “Dominant newsgathering routines privilege the
opinions of
government officials, think tanks, and academics” (Squires
2007, 81) and
may give the impression of an all-powerful monolithic media at
work.

Squires’s argument provides a useful point of departure in
showing how
journalists intervene in the routinized tasks. Todd Gitlin also
suggests that
there are routines that as a matter of course bind journalists to
the agenda of
the power structure and “serve the political and economic elite
definitions
of reality” (Gitlin 1980, 12) in their reporting. Squires adds to
that
discussion the institutional definitions of “Blackness,” the ways
in which
individuals identify with various categories of race, how the
Census
manages and maintains hierarchies of race, and how such
definitions
operate in media coverage of statistics and African American
experiences
(Squires 2007, 137). Black journalists bring diverse
perspectives to the
table that Squires argues are creating a platform for the present
(Squires
2007, 129). The platform however may be disrupted given the
tension
between the diverse perspectives that Black journalists have on
offer.
Chapters 2, 4, and 5 of this book discuss diverse perspectives in
the stories
and self-images of Black journalists and unmask the fallacy of
post-
racialism. The upcoming chapters also reveal how the networks
brand
Whiteness onto the bodies of Black journalists, hierarchize race
categories,
and attempt to silence voices of difference while appearing
diverse. In

addition, Squires’s insight into a color-based caste system
operating through
the structure of the United States Census (Squires 2007, Chapter
5) and
articles in the Black, Asian, and dominant press grappling with
the issue,
works well with the theories in all of the chapters of this book,
particularly
chapters 1 and 2, discussing the construction of a palatable
Blackness and
the marketing and branding of Blackness in television news.
In News for All of the People: The Epic Story of Race and the
American
Media, Juan González and Joseph Torres pay close attention to
activism
against the racially oppressive news industry and its growth
during the
1980s and early 1990s. González and Torres point to macro-
level organized
responses of journalists of color in an industry of “opinion
makers”
(González and Torres 2011, 323) that proved hostile to diversity
in the
newsroom. González and Torres’ chronicle (González and
Torres 2011,
302–309) of how professional organizations formed, racial
discrimination
lawsuits were filed, and Congress and the Federal Courts were
convinced
to end media consolidation brings a better understanding of
public, overt,
and collective resistance (Steve Pile 1997, 12).
The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television News uncovers what
day-to-

29
day struggle means on a micro level of covert and/or personal
forms of
resistance, which are considered invisible (Steve Pile 1997, 12).
This
approach sheds light on how marginalized journalists feel about
working in
a racially biased news media industry while engaging strategies
and tactics
to disrupt the status quo of newsroom culture.
My study of Black journalists builds on the work of Jane
Rhodes,
Catherine Squires, Shah and Thornton, Entman and Rojecki,
Pritchard and
Stonebely, and Marian Meyers. In Framing the Black Panthers,
Jane
Rhodes (2007) discusses the ways in which the “elite national
media failed
in their explanatory role,” of American race relations as
witnessed in the
increased distorted coverage of the Black Panther Party. Rhodes
discusses
the disturbing trend of “new journalism,” which misrepresented
the Black
Panther Party and reinforced stereotypes of Blackness. The
agentive power
of Black journalists goes against the grain of the “new
journalism” that
misrepresented and reinforced stereotypes of Blackness. The
marginalizing
of Black journalists in the news industry is beyond the scope of

Rhodes’s
discussion of the elite national media’s framing of Blackness. .
The race-
based hierarchizing in the news business means that Black
journalists are
the least likely to be offered opportunities for advancement. The
book
argues against the notion that the elite national media is a
monolithic group
with the same agenda. I expand upon Rhodes’s noteworthy
discussion of
how Blackness is framed by the media.
The structure of racial hierarchies in the news business reflects
the
classificatory schemes of value and legitimacy. As Hemant Shah
and
Michael C. Thornton note, “racial hierarchy tends to classify
non-White
groups into gradations based on stereotyped characteristics.
Racial
hierarchy also implies that the culture and sensibilities of non-
Whites higher
in the hierarchy are superior and more valuable than those
viewed as lower
in the hierarchy” (Shah and Thornton 2004, 17). Shah and
Thornton’s study
of representation in newspaper coverage of interethnic conflic t
and
competing visions of America suggests as Squires does that
journalists and
their “journalistic routines” are consciously and unconsciously
in service of
hegemony. Shah and Thornton also point out the ways in which
hegemony is
supported in the general circulation press and challenged by the

