Racialization of News: Constructing and Challenging Professional Journalism as “White Media”

Joint Reflexive Statement

Carlos Alamo-Pastrana: My first experience with news media began in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While there I participated in Voices for Global Justice, a weekly one-hour news and interview radio show on KCSB. A multidisciplinary graduate student and activist collective interested in issues such as women of color feminisms, war, policing, environmental justice, and colonialism developed the programming for the show each week. My experience with Voices for Global Justice sparked an interest in alternative media and in particular in understanding some of its earliest historical iterations in the United States. My dissertation as well as my first book, Seams of Empire (University Press of Florida, 2016), study the work of the Black Press in the 1940s and 1950s to consider the ways in which the Black Press conceptualized Puerto Rico as a useful location to rethink Black marginalization, politics, and possibilities. Moving forward, my next project is a biography and exploration of the journalism of Puerto Rican communist and New York community leader Jesus Colon.

William Hoynes: While I have been studying news media for many years, my understanding of the stakes of critical media analysis came from working among local activists. During my time as a member of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP) at Boston College, I learned from community, anti-war, and labor organizers who were mobilizing to challenge barriers to media access and to promote greater media diversity. During that time, I worked with David Croteau on several studies of the range of perspectives featured on prestigious television news programs. Our studies examining ABC's Nightline and PBS's NewsHour were published by the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) and helped generate public debate about the consequences of limited diversity - ideological and demographic - on U.S. television news. Over the past 25 years, I have worked on projects monitoring local news media in Boston and Philadelphia, activist efforts to challenge the increasing commercialization of public schools, and national campaigns to maintain federal media ownership regulations and to reform the structure of public broadcasting. These research-activist experiences have played a vital role in framing my media inquiry, including the effort here to untangle the complex racial dynamics of professional journalism.

Introduction

Professional journalism in the United States has always been a largely white profession (Chideya 2018; Wilson, Gutierrez, and Chao 2013). News organizations have long recognized the narrow demographics of newsroom personnel. Facing criticism in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, many national news organizations publicly pledged to hire more journalists of color (Sylvie 2011). In 1978, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) made a commitment to a more racially diverse newsroom, identifying the year 2000 as the target date for when each member news organization’s staff should match the demographic profile of its local community. This initiated ASNE’s annual diversity survey to track progress toward the goal of racial parity in the newsroom (Mellinger 2013).

By 1998, with the target year of 2000 approaching, journalists of color constituted 11.5 percent of daily newspaper reporters, up from only 4 percent in 1978. However, this was still far below the goal of 26 percent of newsroom staff, then the percentage of the U.S. population who identified as African American, Hispanic, Asian American, or Native American (ASNE 1998). Recognizing the failure to achieve its diversity target, ASNE set a new target date of 2025 for achieving a newsroom workforce that reflects national racial diversity. By 2017, newsroom diversity was still an elusive goal (Frissell et al. 2017). Simply put, the corps of professional journalists remains disproportionately white, even 40 years after national news organizations announced their commitment to a diverse newsroom. In her study of ASNE’s diversity efforts, Mellinger (2013) highlights the deep-seated structures of exclusion within journalism that help reproduce such a white profession.

How journalism has remained such a white profession, even after nearly half a century of public proclamations about enhancing newsroom diversity, requires us to consider the specific ways news has been racialized in the United States, that is, defined as a white field staffed largely by white professionals, which ultimately reaffirms its own legitimacy.

Even as journalists, media critics, and scholars sort through the complex Web of contestation about the status of news media, the persistent racialization of news remains under theorized. African American media critics, both inside and outside the academy, have long recognized the limitations of national news media, highlighting the Black press as a much-needed arena for the articulation of perspectives that are underrepresented or simply ignored by the national news.

Still largely unacknowledged within journalism circles is an understanding of how professional journalism itself is (and has historically been) a cultural practice that defines and reproduces normative whiteness. That is, understanding the racialization of news—including the new Trump-era forms of racialization—requires us to look beyond the political economic dynamics of the news industry. Understanding the history and culture of professional journalism, both the norms governing journalistic work and the assumptions about audience identities and preferences, will clarify what’s at stake in the racialization of news.

This article teases out the relationship between professional journalism and emergent forms of white nationalist media, exploring how their interactional dynamics ultimately render criticism of white supremacy both moot and difficult to center. The section that follows clarifies the slippery usage of terms including white nationalism, white privilege, and white supremacy. Understanding white privilege and white nationalism helps to show how they can, at times, be antithetical to one another during our new era of liberal multiculturalism, even as both ultimately reinforce white supremacy. Following this section, we trace the history of both the Black press and the ways in which dominant forms of media are constituted as white. Importantly, we show how the standpoint of the Black press served as an important locale from which to challenge racist misrepresentations of the Black community often found in professional news media.

Professional journalism, in sharp contrast to the perspective of the Black press, shunned such an unwaveringly critical approach as antithetical to objectivity and, in turn, cast itself as universal, even as it sought to incorporate marginalized voices in the latter half of the twentieth century to address criticisms about its exclusionary practices. Drawing upon case studies of contemporary white nationalist media and recent controversies surrounding prominent black female journalists, we consider the ways in which professional journalism and white nationalist media navigate a media terrain characterized by both expressions of overt racial hostility and silence, as they affirm their own distinctive status. At the same time, these dynamics demonstrate how these particular strands of media ultimately depend on each other to shield themselves from serious critique and interrogation of their investment in white supremacy.

Conceptualizing White Supremacy

To theorize the racialization of news in a way that adequately accounts for both long-standing patterns and contemporary developments, we need to recognize the complexity of journalism’s relationship to whiteness. To begin, we consider the ways in which professional journalism should be understood as one of the discursive racial epistemologies and cultural texts of what literary scholar Jodi Melamed (2011) terms our contemporary era of neoliberal multiculturalism. New forms of media strongly interface with traditional cultural texts such as the novel as literary forms that promote and strengthen dominant racial regimes.

