Media Coverage Fails
It’s Just Black and White
Missing white women, like Gabrielle Petito, are big news; missing women of color are no news at all. Even in death, the color of your skin matters. Mass shootings in white suburbia are big news; the same events in poor, predominantly black areas, are not.
Petito’s body was discovered in Wyoming this week and she is believed to have been murdered by her boyfriend. The saturation coverage is what the late journalist Gwen Ifill called “missing white woman syndrome.” She joked at a 2004 Unity Journalists of Color convention that “if there is a missing white woman you’re going to cover that every day.”
Media coverage of missing indigenous people has been equally lacking as there has been little publicity about the 710 Native American people who went missing in Wyoming between 2011 and 2020, according to a report released by Wyoming’s Taskforce on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons.
The dearth of reporting about missing Black people is shocking when you see that 35 percent of missing persons reports are of Black people while Blacks are just 13 percent of the population, according to the FBI. Compare that with White people who represent 54 percent of missing people and 76 percent of the population.
The unbalanced press coverage is not limited to the U.S. The body of a 28-year-old teacher, a Black woman, Sabina Nessa, was discovered in a park in England. She had been murdered and her body was found buried under a pile of leaves. The incident was routinely covered, compared with the nationwide explosion of outrage over violence against women in Britain after 33-year-old Sarah Everard, who is White, was murdered by a police officer as she walked home in London earlier this year.
Racism in the media is as old as racism in the culture, distorting and warping and shaping our knowledge, telling us who to remember for their accomplishments and who will remain forgotten.
Charges involving sex and black athletes and other entertainers have long garnered publicity, in part because of lingering sexual stereotypes about blacks. Undoubtedly, most have heard about two famous black men facing allegations of sexual misconduct. The disgraced rhythm and blues singer, R. Kelly is on trial on charges of running a decades-long operation to recruit women and underage girls for sex by capitalizing on the singer’s fame. NFL star Deshaun Watson is facing a series of sexual misconduct and abuse allegations.
But what about Bob Ryland, the first Black tennis player to go professional, who died Aug. 2, 2020? He was 100 years old. Or Jimmie McDaniel, a tennis player who played in the first interracial match with then world champion, Don Budge, on July 29, 1940. McDaniel, a collegiate superstar talented in multiple sports, was regarded as the best African-American player of his time. He was 73 when he died on March 8, 1990 but his obituary wasn’t printed until Feb. 21, 2021.
Stories about white entertainers and obituaries also capture a disproportionate amount of the public attention, thanks to media saturation, as in the on-going stories over singer Britney Spears’ conservatorship dispute.
Recent obituaries were prominent for Willie Garson, the 57-year-old white actor who starred in “Sex and the City” and died on Sept. 21. Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, an acclaimed artist who chronicled Black life, died on May 22, 2015, and her death went largely unreported.
The death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, 80, on Aug. 24, 2021, was reported around the nation and the world. There was little publicity over the recent deaths of hugely popular black rap stars like Baby CEO, born Jonathan Brown, who gained fame for songs about guns and money and died in January; 18veno, a 19-year-old rapper from South Carolina, who climbed the charts with his hit R4x EP and also died in January; or Prince Markie Dee of the Fat Boys who died in February.
Traditionally, the white media has shaped what is news and what is not and what is reflected in the history books and taught in the schools. Take the example of Rosa Parks, a black woman who was arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., after she refused to give up her bus seat to white man. The moment ignited the Civil Rights movement. Nine months earlier, Claudette Colvin was 15 when she was arrested for the same offense of not giving up her seat to a white person on a crowded bus. She is now 82 but you will find rare mention of Colvin in the history books or the media.
The accomplishments of the great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., are known around the world but lesser known is Fred L. Davis, a former longtime Memphis City Council member and civil rights activist who marched with the King and died on May 12, 2020. The Associated Press reported that “Davis sought a city resolution for the Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike in early 1968 to protest dangerous working conditions and low pay. The strike drew King to Memphis, and Davis joined the civil rights leader on a march down Beale Street that turned violent on March 28, 1968.”
Scholars of the Civil Rights movement would know the vital role played the Rev. Dr. Joseph Echols Lowery, who died March 27, 2020. Lowery was widely regarded as the top lieutenant for King and was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Another of the lesser publicized civil rights leaders was Bruce Carver Boynton, an Alabama-based lawyer who died at 83 on Nov. 23, 2020. In 1958 while he was a law student at Howard University, Boynton stopped in a bus stop restaurant in Richmond, Va., where refused to leave a “whites-only” area after trying to buy a sandwich. Boynton sued and lost before the Supreme Court, triggering the “Freedom Rides” across the Jim Crow south.
It is the same in pop culture, where the dominant white musicians receive the most publicity while the black pioneers of forms of dancing and rap music are publicized less.
Don Campbell, the creator of locking, which later became a prominent feature of the popular art of breakdancing, died at 69 on March 30, 2020. His nickname was “Campbellock,” which was shortened to “locking,” the dance moves that came before “popping, b-boying and other styles that are often collected under the label hip-hop,” the N.Y. Times noted in his obituary. As influential as Campbell was, there was scant other attention at the time of his death.
The N.Y. Times has recognized that accomplishments of many people of color have been ignored and has started a regular feature known as “Overlooked,” reporting on remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
The overlooked deaths that have recently been reported include tennis star, McDaniel.
Also, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, whose art chronicled Black life and who “believed that life for her people in America was an act of near-superhuman perseverance, and she was determined to capture that history in every medium she could, the Times wrote. She died on May 22, 2015 and was 75.
Another remarkable person who was not recognized by Times until recently was Jay Jaxon, a pioneering designer of French couture who worked in fashion houses like Jean-Louis Scherrer, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior and dressed Annie Lennox, Thelma Houston and other stars. He died on July 19, 2006 and was 64.
The Times also belatedly honored Roland Johnson who fought to shut down institutions for the disabled. The Times wrote that Johnson survived 13 years of neglect and abuse, including sexual assault, at the notorious Pennhurst State School and Hospital outside Philadelphia before emerging as a champion for the disabled. He died on Aug. 29, 1994, at 48, after being trapped in a house fire.
There are so many, many more people of color who have distinguished themselves through U.S. It is the job of the media to sort out their own bias and to fairly report on all who have made positive contributions.