ethnic
minority publications in the United States. While they examine
how
hegemony operates in newspaper coverage, this book
complicates our
understanding of how hegemony operates in mainstream
television news
media. The book also shows how marginalized journalists—
particularly
Black journalists, translate and carry out journalistic routines
involving
conceptions, assumptions, and definitions of the “normal and
the desirable”
30
differently than White journalists. Black journalists usually
swap stories at
journalism conferences about White management or colleagues
whose
journalistic routines were considered problematic and racist.
Such
conversations are usually followed up with how they devised
strategies and
tactics around the journalistic routines that Shah and Thornton
rightly point
out are operating in the general circulation press (and I would
add the
television news media). In other words, the competing visions
of America
and ensuing struggles around those visions are happening within
television
newsrooms across the country, more heightened within
mainstream media

where the stakes are higher for Black journalists. Embattled
journalists
working in mainstream television news media serve an
indispensable role
for voicing alternative racial ideology and competing visions of
America,
just as Shah and Thornton suggest is the case for ethnic
minority newspapers
as largely counterhegemonic components within the racial
formation
process (Shah and Thornton 2004, 237).
Entman & Rojecki’s, The Black Image in the White Mind,
explores news
and entertainment to shed light on some of the disturbing
recurring
representational themes of Blackness. In their observations of
the news
media, Entman & Rojecki mainly focus on fixed notions of
Blackness in
how news is reported and structured. They found that the “broad
patterns of
roles assigned to Blacks fall into a limited range, mainly crime
and sports
…” and the “racial patterns in the range of experts that appear
on newscasts
to offer their authoritative and persuasive views …” (8–9) are
rarely Black.
They also point out that the negative symbolic associations of
the word
“Black” does not conjure a positive image of Black individuals
in the White
mind, which Entman & Rojecki argue is a “causal agent” (2–3)
of negative
symbolic associations shaping and reshaping the culture. My
book is in

conversation with Entman & Rojecki’s work in its consideration
of the role
of Black journalists and agency, for example, professionalizing
practices
promoting notions of Whiteness as the standard, constructing a
palatable
“Blackness” under the terms and conditions of Whiteness, racial
hierarchies
within newsroom culture in shaping our racialized worldview,
and how
Black journalists meet these challenges. Such critical analysis
of the news
media is not covered by Entman & Rojecki’s extensive and well
thought out
analysis of news and entertainment.
In African American Women in the News, Marian Meyers
provides a
remarkable analysis of how traditional media and YouTube clips
rendered
First Lady Michelle Obama the quintessential “Powerful Black
Bitch” (49).
Meyers cites Fox News, The New Yorker magazine, and
YouTube clips as
the means through which individuals and news organizations
attempted to
31
define the nation’s first African American First Lady in a
process of
demonization. Such recurring representations of Michelle
Obama, Meyers
argues, offers a lens through which we may begin to understand

race-gender
stereotypes of African American women as unworthy of access
to
economic, political, and social power. Meyers’ rich assessment
of
traditional news, publications targeting African Americans, and
YouTube
clips of Michelle Obama offers insight into North America’s
fascination
with measuring African American women to the dominant
culture definition
of womanhood. Indeed, Meyers’ discussion of Michelle Obama
is a point of
departure in chapters 1 and 6 of The Myth of Post-Racialism in
Television
News in my analysis of beauty standards of Black women
broadcasters.
These chapters pay particular attention to Black journalists and
how they
meet the challenges of covering the Obamas while confronting
depictions of
them as both symbols of progress and threat to the nation’s
sustainability.
While Meyers offers a much-needed discussion of the ways in
which
Michelle Obama has been subjected to the myths about Black
women, my
chapter 6 provides an analysis of racist and sexist depictions of
the Obamas
in new media form and uses interviews with Black television
news anchors
and reporters to better understand how discourse of the overall
significance
of the Obama phenomena facilitates a remix of blatantly racist
imagery and
domestic terrorism under the guise of objective news and

information and
debates about “alternative meaning.”
Pritchard & Stonebely’s “Racial Profiling in the Newsroom”
offers
content analysis and documents a form of racial profiling in
daily
newspapers that reveal a pattern and practice of assigning
African
American reporters stories about minority issues, while White
reporters
write stories mostly about government and business. In their
discussion of
racial profiling in the newsroom in terms of story assignment
disparities
between Black and White journalists, Pritchard & Stonebely
focus primarily
on and that “journalists of color are disproportionately assigned
to cover
minority issues, while White reporters cover the White-
dominated arenas of
government and business in which decisions are made about
distribution of
power and resources” (Pritchard & Stonebely 2007). The Myth
of Post-
Racialism in Television News interrogates the sincerity of
newsroom
diversity claims in all of the chapters particularly chapter 5 on
the politics
of race, gender, and sexuality in newsroom culture. While
Pritchard &
Stonebely’s study of journalists of color being pigeonholed into
stories
about minorities, chapters 3 and 4 of my book interrogate how
Black
journalists are placed spatially in the newsroom and newscast