For purposes of clarity, we distinguish between the terms white nationalism, white privilege, and white supremacy. White supremacy is an umbrella term that houses both white nationalism and white privilege. According to Indigenous Studies scholar Andrea Smith (2012), white supremacy encapsulates three defining features: slavery, genocide, and orientalism. Within Smith’s framework, the antiblackness prevalent in slavery helps to anchor the materialist roots of capitalism while genocide and orientalism help to explain colonialism and permanent war as constituent features of white supremacy. Although not mentioned directly by Smith, we consider white privilege and white nationalism as important, yet distinct, strands that also undergird and permeate the overarching system of white supremacy.

Geographer Laura Pulido (2015) notes that white privilege details the benefits in housing, education, and wealth afforded to whites that require little, if any, direct and/or conscious forms of racial animus by whites toward other groups. White privilege exists as a defining feature of white supremacy in the United States following World War II (WWII) when overt and institutionalized forms of racism were outlawed and considered socially unacceptable, even as de facto forms of racism and inequality persisted. One important feature of this shift is that racism is identified as an individual trait or behavior rather than a structural arrangement. Specifically, racism could only be considered legitimate in as much as it is present in the conscious and direct actions of individuals rather than as a structural relationship highlighting “the production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death” (Gilmore 2007:28).

This “dematerialization” of racism, argues literary scholar Jodi Melamed (2011), explains the rise and use of cultural forms such as race novels as key epistemological tools of official anti-racist regimes between 1940 and the early 2000s. Novels promoted an emergent multicultural and cultural pluralist impulse where dominant groups could learn about marginalized racial and ethnic groups through inclusive reading lists. Such multicultural reading lists provided in institutional spaces such as the university enabled whites to see themselves as an informed public and, perhaps most importantly, as morally “good white people” (Sullivan 2014). The shift away from overt practices of racism, argues Melamed, rationalizes our current neoliberal multicultural era of wealth concentration, elimination of the social safety net, and continued extraction of low wage labor from certain groups. In order to maintain its legitimacy, neoliberalism must therefore reject and conceal structural forms of racism, all while reducing racism to an individualized phenomena.

In contrast to the discreet manifestations of white privilege, we use the term white nationalism in this article to identify the conscious and intentional ways in which groups of whites across the globe seek to create an exclusive, normative, and heteropatriarchal racial state. White nationalism opposes neoliberal social and economic priorities on the grounds that they lead to the disenfranchisement and disempowerment of white male majorities. In response, white nationalists resort to varying strategies such as physical violence and discursive strategies that include the use of terms like “white genocide,” “invasion,” and “terrorism” that establish themselves as victims who are under attack who must simply defend themselves and the essentialist features of a white racial state.

These and other terms are meant to highlight shifting population demographics and, most importantly, the resulting loss of political power of white men. These narratives traffic in the use of explicitly racist, homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic imagery and language that is often paired with unfounded conspiracy theories. One such example includes the Black helicopter conspiracy theory, popular among alt-right militia groups, whereby United Nations and/or New World Order directed covert Black helicopters are used to invade the United States and/or take away the property of white ranchers (Goldwag 2009).

Although white privilege and white nationalism are both products of white supremacy, they may at times be antithetical and hostile to one another. In fact, our discussion of professional journalism demonstrates that white professional media (racial privilege) is often antagonistic toward white nationalist media. White nationalist media’s pronounced racism and use of “alternative facts” is a direct threat to the seemingly objective and multicultural anti-racism of white professional media. Even so, professional journalism’s desire to defend and police itself against white nationalist newspapers helps to reinforce white professional media’s investment in color-blind rhetoric and its dependency on white nationalism as a means of affirming its own value. In the end, white supremacy in the news media and in society more broadly escapes critique as white privilege and white nationalism attempt to maneuver against one another.

The Emergence of Professional Journalism

Journalism was not always regarded as a profession and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century press was not rooted in now-familiar ideas about objectivity. In fact, the emergence of professional journalism is precisely when objective reporting became the defining idea within U.S. journalism. In his classic study of the origins of objectivity in journalism, sociologist Michael Schudson (1978) defines objectivity as “a faith in ‘facts,’ a distrust of ‘values,’ and a commitment to their segregation” (p. 6). According to Schudson, the idea of objective journalism is a twentieth-century concept. Only in the years after World War I (WWI) did objectivity become the dominant value in American journalism.

Prior to WWI, reporters did not subscribe to a belief in what we now term objectivity. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, most newspapers were run by political parties, offering a partisan account of events aimed at engaging and mobilizing sympathetic voters. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a new fact-based journalism replaced the partisan press; media historian Gerald Baldasty (1992) argues that economic forces drove the growth of this new kind of journalism. For example, the Associated Press—one of the first wire services—sought to present news in a way that would be acceptable to the many different newspapers that printed their reports, and the New York Times introduced an “information” model of reporting aimed at attracting an upscale audience.

Still journalists did not aim for objective reporting; they were not concerned with the separation of facts and values, nor did they believe that facts themselves were messy (Schudson 1978). To the contrary, for journalists before the emergence of professional journalism, the facts spoke for themselves. The goal of fact-based reporting was simply to uncover these facts, and that task was straightforward: Find and report the truth. As late as the early twentieth century, journalists were confident in their ability to identify the relevant facts and to report them accurately.

This faith in facts held by American journalists was thrown into doubt in the years during and after WWI. Many American journalists participated in wartime propaganda efforts during WWI, working with the Committee on Public Information (CPI), led by journalist George Creel (Ewen 1996). The success of the CPI in using news to mobilize public support for the war made journalists uncomfortable with any simple understanding of “facts.” Having seen how effectively facts could be manipulated, journalists began to question the very foundation of the news (Schudson 1978).

In the aftermath of WWI, the field of public relations (PR) was also emerging, and professional publicists learned how to manage the news. They fed information to reporters, carefully controlling access to their powerful clients, and they staged events such as press conferences, designed with the specific intent of influencing the news. With PR professionals spinning the facts, dispensing information strategically, and shaping news content through the use of official press releases, journalists’ cynicism became even more pronounced.

