The Business of Forging a Shared Future Begins With Media Reparations
The U.S. media system has been a chief architect of our nation’s anti-Black narrative since 1619. Media reparations could help us finally move forward, to reconcile and repair the harm our media system has caused to the Black community.
Early newspapers sold runaway-slave ads and acted as in-person brokers for the African slave trade, and some of those papers still operate today. Deceitful coverage in the Jim Crow era fueled lynchings and massacres, and Black journalists have faced deadly retaliation in every era.
After uprisings erupted across major U.S. cities throughout the 1960s, the landmark Kerner Commission’s study noted that causes included a national media that “reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.”
Martin Luther King Jr. remarked in 1967 that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” And today, as our nation engages in another widespread movement for racial justice -- including uprisings within The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, podcast empire Gimlet Media and other organizations -- it’s urgently clear that we must finally address Kerner’s findings and realize a world in which Black voices, stories and truths are abundant.
It’s time for media reparations.
We define media reparations as the acknowledgement and repair of media’s systemic anti-Black harms, leading to the redistribution of power and resources to realize a future in which Black people control their own stories and narratives, from ideation through production and distribution.
We believe bold transformations are in order, and in that spirit we are issuing a challenge:
The top 10 print and broadcast media outlets, defined by reach, should devote at least 10 percent of their pre-tax profits to a fund to support Black and “ethnic” media. To redress decades of racially biased funding, philanthropic foundations that fund journalism should double their commitments to the overall field -- and allocate 80 percent of this expanded support to institutions run by and serving communities of color for at least the next decade.
We don’t have to wait on Congress and the president to get this right.
Broader federal reparations that touch all aspects of our society are what are ultimately needed, and local initiatives are happening across the country. H.R. 40 legislation, which would establish a commission to study reparation proposals for African Americans, is moving forward in Congress. And Media 2070, our organization’s effort to highlight how the media can serve as a lever for racial justice within the next 50 years, has been joined by 25 members of Congress in calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate the history of racism in media policymaking. But the wheels of government turn slowly.
A glance back at history shows that when the U.S. government was unwilling to economically isolate the South African apartheid government, businesses and institutional investors took up the cause as a matter of “corporate social responsibility,” a concept pioneered by General Motors board member Leon Sullivan.
The United States’ de-facto media-apartheid system -- and the myths of Black inferiority that it perpetuates -- will persist without similar shifts today from business and philanthropy.
According to the Democracy Fund, from 2013 to 2017, $1.1 billion in grants were awarded to the flagging journalism industry -- but just 8.1 percent was given to outlets that serve so-called “ethnic” communities, women and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Businesses and philanthropies have the ability and capital needed to jump-start the transformation of our inequitable media system. And corporations in media, telecom and technology have a particular responsibility to repair past harms.
America’s earliest radio and TV licenses were given freely, but only white owners received them -- creating an unjust system in which white media owners have amassed astronomical media wealth using their exclusive access to the public airwaves.
According to Free Press research, in 2019 Black people owned only 18 full-power TV stations -- or just over 1 percent. And according to the FCC, Black people owned just 239 of the country’s 11,000 commercial radio stations as of 2017.
After peaking in the mid ’90s through the early 2000s, Black representation among newsroom staffers working at daily publications and online sites fell to just 5.6 percent in 2017 and to 4.6 percent of newsroom leaders that same year, according to the American Society of News Editors.
Diversity efforts have been ongoing since the 1970s -- but haven’t offset the white supremacy that undergirds countless media organizations. Carla Murphy’s groundbreaking “Leavers” survey, an exit survey with more than 100 journalists of color who left the industry, shows that training and recruitment aren’t enough when toxic workplaces are forcing established journalists of color out of the industry at their career midpoints -- the stage when they’re starting to assume the power needed to change the status quo.
We must do the right thing now -- it is urgent that we act. And that means engaging in direct processes of repair.
Corporate and philanthropic leaders have the power, and the historical obligation, to invest in a media future with justice as its guiding principle.
Share this message with the business and philanthropic leaders in your circle, and let’s dig deep to plant the seeds that will yield the just media and society that our communities deserve.
About the Authors:
Alicia Bell is a co-creator of Media 2070. She served as the founding director of Media 2070 and is now director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. A child of ancestors from Mississippi and the Carolinas, Alicia works at the intersections of afrofuturist imagination, journalism, land, food and all the spaces in between.
Joseph Torres is co-creator of Media 2070 and also senior director of strategy and engagement at Free Press, where he advocates in Washington to ensure that our nation’s media policies serve the public interest. Joseph is co-author of the New York Times bestseller News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.
Damaso Reyes is the founder of Clarify.Media and has been an independent journalist for more than 20 years. He is the recipient of several awards and grants, including Arthur F. Burns and Holbrooke Fellowships from the International Center for Journalists; grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Solutions Journalism Network; and an Immigration Reporting Fellowship from the French American Foundation.
Collette Watson is a native of Gullah country, South Carolina, a co-creator of Media 2070 and vice president for cultural strategy at Free Press. She is a past recipient of the American Advertising Federation MOSAIC Award, co-founder of Black River Life Media and an indie singer-songwriter.