and
geographically in particular media markets. I also address the
growing
32
concern among LGBQ and/or Black journalists being passed
over to cover
the issue of Gay marriage or the Election and Reelection of the
first Black
President of the United States—calling into question their
ability to remain
objective. As Pritchard & Stonebely so aptly argue, “patterns of
coverage”
and “decisions that match reporters to story topics based … in
part on racial
criteria” serve to reinforce privileges of Whiteness and relegate
people of
color to the margins (Pritchard & Stonebely 2007, 233), also
become
driving forces suggesting a monolithic media exists.
Jeff Chester, the Executive Director of the Center for Digital
Democracy,
says “What makes Murdoch particularly dangerous is that he’s
foremost a
politician and he will use his immense media power to shape the
content
and especially the news that furthers his interest and those of
his allies,
including the conservative Republican community. After all,
Fox News is
nothing more than a 24/7 political ad for the GOP.”31 Given the
mounting

evidence supporting Chester’s statement, it is understandable
that the media
may be seen by some as monolithic and all-powerful. Black
journalists
channel concerns over intense scrutiny and being measured by a
different
standard of objectivity in a variety of ways. Such concerns are
outside the
scope of media literature concerned with tracking news media
oligopolies.
My study on Black journalism bridges to other media literature
covering the
problematics of oligopolies.
In asserting that the monolithic media is a myth is not to say
that media
scholars and news media audiences are oblivious to the myth,
but the
reiteration is meant to call attention to the barrage of messages
to the
contrary. Media discourse and Media Studies scholarly works
that point to
American media as “a significant antidemocratic force”
(McChesney 1999,
2), an “agenda setting media” aimed at “thought control”
(Chomsky 1992),
and cartel-like monopolistic media power manufacturing our
social and
political world (Bagdikian 2004, 4–9) are challenging obstacles
to the
inclusion of diverse perspectives. The challenges of sustaining
an inclusive
free press do not limit us to accommodation, resigned
acquiestence,
despondency, social implosion (Hackett and Carroll 2006, 143)
or

participatory thought control on the part of journalists. While
Chomsky,
Bagdikian, and Hackett and Carroll reveal recognizable and
evidentiary
truths about the structure of the news industry that consumers of
news media
may infer is the product of a monolithic media at work, I
uncover the subtle
forms of resistance aimed at a preemptive strike against the idea
of the
media as monolithic and all-powerful. Such a move allows us to
rethink
domination and oppression in terms of powerlessness and lack
of agency.
Furthermore, “the hegemony of whiteness” (Pritchard &
Stonebely 2007,
33
244) in the process of news gathering, raises concerns of
journalists who
consider the role of Whiteness in news coverage and struggle
daily to
include different perspectives. Stuart Hall’s discussion (1997)
of meaning
and absence resonates with Black journalists who understand
that “absence
means something” and “signifies as much as presence.” One of
the interview
participants in the book, who was about to introduce the judges
of the
Pulitzer Prizes, stood there stunned by the “sea of … a hundred
people” all
of whom were “White men.” For “Ed,” a television journalist

who chose to
remain anonymous, the stark absence of Black journalists made
him realize
that “Black journalists have come a long way but are still
underrepresented,” which makes the responsibility he feels in
finding ways
to include the perspectives of underrepresented individuals all
the greater.
Despite the sea of White men in the audience of media
managers, Ed never
expressed feeling powerless; he did, however, speak extensively
about the
strategies he uses to weather if not overcome the obstacles.
Black journalists have historically devised strategies around
systems of
oppression, and the news media industry is no different. Jinx
Coleman
Broussard says that William Worthy Jr., a Black journalist who
was a
Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, slipped into China along
its border
at Lo Wu, defying a government travel ban to the communist
country. Worthy
criticized what he considered the establishment media’s
complicity with the
government in excluding reporting about world events that was
vital to an
informed public (Broussard 2013, 159). He found a way around
the power
structure and filed stories to the Afro-American newspaper
chain and CBS
News from mainland China (Broussard 2013, 156) despite the
major
obstacles that the McCarran Internal Securities Act of 1950
created. In