The recognition that information could be manipulated and the rise of a new PR profession that was dedicated to the shaping of public opinion left journalists with a crisis of confidence about their ability to report facts in any straightforward way. In Schudson’s (1978) account, objectivity emerged as a solution to this crisis; rooted in a belief in science and professional expertise, objectivity offered journalists “a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted” (p. 122). By training reporters in the method of objectivity, journalists transformed their naive fact-based craft into a profession with a distinctive method (Glasser 1984). This method could be taught to aspiring journalists who would be credentialed and professionalized through formal higher education at the growing number of journalism schools at colleges and universities.

By the 1930s, professional journalism had become institutionalized within the news industry. Over the next several decades, this new journalism would become an increasingly high-status (and influential) profession. The foundation of professional journalism—the source of self-confidence among reporters and the roots of public trust in the news—was the commitment to the practice of objective reporting.

The Power of the Black Press

The Black press made no pretenses to objectivity and instead directly challenged the marginalization African Americans experienced within the U.S. empire state that required them to demonstrate their very humanity in the face of daily racial violence. Specifically, messages within the Black press focused on education, racial uplift, and challenged racist misrepresentations, enabling members of the African American community to imagine themselves as a sovereign community beyond the parameters defined for them by white Americans and popular culture (McHenry 2002). But even as the Black press helped establish some limited forms of sovereignty, the articulation of an alternative press and its desire to produce new narratives about African Americans cannot be understood outside of the ways in which the Black press always understood the audience for dominant media as white. Put differently, black writers and audiences found in the Black press a venue in which they were able to assert alternative knowledge projects.

In addition to stories about civic engagement and progress, the Black press included stories that directly challenged popular assumptions about the Black community through the use of social scientific research. Not coincidentally, the development of the Black press overlaps with the emergence of early American sociology departments at the end of the nineteenth century. ¹ Segregated out of popular academic networks, the Black press was the next best thing where black intellectuals and academics could reach broad audiences and present their research. W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson are among some of the important figures in the early Black press who also enjoyed prominent careers as social scientists.

Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois continued this form of public sociology in the pages of the Crisis, the national publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois took up the editorship of the Crisis in New York city following his academic appointment at Atlanta University. Du Bois (1951) hoped to use the Crisis to “stress the facts and minimize editorial opinion” (p. 147). In addition to responding to the neglect and pseudo-knowledge espoused by the white press, the Crisis presented black readers with an alternative news source to The New York Age, a weekly run by friends of Booker T. Washington.

Always attentive to the importance of the Crisis as an organ of truth, Du Bois noted, “only the publication of the truth repeatedly and incisively and uncompromisingly can secure that change in public opinion which will correct these awful lies. The Crisis…must not be a namby-pamby box of salve, but a voice that thunders fact…” (cited in Squires 2009:45). Journalistic work by Du Bois and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, however, did more than just provide evidence intended to counter popular assumptions about the Black community. More than anything else, the Black press provided an outlet that also made visible the discrimination experienced by African Americans and their corresponding demands for material redress and justice. The Black press made these demands even as they continued to support populist and patriotic national endeavors such as the war effort during both WWI and WWII. Perhaps, even as Du Bois and other black writers worked to expose the politically motivated falsehoods and misinformation promoted by the professional white press about Black America, their political advocacy for black equality eventually came to be used to silence and dismiss black journalists and writers as lacking the professionalism and objectivity of their white counterparts.

The growth of the Black community in the first decades of the twentieth century in places like Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, and other cities in the Northeast and Midwest produced a corresponding growth in the readership and distribution of Black periodicals. The impact and importance of the Black press at this time cannot be overstated. According to historian Washburn (2006), some polls “showed that more than 90 percent of the black respondents agreed with the papers’ militant attitudes” (p. 181). In another poll, more than 80 percent of Chicago Defender readers consulted the periodical before deciding on a political issue. Still an uncertain financial situation required a balancing act where the Black press could promote a race conscious agenda that pleased and grew its readership even as it also attempted to lure white advertisers and companies in order to produce the revenue required to operate (Buni 1974).

Even under threats of censorship, the Black press continued to grow during WWII. The number of Black periodicals jumped from 150 to 210 between 1933 and 1940. The Pittsburgh Courier increased its audience from roughly 127,000 readers in 1940 to more than 357,000 seven years later, making it the largest Black newspaper in the nation (Buni 1974). Government officials made a cautious note of the marked increase in the wartime reach and audience of the Black press. In the eyes of the government, the Black press’s support of the war effort did not sufficiently offset its blunt criticisms of race relations in American society especially with regard to the state sponsored racial terror of Jim Crow segregation wrought on African Americans.

The Decline of the Black Press

The end of WWII also brought with it the beginning decline of the golden era of the Black press. There is not one single reason that explains this initial decline by itself. The radicalism and militancy promoted by the Black press that led to its popularity among black audiences is perhaps the overarching reason that contributed to its gradual waning. In 1945, Mississippi Senator John Rankin lobbied to make the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been slated for elimination, a permanent standing committee (Bogle 2001). A segregationist and anti-Semite, Rankin ushered in an era of fervent anti-communist hysteria often based on unlawful and meritless innuendo or rumor. The McCarthy era targeted numerous prominent members of the Black press, including Du Bois and publisher of the California Eagle Charlotta Bass, leading them to leave the country or to sell their periodicals. The McCarthyist purges also shaped the ways in which corporate advertisers shifted their advertising dollars away from newspapers with seemingly radical politics toward more moderate periodicals (Nelson 1999).

Changes were also afoot within the broader newspaper industry that influenced black newspapers. During the 1940s and 1950s, the ASNE began to internally debate the need to diversify its all white membership. In 1947, ASNE considered the application of the Defender’s editor Louis E. Martin for inclusion. However, ASNE required its members to be editors of daily newspapers, which all but excluded Black periodicals, which were primarily weekly newspapers. As media historian Gwyneth Mellinger (2013:20) notes, “This rubric allowed ASNE members to blame the failure of nonwhites to meet professional standards, rather than a long-standing pattern of racial exclusivity, for the organization’s all-white and predominantly male profile.” Martin, who graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Michigan, was also perceived negatively by ASNE because its leadership considered the Defender’s content to be specialized rather than general interest. Given ASNE commitment to its own narrow version of professional journalism, the organization ultimately rejected Martin’s application.

Although ASNE did not admit a black editor into its ranks until 1965 with the inclusion of Chicago Daily Defender’s John Sengstake, the white professional press did begin to recruit and lure leading Black journalists to its publications in the 1950s and 1960s. This internal model of “brain drain” also contributed to the decline of black newspapers in the post–WWII era. Even more, it strengthened and affirmed the white professional media’s control of the standards and terms under which it accepted diversity as a part of its journalistic mission in newspapers and newsrooms.

The reasons above notwithstanding, the decline of the Black press in the 1950s, did not so much affirm the continued prevalence of white supremacy as it had organized itself as a defining feature of American life in the prewar years. Rather, the ways in which white professional media shifted its priorities heavily overlap with the ways in which white supremacy reorganized itself after the racial break.

This shift cannot be understood as the resulting graciousness of governing elites that somehow became enlightened following WWII. Instead, this break resulted from the pressures enacted on varying racial regimes by social movements in the United States as well as throughout the global south. The Black press itself should be considered a part of these successful contestations to racial power even as its challenges to racial power may have contributed to its ultimate incorporation into white professional media. In the end, the intense pressures and demands for justice enacted by social movements required their selective incorporation into the ruling hegemonic bloc as de jure forms of white supremacy no longer efficiently served the interests of the U.S. racial state. The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for global supremacy and influence during the Cold War made the United States’ shift to an anti-racist regime especially pertinent (Melamed 2011). In the context of the press, the shift to an anti-racist regime required the press to diversify in both its content and its professional staff. The symbolic gestures of anti-racism present in the emergent post–WWII press significantly blunted the material demands articulated in the early Black press and affirmed the mutually constitutive relationship between whiteness and one of the central values of the journalistic profession: objectivity.

Whiteness and Objectivity

For many journalists, objectivity stands as an unattainable goal, an ideal, of what professional journalists should strive for. At the same time, objectivity is codified in routine reporting methods that are taught in journalism schools and reinforced in newsrooms. Objectivity is both norm and practice. The normative dimensions of objectivity define expectations for an appropriate journalistic approach (Santos 2009). Objective reporters aim to inhabit a mind-set that values neutrality, even disinterestedness; they are expected to express no opinion and to produce accounts that do not reflect any specific perspective. In fact, professional journalists remove themselves from their reporting—a commitment to objective reporting leaves little room for subjectivity—and this discourages reflection about the relevance of journalists’ background and identity (Jenkins and Padgett 2012). Objectivity as norm, then, positions journalists as having no standpoint or, more precisely, renders invisible the standpoint(s) from which journalistic knowledge is produced.

Objectivity as practice, similarly, affirms professional journalism as knowledge with an invisible standpoint. The practice of professional journalism emphasizes a two-sided version of balance, separating facts from opinion, attributing opinions to (preferably named) sources, an emphasis on description over interpretation, and an avoidance of highly charged language. These practices ensure that news is neither one-sided (by definition, since reporters include two sides) and contains expressions of opinion limited to the perspectives of news sources rather than journalists themselves. Following standard practices of objective reporting relieves journalists of the responsibility to account for the forces that structure their professional standpoint.

Professional journalists see objectivity as the foundation of their profession’s legitimacy (Schudson and Anderson 2009). In defining journalistic knowledge as objective, and highlighting the limitations of subjective accounts, objectivity, like other claims to expertise, attempts to erase the traces of the humans that produce journalistic knowledge. This is consistent with Tuchman’s (1972) argument that objectivity is, fundamentally, a “strategic ritual” designed to protect reporters and news organizations from claims of bias or potential lawsuits. But the dimensions of strategy inherent in objectivity are far deeper than simply professional or organizational protection. Indeed, objective journalism has, albeit unintentionally, served to conceal its own long-standing whiteness. It is no wonder that four decades of public statements endorsing a more diverse newsroom have failed.

For professional journalists, objectivity is what elevates standard-format news reports over other forms of knowledge. If journalistic accounts are still “stories,” objectivity defines the stories produced by professional journalists as more reliable and accurate—if, perhaps, less engaging or accessible—than other modes of storytelling. In this regard, news organizations promote objectivity as the most consequential difference between journalistic stories and other narrative accounts. Since objectivity and the professionalization of journalism emerged in response to journalists’ own anxiety about the status of “facts” and “truth” (Schudson 1978), it may be no surprise that professional journalists hold tightly to the ideal of objective journalism.

Scholars of whiteness and media (Dyer 1997; Feagin 2013; Hughey 2012) offer a valuable perspective on the limitations of a professional journalism defined by objectivity. In removing subjectivity from professional journalism, while simultaneously ignoring the persistently narrow demographic makeup of newsroom staff, objective journalism has long managed to both marginalize journalists of color and reify the perspectives and experiences of white reporters as a form of disembodied, neutral knowledge.

Just as there has long been silence among white people about their own racial identity, with questions about “race” being reserved for people of color, so too does professional journalism define objective reporting for major news organizations as an un-raced form of knowledge, while racializing the reporting of journalists of color and publications and programs aimed specifically at audiences of color. For example, many journalists of color, including those who work for major national news organizations, are defined by their racial identity through their membership in organizations such as the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Asian American Journalists Association. White journalists are not similarly racialized; the associations they belong to (and to which many journalists of color also belong) are identified by their commitment to journalistic practice, such as the Society for Professional Journalists; by non-race-based identities, such as the Association of LGBTQ Journalists; or by areas of professional expertise, such as the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Similarly, news organizations that cover stories focused on the experiences of and perspectives within communities of color are labeled with a specific racial identity. For example, African American media, most prominently (as we have described) the long-standing Black press during its heyday in the mid-twentieth century, has long offered reporting of events, issues, and perspectives that receive little attention in the national news. Media labeled as Hispanic media, including Spanish-language newspapers and television, cover Latinx communities with a regularity and depth that is not available from the major national news outlets.