Black Journalists, The NABJ Story, Wayne Dawkins recalls the
hostile
treatment of Black reporters by the Black community because of
how the
Tawana Brawley case was covered. Brawley was a Black
teenage girl who
claimed she was raped by six White men and dumped in the
woods.
Lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox and Reverend Al
Sharpton
“retaliated against black reporters who did not buy the racist-
white-cops-
did-it story without evidence. Tension between the black
community and
black journalists peaked when Maddox, Mason and Sharpton
denounced
black Newsday reporters from the pulpit in a crowded Brooklyn
church”
and ordered security to remove Newsday reporters—eight other
journalists
picked up their notebooks and cameras and left the church
(Dawkins 1997,
193–94). This provides useful insight to highlight the
experiences of Black
journalists who are “tired of being referred to as ‘Rent-a-
Toms’” (Dawkins
1997, 194) and implicated in reinforcing stereotypes of African
Americans
34
when they are on the job.
The recent surge in Black pundits and political analysts on
cable news

like Melissa Harris Perry and Roland Martin are examples of
individuals
who waited for the right time to seize an opportunity. While
examinations of
print media are outside the scope of the book, the multitude of
ways in
which “Blackness” is experienced and covered in the news
media offers
insight into the challenges of Black journalists with a
multiplicity of media
options toward career mobility. Part of the contentiousness of
power in
corporate television news comes from Black journalists who
understand
that there are options that may serve as a holding pattern until
better job
opportunities are presented.
Equally noteworthy are the online media publications that target
a Black
audience like, The Root and Ebony. While mainstream media
like
CNN.com and other news organizations cover issues of race and
gender,
alternative media outlets have been known to report more
extensively on
these issues and offer more journalistic license in reports
concerning Black
communities across the United States. Richard Prince’s
reporting of
Meteorologist Rhonda Lee’s firing from the ABC affiliate in
Shreveport,
Louisiana, for responding “to a racial remark posted by a viewer
on the
station’s Facebook page … questioning whether she should wear

her short
Afro, suggesting she put on a wig or grown more hair” (Prince
2012,
December 12), Paul Delaney’s focus on “The Disappearing
Black News
Professional” (Delaney 2011, December 23), and Ravi K.
Perry’s article
entitled, “Love is Love: A Kappa Man Speaks on the Viral
Video
‘Controversy’” (Perry 2012, October 12) about Black fraternity
brothers
getting married, are just a few examples of the difference in
style and
content in reporting for Black-oriented and owned news media.
Worthy,
Prince, Delaney, Perry, and others have more freedom and
flexibility in
offering different perspectives. Such an approach to reporting
reveals the
diversity within Black communities across the U.S. Black-
oriented and
owned news media open new possibilities for audiences whose
needs are
not being met through mainstream news media and for
embattled journalists.
T.J. Holmes, Soledad O’Brien, and Roland Martin are just a few
examples
of Black journalists who have not had contracts renewed with
CNN.
O’Brien went to Al Jazeera America TV as a special
correspondent, T.J.
Holmes went to BET to host a late night news-satire series, then
left BET
and is currently weighing other options with interested news
networks, and
Martin took his skills to TV One as host of the NewsOne Now

show with the
slogan “Our news, our way.” Roland Martin has been very vocal
about the
fact that he hosted highly rated specials for CNN and says that
race has a lot
35
http://CNN.com
to do with why he was not rewarded with his own show.
In order to unmask what goes on behind the scenes of television
news and
the contentiousness of power, I use a variety of methods to
show the ways in
which journalists negotiate race, gender, and sexuality on the
job through
covert, overt, unintentional, and/or personal forms of resistance
(Pile 1997).
Gitlin’s discussion of “disruptive moments” to the routines of
journalism is
a point of departure in examining how journalists produce and
coordinate
sustainable disruptive moments individually and collectively.
Herman Gray
and Darnell Hunt offer a critical analysis of disruptive moments
in terms of
raced-gendered subjectivities in commercial television (Gray
1995) and
television news audience perception of the L.A. Riots (Hunt
1997) that
provide useful tools in chapter 2 of this book for a better
understanding of
how journalists mobilize on disruptive moments in the everyday

struggle.
Commercial cultures as both a resource and a site in which
“Blackness”
as a cultural sign is produced, circulated, and enacted reveal
how power
dynamics within the cultural arena move people: enlist and
position them in
different political and social configurations (Gray 1995, 2,
emphasis mine).
Black journalists may have a foot in the door of television
news, but the
socio-political configurations of newsroom culture work to deny
a seat at
the table of decision making. In other words, what and who gets
included in
the newscast is a matter of strategy and tactical moves
employed by
marginalized journalists. Chapter 6 focuses more intensely on
the explosion
of new media as a resource and site of news coverage and
representation
that inform, influence, and incite counter-cultural moves from
within the
newsroom.
I focus extensively on the enactment of “Blackness” on the
body, systems
of reward and punishment, and the news report itself. “Raced
ways of
seeing”32 the inner workings of the television newsroom and
industry adds
critical insight into knowledge based on perception and
experience. Since
garnering a job in television news is difficult at best, and Black
journalists