In short, news that is produced primarily by white journalists, focused primarily on white communities, and targeted primarily at white audiences claims the label of professional journalism. In refusing a racial identity, professional journalism claims a universal perspective, and this stands in sharp contrast to the racially specific identities of news by and for communities of color. This invisibility of professional journalism’s whiteness is what requires critical attention.

It is worth noting that the whiteness of professional journalism is not entirely invisible. Journalists and audiences of color have long understood the major news media as “white media,” which is different in important respects from, for example, the Black press. And while many readers of the Black press understood that deeply structured racial inequality made it unwise to ignore the “white media,” that understanding coexisted with a recognition of how, despite (or perhaps because) of claims to universality and neutrality, professional journalism is constituted as white.

News for a White Audience

While objectivity as both norm (a mind-set emphasizing neutrality) and practice (methods to achieve balance) contribute to the construction and concealment of professional journalism as white, journalistic conceptions of the news audience reinforce these same processes. At the most basic level, professional journalists produce news for an audience that they, perhaps unconsciously, assume to be primarily white. While this assumption remains largely hidden, not least to journalists themselves, it manifests itself in the everyday work of news making: from the vaguely white midwestern speech of television news anchors and definitions of what’s newsworthy to the sources quoted in the news and the markets targeted for advertising. Such implicit beliefs that news audiences are primarily white seem to persist, even as viewers, readers, and listeners are becoming more racially diverse.

Professional journalism has long spoken, albeit implicitly, to a white, middle-class audience. The assumption about the class status of news audiences has long been embedded in the advertising-supported business model of commercial news organizations (Hamilton 2004). In this model, news is funded by, and aimed at, audiences with sufficient resources to consume advertised goods. That means, news organizations seek to attract audiences that advertisers will define as “valuable”; it is not just the sheer size of the news audience that defines advertising rates, but the makeup of that audience that determines the cost of advertising space and time. In this context, news organizations have long sought to build an upscale audience and, in the process, have defined that upscale demographic as primarily white.

At the same time, news organizations hope to avoid offending any substantial segment of this desired audience. So news should be appropriate and “tasteful”; as a result, any sustained and serious reckoning with the significance of a structurally preferred audience that is white and economically comfortable remains largely unspoken. At a foundational level, then, news organizations have long been structured by economic principles that incentivize a news audience that matches perceptions of the demographics that will have the most value in their exchange with advertisers.

In addition, definitions of what’s newsworthy—that is, what is interesting and important enough to dedicate scarce newsgathering resources to cover—are shaped in powerful ways by journalists’ own (rather limited) social networks (Gans 2005). In the process of deciding what’s newsworthy, journalists rely upon their own experiences with and feedback from within their social circles. Given the persistently narrow demographic makeup of the newsroom, and the long-standing residential segregation by race and class in the United States, judgments of newsworthiness largely align with the perspectives of professional journalism’s narrow demographic. Since journalists are uncomfortable with the subjectivity of these judgments, they regularly pay attention to what their rivals are covering; this cross-media feedback loop only reinforces these invisibly racialized definitions of audiences and their interests.

Taken-for-granted assumptions of a primarily white audience are embedded in the news making process. Professional journalists produce news that they expect will be consumed by whites, even if they are uncomfortable with (or unaware of) these assumptions. The very idea of professional journalism as trusted source of information was built on a (largely unspoken) foundation of news as a primarily white arena.

The cultural authority of professional journalism was, at least until recently, rooted in audience trust. That trust was rooted in broad acceptance, at least among the target audience, that professional journalists offered accounts that were culturally familiar in a way that audiences understood them to be in the realm of objective—that is, more or less neutral and balanced.

In the current climate of political polarization, however, the project of professional journalism and the idea of objective reporting are becoming increasingly unstable. Charges of bias and “fake news” and the emergence of popular and aggressively conservative forms of news are helping to shift the news landscape (McNair 2017). Amid such change, the invisible whiteness of professional journalism may be becoming far more legible and, as it is recognized and discussed, may be simultaneously opening space to challenge the norms and practices of professional journalism and facilitate the emergence of new, explicitly white nationalist forms of news.

White Nationalist News as a Challenge to Professional Journalism

The growth of explicitly white nationalist media, a genre that announces its white identity with pride and anger, highlights the changing racial dynamics of the journalistic field in the late 2010s. As professional journalism remains largely unable to confront its own invisible whiteness, emphasizing the importance of objectivity and a reliance on verifiable facts in the face of a changing political culture that seems to render such values old-fashioned, the newly emboldened white nationalist media confronts professional journalism from a new direction.

To explore the challenge of white nationalist media, we focus here on two prominent online publications that espouse a white nationalist perspective: The Daily Stormer (TDS) and American Renaissance (Am Ren). While TDS and Am Ren each has a distinct tone, style, and substantive focus, the two online publications employ a fundamentally similar approach to their coverage of race, racial difference, and whiteness.

TDS is among the most high-profile alt-right Web sites in the United States; it announces itself as a voice of the contemporary white nationalist movement. TDS, launched by neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin in 2013 (O’Brien 2017), is full of content about racial politics. In the wake of the August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when TDS mocked Heather Heyer, the peaceful counterprotester who was killed by a white supremacist at the rally, its Web host GoDaddy dropped TDS, taking it off-line temporarily. In scrambling to get back online, TDS briefly found a Web host in Iceland, then Anguilla, then Hong Kong (Lavin 2018), before returning to a U.S.-based Web host in November 2017. TDS calls itself “the most censored publication in history” and features a “we here at TDS are opposed to violence” disclaimer on the front page of the site.

TDS, however, is certainly not opposed to racism. In TDS founder Andrew Anglin’s (2016) A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right, central principles of the ideology of the movement include anti-Semitism, scientific racism, opposition to gender equality, a celebration of “white history,” and a commitment to the establishment of “pure white racial states in all formerly white countries,” which would require mass deportation of all non-whites from the United States.

TDS, especially with its newly refreshed 2018 design, is stylistically similar to many popular news Web sites: the front page announces featured stories, includes links to video stories, shows a Twitter feed, and highlights U.S. and World news sections. Visually, TDS might seem like just another partisan news site. While the site’s editors and authors are not journalists, the site employs an aesthetic and organization of “stories” that suggests a journalistic approach.

The content of TDS, however, is assertively racist. One of the tabs at the top of each TDS page is labeled “Race War” and TDS stories are full of racially inflammatory claims. We examined all of the postings in TDS’s Race War section for a two-week period between July 5 and July 18, 2018, a total of 59 articles over a 14-day period. All 59 of these articles are cut and paste (with active links) to articles published online by professional journalism outlets. A total of 71 percent (42 stories) of the postings are links to news stories from local or national television news in the United States. Another 14 percent (eight stories) are links to articles posted by daily or weekly U.S. newspapers, with 12 percent (seven stories) from European news outlets and 3 percent (two stories) from the hyper-local U.S. news source Patch.

All of the stories—100 percent—in the Race War section during our two-week sample were accounts of crimes committed by people of color and immigrants in the United States and Europe. The perpetrators of crime and violence in these stories are marked as racial/ethnic other—African American, Latino, and Muslim—and the victims are depicted as white. The story selection process offers little journalistic coherence; rather, the Race War section is simply a collection of crime stories, curated to emphasize white suffering as a result of black and brown violence. The not-so-subtle message is that a race war is underway, and whites are losing.

While TDS does not contribute any original journalism to these stories, the editors attach their own headlines and a brief, snarky tagline, appearing with a provocative or mocking image that links to the actual news story. These headlines and taglines work to aggressively frame the stories that follow. For example, all of the stories explicitly invoke race (of the victim, perpetrator, or both) in the headline or tagline. Most of this race-marking uses openly racist language. A total of 75 percent (44) of the stories in the race war section include an explicit racial epithet in the TDS-inserted headline or tagline, most commonly some version of the N-word. Such boldly racist language is widely regarded as offensive, and it is virtually nonexistent in professional journalism, including the news stories that are linked to by the racist headlines. In every instance, such derogatory labels are not present in the actual news reports but are used by TDS to transform crime news into inflammatory race (and racist) news.

TDS offers a version of “news” from a white nationalist perspective. The site embraces, even screams, its commitment to telling stories about current events from a white standpoint. While TDS may be the iconic media voice of white nationalism, it is only one part of a broader network of white nationalist media that has become more visible in the Trump era.

Am Ren, a publication of the New Century Foundation, was a monthly print magazine from 1990 to 2012. Since 2012, Am Ren has been exclusively online, publishing daily stories and commentary about race and immigration. Am Ren describes their approach as “race realism,” a perspective that believes there are fundamental differences among humans of different races. The race realists at Am Ren generally refrain from posting derogatory racial epithets, and they avoid the kind of snarky tone that is a defining characteristic of TDS. Instead, Am Ren adopts a rather sober tone, one that suggests a serious, even academic approach. Am Ren emphasizes the value of “white identity” and advocates for policies that will maintain a white majority in the United States, explaining “If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people” ( Am Ren N.d.). The Southern Poverty Law Center (N.d.) describes the New Century Foundation as a “white nationalist” organization.

Am Ren’s home page is understated, with a slideshow of featured stories and links to news, commentary, videos, and podcasts. Despite its staid tone, Am Ren’s home page features assertive white nationalist content, including advertisements for Am Ren founder Jared Taylor’s books on white nationalism (such as White Identity and If We Do Nothing) and an advertisement for the white nationalist online dating site White Date.

The news section is the most prominent feature on the site. We analyzed every article in the news feed for the two week period between July 5 and July 18, 2018. Over these 14 days, Am Ren posted 126 news items; the vast majority of stories focused on race (49 percent, 62 posts) or immigration (37 percent, 46 posts) and related issues.

The Am Ren news section contains very little, if any, original reporting. During our two-week sample period, 87 percent (109) of the stories were excerpts from stories posted on other Web sites, with most (95) coming from news outlets. Each news story includes the headline from the original post, along with a brief Am Ren-inserted tagline describing or commenting on the article; most news items were excerpts of longer stories, using the {snip} convention to signal missing material, with links to the original posts. In addition, 13 percent (17) of the news stories were written by Am Ren staff; while these appeared in the “news” section, Am Ren’s original stories consisted primarily of political commentary.

Similar to TDS, any journalistic activity in Am Ren’s news is limited to the story selection process, the work of curating the news feed from across the Web. The stories posted on Am Ren are a hodgepodge of stories about white identity, racial difference, and the threat of immigration. The stories, and the brief taglines, are less outwardly racist than TDS; in fact, derogatory racial epithets do not appear on Am Ren. Still the news stories paint a bleak picture of a world in which white people face the existential threats of black crime, Latino and Muslim immigration, and mainstream beliefs in racial equality.

For example, the news stories Am Ren tagged under the “Black Culture” category (12 posts) are similar to, if less graphic than, the Race War stories posted on TDS. Seven of the 12 stories are accounts of crime or violence committed by black people; the alleged perpetrators include a former professional football player in Los Angeles, employees at a veterans home in Mississippi, teenage babysitters in Arkansas, and protesters in Haiti.

As with TDS, there is no clear journalistic framework guiding Am Ren’s selection process beyond a cherry-picking of stories from across the Web about crime committed by black people. Four other items tagged “Black culture” are stories implicitly questioning the existence of anti-black racism in the United States—including a link to a Buzzfeed story about African American opposition to President Trump’s immigration policies that is introduced with the tagline “Fighting ‘racism’ is more important to professional blacks than the welfare of ordinary blacks” (July 5)—and one story in the category is a series of excerpts from a Washington Post article on racial disparities in home ownership rates.