are for the most part placed in the margins of the newsroom (see
chapter 3),
it is understood that as members of the media they are expected
to uphold
the notion of objectivity that places certain constraints on how
they engage
in issues of race, gender, and sexuality and particularly how
they are
impacted personally. Many of the journalists interviewed and
observed
were uncomfortable discussing these issues as they relate to
them and their
careers. Hunt’s “raced ways of seeing” became a useful tool of
analysis in
deciphering whether the journalists observed and interviewed
identify with
the newsroom culture of Whiteness and heteronormativity,
perspectives
against the dominant culture order, or a combination of both
depending on
36
the context and their positionality using pronouns of solidarity
revealed in
language (Hall 1997) as guideposts. This approach provides an
invaluable
understanding of how journalists situate themselves at any
given moment,
engage in forms of resistance, negotiate selfhood in the face of
objectivity,
and strategically and tactically navigate the contentiousness of
power.

Much is owed to the work of Franz Fanon in shedding light
upon deeper
meanings of struggle and relations of power that take into
account forms of
violence beyond physical force intended to hurt, damage, or
physically kill
someone. Ralph Ellison’s “inner eyes,”33 Toni Morrison’s
“bluest eye,”34
Zora Neale Hurston’s “transmitted memory,”35 and Fanon’s
“psychic and
symbolic violence”36 are all concepts of rupture to which
metaphysical
violence and struggle across space and time as a feature of
reality beyond
the physical world exists. The extraordinary feat of navigating
the psychic
and symbolic violence of institutionalized racism within
corporate
newsroom culture makes Black journalists truly remarkable and
the lack of
scholarship in this area unsettling. Paving the way to collective
catharsis37
in newsroom culture finds expression through enforcement
practices of
aggression and subjugation where hair and tongue are mutilated
and
reconstructed, Black journalists are held to a higher standard,
placed in the
least desirable markets, shifts, and positions, their scripts and
story ideas
are heavily scrutinized and policed, and objectivity relies on
prescriptions
of colorblindness, Americanness, and heteronormativity. All of
these

practices of psychic and symbolic violence become an outward
show of
visibility to the viewing audience and the world that diversity is
alive and
well within U.S. newsrooms. The connotation of difference and
diversity
attempts to blur the fact that journalists of color and Black
journalists who
identify as heterosexual or LGBTQ in particular are relegated to
the margins
in higher numbers (chapter 5), thereby shaping our worldview in
terms of
Whiteness—the standard of legitimacy and validity in the
television news
business. Black journalists are often placed in positions that
feed North
America’s collective catharsis in the form of promotions of
marginality38
that denies Black journalists the primetime positions at top
network
affiliates, placing them instead within the BET network which
targets Black
audiences and has been the subject of much controversy over its
thematization of “Blackness.”39
Formerly the Black weekend anchor with CNN, T.J. Holmes
garnered
high ratings and was poised for the primetime slot as CNN’s
weekday
anchor but was passed up. After leaving for better opportunities,
Holmes
found it amazing that he could be on CNN for 5 years but
already be a
37

“trending topic” after being on BET (Black Entertainment
Television) only
60 seconds40 as the late night show host. It is difficult to
become a “trending
topic” when marginalized journalists are relegated to positions
other than
primetime, getting consistently less exposure than White
colleagues. CNN
management is still wondering why ratings for the month of
May 2012, hit a
20 year low41 for primetime slots reserved for White men—
Piers Morgan
and Anderson Cooper. This latest move speaks to a much larger
problem in
terms of Black mobility in television news. While T.J. Holmes
for example
had to jump the CNN ship toward the promise of upward career
mobility
with BET and his role at BET provides more visibility, it
becomes a
visibility that marks Holmes as different from his former
colleagues Piers
Morgan and Anderson Cooper who dominate primetime news.
After his
contract was not renewed with CNN, T.J. Holmes had high
hopes for better
opportunities in voicing concerns of marginalized communities.
Holmes’s
vision of using news and satire to inform the BET audience of
issues
concerning Black communities was not fully realized after the
shuffling of
his show to another time slot. Headlines such as “BET