Such is Am Ren’s view of Black culture: crime and violence, insincere claims of racism, and lower levels of achievement than whites. Combined with its emphasis on the biological basis of racial difference—with stories such as “Science Strikes Back” introduced with the tagline “An antidote to fashionable nonsense about race” (July 8) and “Seeing Double: Serbia Twin Study Probes Whether IQ Is Innate,” with the intro “Another study shows intelligence is ‘largely determined by certain genetic factors’” (July 9)—and regular stories about the value of a “white majority”—including “Patriotism Requires a White Majority” (July 7) and “White Fight: Donald Trump Is Leading the Republican Charge to Preserve a Shrinking White Majority” with the tagline “Let’s hope so” (July 5)—Am Ren offers a classic, if more highbrow than TDS, articulation of a white nationalist perspective rooted in an unabashed adherence to white supremacy.

In addition, stories on immigration-related themes emphasize the encroaching danger to the United States and Europe of nonwhite immigrants. Headlines under the Am Ren tag “Hispanic Culture” include “Man Suspected of Attacking Wife with Chain Saw was Deported 11 Times” (July 16), “Parents of Nearly Half of Kids Younger Than 5 Taken at the Border are Child Abusers, Kidnappers, and Murderers” (July 13), and “Texas Mother, 29, Is Accused of Selling Her Children” (July 6). Similarly, stories under the Am Ren tag “Muslim Immigration” include headlines pointing to the imminent threat: “Leicester Square Stabbing—Horror as Man in His 40s is Knifed in Empire Casino in Front of Shocked Customers” (July 17), “Migrant Boys Abuse and Rape 5 Young Girls in Denmark—Migrant Mother Thinks Racism is Behind Their Arrest” (July 13), and “Police Say Two Snohomish County Torture Killings are Connected” (July 11).

Am Ren’s coverage of the 2018 FIFA World Cup highlights its emphasis on a racialized fear of immigration. In advance of the championship match between France and Croatia, Am Ren posted a news story describing the match as a contest between a white nation, Croatia, and a French team consisting primarily of immigrants of color. The July 15 story, “Will Croatia Destroy the Narrative” is framed by a tagline “Last European Team to Face Africa in the World Cup.” After the French victory, Am Ren posted a Breitbart story “France: Night of Violence, Riots and Looting After World Cup Win” (July 16), with the snarky tagline “What ‘national cohesion’ looks like.” Am Ren rewrites the French World Cup victory as a scary tale of immigration and a threat to white culture and identity.

Our case studies of TDS and Am Ren, two salient voices of a broad network of white nationalism that has become more visible in the Trump era, illustrate how contemporary white nationalist media make no pretense to objective reporting, nor do these media follow standards associated with professional journalism. In fact, much of what appears on white nationalist sites is a form of commentary on journalism itself; the white nationalist news sites do not do original reporting, follow journalistic methods, or rely upon traditional norms of fact-checking. Rather, white nationalist media typically provide a lens for interpreting the news, for making sense of selected current events. This lens is unapologetically defined as a white way of seeing the world, one that presents itself as a stark contrast to a multicultural, neoliberal worldview. In asserting this contrast, white nationalist media implicitly represent this lens as preferable to the perspective of professional journalism, which white nationalists, even as they selectively repost and assertively reframe content from mainstream news outlets, mock as elitist, dishonest, and out of touch with the interests of white Americans.

TDS and Am Ren are not identical. TDS employs a heavy dose of in-your-face racial slurs, while Am Ren takes a much more subtle approach. Still both invoke a white culture under attack and highlight violence by people they define as non-white, key components of how white nationalist media assert a white racial subjectivity. This explicitly subjective approach to the news is part of what makes white nationalist media stand out from professional journalism. It is reasonable to intuit that this distinction is part of what makes these media attractive to their loyal audience. In this regard, in repurposing a highly curated set of news articles and framing the news with inflammatory headlines and often-snarky commentary, white nationalist media is a critique of both the form and content of professional journalism.

The current visibility of white nationalist media highlights the complexity of the contemporary racial politics of professional journalism. The invisible whiteness of professional journalism, hidden, as we have seen, by the norms and practices of objectivity, is decidedly different from the openly racist embrace of white identity by white nationalist media. And these differences are meaningful. White nationalist media normalize racist stereotypes and endorse the creation of a white society, while professional journalism promotes a color-blind approach that strengthens the invisibility of whiteness.

In defending their own craft in the face of the challenge posed by white nationalist media, professional journalists have, perhaps ironically, made it more difficult to recognize the structural sources of racial inequality in the United States. Sullivan’s (2014) analysis of the problem of “good white people,” who define their own virtue in opposition to their openly racist neighbors, is helpful here. White nationalists offer professional journalists an easy foil that highlights the goodness of professional journalism’s commitment to fairness, balance, and diversity. However, comparing themselves favorably to white nationalist media may, ultimately, let professional journalists off the hook. Just as Sullivan’s good white people avoid confronting the structures that support white privilege, professional journalism’s implicit critique of white nationalist media pushes the invisibility of journalism’s whiteness further into hiding. As a result, we are left with a well-meaning professional journalism unable to engage its own role in the reproduction of white privilege.

Policing the (Racial) Boundaries of Professional Journalism

Analyzing white nationalist media is an effective and useful point of departure for critically examining the contemporary racial politics of professional journalism. White supremacy has long depended on the use of comparative logics to articulate its ever-changing parameters and to define value(less)-driven relationships between different racial and ethnic groups. These uneven relationships not only help to establish and differentiate groups in hierarchical ways, they also define whiteness as an unmarked category. In addition to being an unmarked category, argues historian George Lipsitz (2006:1), “whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its rule as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.” In fact, whiteness must never speak its name. To do so, risks undermining its centrality and runs contrary to the neoliberal premise of color-blindness. Applied to the case of news media, white nationalist media helps to obscure the ways in which white professional journalism is also invested in white supremacy and the maintenance of a predominantly white industry even as it publicly promotes a neoliberal multicultural vision of abstract equality.