Introduces T.J.
Holmes’ New Comedy Slanted Nightly News Show”42 and
comments stating
that BET needs news, not another comedy show43 expose the
racism of the
television news business.
In I See Black People: The Rise and Fall of African American
Owned
Television and Radio, Kristal Brent Zook (2008) discusses the
“troubling
perceptions about what African American audiences want,”44
whether it is
what Zook refers to as “gum-smacking, jive-talking sitcoms”45
or just more
of the same programming we see at stations like BET with T.J.
Holmes’
“New Comedy Slanted Nightly News Show.” Rebecca Wanzo’s
The
Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and
Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009) poignantly argues that
cultural
practices of rendering Black women’s suffering illegible clearly
shows
“this media devaluation of black bodies.”46 The “suffering
hierarchies” that
are observable in television, whether in news, sitcoms, or
another genre of
television, underscore the importance of minority journalist
organizations
and individual journalist action against newsroom culture that
renders
invisible the daily struggle over representatio n of “Blackness.”
The book
foregrounds the ways in which Black journalists are peeling
back the lies of

Post-racialism parading as a mask of colorblindness and
neutrality. How
does it feel to be journalist while Black in the era of Post-
racialism?
T.J. Holmes made it clear at the National Association of Black
Journalists convention that claims of diversity in the news
business are a
38
joke—referring to his position at CNN as the “weekend
ghetto”47 to which
Black television anchors are consigned. One of the leading
online sources
of news and commentary from an “African-American
perspective” entitled,
“The Root” reported on Holmes’ comment saying that Don
Lemon and
Fredricka Whitfield are also anchoring weekends at the network
and the
pattern is not just at CNN.48
No one can deny that there are Black journalists who have been
promoted, but to what extent, under what conditions, and how
they are being
promoted are questions that warrant interrogation. Strategically
placing and
displacing Black mobility in dominant imaginings disassociates
the powers
that be from accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and
inequality and
shifts the blame of any lack of career progress squarely upon
the shoulders

of Black journalists. Many of them are in constant struggle and
bypassed for
promotions and other rewards in their career. Indeed, marginal
Black
visibility is not enough to legitimize claims of diversity in
television news
and does psychic and symbolic violence to Black individuals as
perpetual
signifiers of intellectual deficiency and illegitimacy while using
marginal
Black visibility to contribute to the collective catharsis of the
nation.
Career mobility for Black journalists is complicated at best.
Chapters 3
and 4 examine the ways in which the human has been and
continues to be
“territorialized” (Wynter 2006). Black journalists struggle
against
territorializing strategies and employ forms of resistance toward
a
sustainable journalism praxis inclusive of perspectives outside
the
mainstream grid of intelligibility. According to U.S. Census
data, America
is not the America being promoted and represented in
mainstream media
today. Today’s African Diaspora journalism praxis takes into
account that
the Whitewashed facade of North American news and
information of
yesteryear is no longer relevant to an audience that is quickly
becoming the
majority.49 While White heterosexual men who make up the
majority of
news management and The Commission on Presidential Debates

are
scratching their heads repeatedly attempting to put a square peg
in a round
hole, North Americans are tuning out in large numbers and
finding
alternatives for news and information that better meet their
needs.
Meanwhile the National Association of Black Journalists is
publicly
confronting The Commission on Presidential Debates on their
treatment of
journalists of color as “invisible, unqualified, or both” when
“There is no
absence of qualified journalists of color, or those with
experience as debate
moderators, such as NABJ Hall of Fame member Gwen Ifill, of
PBS.”50
News management and owners’ attempt at playing catchup
means
39
choosing a woman for the first time in 20 years to moderate the
presidential
debate. It is no wonder Carole Simpson—a Black journalist who
was the
last woman to hold such an esteemed position back in 1992—
felt the need
to offer advice to Candy Crowley, a White woman tapped to
moderate the
2012 presidential debate. The advice Simpson offered Crowley
came out of
an experience of criticism unique to her position as a woman

that no “man
has gone through.”51 Television news is branded and promoted
as authentic
“reality TV” by its claim to keep its audience “in-the-know” of
important
news and information of the day. Unfortunately, the bottom line
of higher
ratings and revenue suffers as news executives continue to
operate on the
false premise of serving an imaginary all-White male
heterosexual
“audience” rather than being open to the reality of an ever -
increasing
diverse North American audience that cannot trust mainstream
media to
inform understandings of the world in which we live. The social
development of an individual and/or group that, when examined
in terms of
our present order of knowledge, its art, and its aesthetic reveals
the
territorialization of the human or the “monopoly of humanity”
(Wynter 2006,
114). Mainstream media is the sinking ship trying to hold on to
its monopoly
of humanity and attempting to stay relevant using Carole
Simpson, Candy
Crowley, bloggers, iReporters, and other clever tactics as life
rafts.
One of the deeply rooted phenomena of territorializing the
human is in
defining the “regime of truth” (Trinh 1989, 123) televisually.
The monopoly
of humanity continues to leave its mark in the form of voice
coaches to
“correct” speech patterns outside the White Midwestern speech

pattern,
rewards such as promotions for Asian Americans who undergo
cosmetic
surgery to widen their eyes, White women feeling pressured to
“go blonde,”
or Black journalists straightening their hair or lightening their
skin to get a
chance at a top anchor position, which all speak to the psychic
and symbolic
violence (Fanon 1967) of territorializing the human (Wynter
2006)
particularly in branding and placing “Blackness.” With the
cover of
anonymity, many Black journalists reveal in depth how they
utilize their
agency to resist the challenges they face in television news.
Uncovering the daily inequities Black journalists experience
means
looking beyond surface signifiers of professional upward
mobility. Finding
a way to bring voice to the silences induced by intense
surveillance, cut-
throat competition among colleagues, job instability, and
contractual gag
orders to name a few of the deterrents and/or fear about
speaking one’s
mind concerning the condition of being a journalist while Black
is an
exercise in agency and resistance. Journalists’ perseverance
speaks to the
contingency of the “media powerful” approach that some media
scholars
40

take up (Gitlin 1980, 2001; Bourdieu 1996; Caldwell 1995;
Fiske 1987;
Corry 1986; Gans 1979). Taken together, the literature of Ralph
Ellison that
addresses his main character’s invisibility, Toni Morrison’s
main
character’s struggle with feeling disappeared in The Bluest Eye,
and Frantz
Fanon’s discussion of the Black subject and imposed amputation
all address
the pain of living a double consciousness that bears the added
historical
psychic weight of transmitted memory (Zora Neale Hurston
1942, 229).
Such an approach to uncovering the depths of multiple
oppression brings a
better understanding of what struggle means as a condition of
dwelling in
what Audre Lorde calls the “House of Difference.”52
In most of the chapters, particularly chapters 1 and 2, fiction
and non-
fiction literature is especially useful in making sense of how
Black
journalists process their circumstances, as well as how they
choose to
respond to the institutional constraints they face. For instance,
Ralph
Ellison’s “inner eyes” and invisibility speak to the
schizophrenia of having
to orient the eyes with a White male heteronormative
worldview. The inner
eyes guide us to what the dominant culture deems normative;
the inner eyes

are our guide posts toward performing the human on “Man’s”
terms.
Orienting the eyes also means understanding and navigating
one’s own
invisibility—in a process of hoodwinking, bamboozling, and
leading astray
the powers that be who render Black subjectivities invisible and
subscribe
to the stereotype. The narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947)
says, “to
be unaware of one’s form is to live a death” and to “become
alive” one must
discover one’s invisibility. The process of discovery may also
mean
orienting the eyes to “live to fight another day”53—
understanding and being
strategic about when, where, and how to use one’s invisibility
to one’s
advantage. The ability to see the power that invisibility may
offer at
strategic moments can mean the difference between surviving
and thriving in
the career of a broadcast journalist. Veteran Black journalists
possess “the
sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s
soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity”
(DuBois 1969, 45) and understand the importance of engaging
strategy and
tactic to stay in the television news industry. The strategy of
“orienting the
eyes” (Ellison 1947), becoming aware of one’s double
consciousness, is a
critical initial step in surviving and thriving despite the
everydayness of

struggle over representations of “Blackness,” the
professionalizing process,
and the ways in which their bodies and stories are continually
branded and
placed in an attempt to control Black mobility.
The value placed in the presentation of self including how
journalists
speak, how they choose to dress, and how their hair is styled
and textured
41
are all factors that help determine job security and mobility in
television
news. In an image-conscious industry, Black wo/men in
television who
straighten their hair are well aware of how individual choices in
style and
dress are shaped by the dominant culture order of acceptability,
professionalism, and beauty. The recent firing of KTBS
Meteorologist
Rhonda S. Lee reminds Black journalists of just how dangerous
it is to
challenge a news director over something as simple as hair. The
inner eyes
inform journalists of the peculiar policing of “Blackness” and
what is at
stake in the pervasiveness of racism and “simultaneous
oppressions”54 as
expressed in language (Hall 1997) including news copy/script,
audio-visual
issues, and the body.

Likewise, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye shows the tragedy of
being
subjected to a standard of the human that at the same time
rewards,
dehumanizes, and denies one’s self identity. Such denial is
explored through
Morrison’s character, Claudia, who said that she hated Shirley
Temple
because “The[ir] entire world told them that Shirley Temple was
something
worthy of adoration, acknowledgement, desire … for she held
something
‘precious. …’” Morrison beautifully describes the deep
resentment and
dehumanization an imposed White standard of beauty has on
generations of
Black women through Claudia’s reaction to being given the
“blue-eyed
Baby Doll” for Christmas. “From the clucking sounds of adults
she knew
that the doll represented what they thought was her fondest
wish, but she had
only one desire: to dismember it” so that she could see of what
it was made,
“to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability
that had
escaped only her” (italics emphasis mine). She hates white baby
dolls but
later learns to worship the little White girls the baby dolls
represent,
knowing, even as she learns that “the change was adjustment
without
improvement” (Morrison 1970, 12). As she gets older, Claudia
pays close
attention to her “inner eyes” (Ellison 1947, 3–4), making her
keenly aware

of a palatable “Blackness” enforced by society’s socio-
economic system of
reward and punishment. Morrison’s narrator tells us:
They straighten their hair with Dixie Peach … They fight this
battle all
the way to the grave. The laugh that is a little too loud; the
enunciation a
little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold
their behind
in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they
never cover
the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry,
worry, worry
about the edges of their hair.
(Morrison 1970, 68)
42
Morrison’s discussion of race and denial of the self is the
terrain and
condition of living while Black that the characters in the novel
must
navigate. The lived realities and corporeal constraints of the
novel’s
characters (particularly Claudia’s daughter, Pecola Breedlove,
who has a
deep desire for blue eyes that she believes will afford her
human
recognition) speak to some of the experiences of Black
journalists who
undergo more intense scrutiny of palatability under the
microscope of

management’s use of image consultants and talent agents.
Policing Black
journalists’ language (Hall 1997, 3–4) of self-identity that is
understood
within and beyond the domains of popular culture is a major site
of struggle.
No one escapes the scale of palatability least of all Black
wo/men—Black
men are scrutinized and punished for wearing a goatee and/or
embracing a
speech pattern other than the standard White Midwest speech
pattern that
cultural capital affords. Blatant disregard for linguistic cul tural
capital
practices in privileged spaces such as television news tends to
be seen as
unprofessional and is more acceptable in prescribed spaces of
the newscast,
such as the sports segment. Modes of being exercised outside
the dominant
culture order must at times subscribe to epistemologies marked
“other” and
therefore delegitimized. Tools long forgotten, remembered,
devalued, and
considered primitive by the powers that be are excavated and
used in some
of the chapters through the lens of Ralph Ellison, W.E.B.
DuBois, Frantz
Fanon, and Zora Neale Hurston to uncover that which is in plain
sight yet
muted, bound, gagged, blinded, and therefore unreachable using
the
analytical tools of so-called modernity.
In foregrounding the simultaneity of past, present, and future,
Zora Neale

Hurston’s concept of transmitted memory (Hurston 1942) allows
for more
expansive ways of thinking about forms of resistance to what
seems a
compelling force of image consultants, talent agents, news
directors, and the
fear surrounding body image and hair particularly when linked
to
“Blackness.” Here is where Ellison’s and Morrison’s works of
fiction are
used to shed light on forms of resistance exercised by
journalists. There are
also spaces in the interview transcript that seemed to stand
silent on issues
of race, gender, and sexuality until concepts from Ellison’s and
Morrison’s
works were used to open space for understanding the volumes
spoken in the
ways in which journalists resist dominant newsroom cultural
practices.
Such resistance comes in the form of journalists’ using their
inner eyes as
guideposts of understanding what is desired in terms of image,
dominant
cultural expression, and practice to clearly identify tactical
moments of
opportunity for getting around the system, progressing, and
undermining
newsroom hierarchy. Media management logics of
demographics that
43
determine when and where in the United States “Blackness” is

acceptable in
the promotion of a particular “genre of the Human” (Wynter
2006, 219), the
ways in which media management is constantly “writing the
body” (Cixous
1991, 52) with its prescription for what it is to be human, and
the denial of
one’s “dwelling” space of “difference” (Lorde 1984) become the
dominant
“regime of truth” (Minh-ha 1989, 1992) that Black television
news
journalists must navigate. In other words, the negotiation of
race, gender,
and sexuality in a corporate newsroom culture at the very least
requires
historically contextualizing the data while foregrounding the
transmitted
memory that is part and parcel of the experiences journalists
have shared in
this book.
Herman Gray’s work questions conventional assumptions about
cultural
moves of recognition, visibility, and African American
investment in
representation as a route to African American membership in
national
culture (Gray 2005, 2). One of his chief assertions is that
American
commercial television networks are no longer the primary sites
of mass-
mediated theater and performance of the nation. Media Studies
scholar
Darnell Hunt’s work takes aim at the analysis the major network
affiliates
offered for the Los Angeles “riots.” While Gray’s work points

The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television NewsLibby Lew

The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television NewsLibby Lew

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television NewsLibby Lew

Similar to The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television NewsLibby Lew (19)

More from AlleneMcclendon878

More from AlleneMcclendon878 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

The Myth of Post-Racialism in Television NewsLibby Lew