Recent controversies surrounding prominent black female journalists Melissa Harris-Perry and Jemele Hill are equally important examples that highlight the structural limitations present in white professional news media. Melissa Harris-Perry, who is also a political scientist and endowed chair at Wake Forest University, resigned from her weekly MSNBC weekend morning show in early 2016 following a major falling out with the network four years after the show began. The Melissa Harris-Perry Show used a panel format to focus on a variety of news issues, with a special emphasis on the relationship between race, gender, and American politics. Perhaps most important, Harris-Perry’s show approached many of these topics using a cultural lens that employed analysts not often heard in professional media that in turn provided unique entry points into topics of national interest.

For example, in one of the final episodes prior to her departure from MSNBC, Harris-Perry devoted a substantive segment of the show to Beyonce’s recently released song and video “Formation.” Released on the eve of the National Football League’s (NFL) Super Bowl scheduled to take place in New Orleans, the video directly references the organized abandonment experienced by New Orleans’s black residents during Hurricane Katrina. The video also takes up the topic of the racialized police violence experienced by African Americans and the centrality of black women within the Black Lives Matter movement, and the African American community more generally. As Harris-Perry noted in the segment, “[Beyonce] is giving us Black bodies and a Black politics that will not be silenced or shamed but instead commands space for the one thing the video tells us they are most definitely here to do. As Beyonce says in the song’s refrain: ‘I slay’” (Harris-Perry 2016).

The decision of MSNBC producers and executives to partially supplant Harris-Perry and her guests, which included black scholar and cofounder of the Crunk Feminist Collective Blog Brittney Cooper as well as the black gay writer Michael Arceneaux, with a small live video feed box of presidential election rallies for Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, is a clear indication of their displeasure with Harris-Perry’s programming. This production choice is even more egregious when one considers the fact that Jeb Bush became the first governor to sign into law a Stand Your Ground Statute in Florida in 2005. George Zimmerman used the Stand Your Ground statute to claim self-defense following his killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, which served as a pivotal moment in the emergent Black Lives Matter movement that Beyonce’s video referenced. Thought about differently, MSNBC’s election coverage attempted to silence or overshadow Harris-Perry at the very moment that she celebrated black political visibility and “command[ed] space” (Harris-Perry 2016).

Harris-Perry confirmed these efforts in an email she penned to her staff right after her show had been taken off air for several episodes “without comment or discussion or notice” in favor of more traditional election coverage. Harris-Perry continued,

The purpose of this decision seems to be to provide cover for MSNBC, not to provide voice for MHP Show. I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin, or MSNBC. (Smith 2016)

Harris-Perry’s statement acknowledged the ways that neoliberal multicultural representation matters to contemporary white professional media, but only within clearly articulated parameters. In fact, at the time the controversy with Melissa Harris-Perry played out, MSNBC was in the process of attempting to rebrand itself as a balanced news channel (shifting away from its Obama-era reputation as the home to left leaning commentary), highlighted by various news talk-show personalities that include Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, and Chris Hayes. MSNBC executives deemed Harris-Perry’s desire to center black pain and gendered and racial inequality as out of bounds and as veering outside the parameters of white professional journalism.

The experience of Jemele Hill at ESPN is another valuable example that highlights how understandings of objectivity within professional journalism continue to protect white privilege within news media. In late 2017, Hill became entangled in two Twitter controversies that ultimately led to her being suspended for two weeks by the network. In her first series of tweets on September 11, 2017, Hill (2017a) criticized President Donald Trump for being a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/other white supremacists” and that Trump’s election is the “direct result of white supremacy.”

Hill’s tweets immediately drew a firestorm of controversy that even included White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling her tweets a “fireable offense.” ESPN defended itself, claiming that Hill’s opinions did not represent the views of the company and even went as far as to attempt to understand them. Disney (ESPN’s parent company) CEO Robert Iger, for example, noted:

I’ve not ever experienced prejudice, certainly not racism. It’s even hard for me to understand what [Black journalists are] feeling about this, what it feels like to experience racism. So I felt that we need to take into account what Jemele and other people at ESPN were feeling at this time. That resulted in us not taking action on the Tweet that she put out. (Pallota 2017)

Iger’s remarks notwithstanding, ESPN president John Skipper followed up Iger’s comments by sending a memo to all employees that emphasized that “ESPN is not a political organization” and that “we need to remind ourselves that we are a journalistic organization and that we should not do anything that undermines that position.” Skipper’s memo reiterates the ways in which race and white supremacy are considered to be political issues that remain outside the purview of ESPN’s objective journalistic mission beyond the representational diversity and goals of the company.

It is not surprising, then, that ESPN immediately suspended Hill one month later following another series of tweets by Hill related to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ comments regarding the recent protests of the national anthem by NFL players. Started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, NFL players began kneeling during the pregame performance of the national anthem and partaking in other forms of silent protest in response to the state violence and marginalization experienced by different communities of color in the United States. Jones insisted that his players were required to stand for the national anthem or risk not playing.

In response to Jones’s ultimatum, Hill argued that viewers and fans had as much responsibility as players to respond. “If you feel strongly about [Jerry Jones’s] statement,” tweeted Hill, “boycott his advertisers” (Hill 2017b). ESPN’s two-week suspension of Hill is not solely attributable to the second violation of ESPN’s policy and standards. Instead, Hill’s suggestion that fans boycott the NFL, with whom ESPN had recently signed a US$15.2 billion dollar contract, illustrates the detachment of anti-racist discourse from the material and structural conditions created by racial capitalism. While controversial, Hill’s first series of tweets about President Trump did not directly challenge the material conditions that enable neoliberal multicultural capitalism to thrive in the same ways as her second series of tweets.

In early 2018, Hill announced she would be leaving her position as one of the anchors of ESPN’s signature program SportsCenter to join the staff of ESPN’s platform focused on race, sports, and culture, The Undefeated. While Hill has consistently stated that this change was her career choice, the implications and context of her decision are nonetheless significant. In the wake of her outspoken challenge to white supremacy and racial capitalism, Hill is moving from the iconic anchor chair to The Undefeated because, as Hill (2018) put it in a Twitter post announcing her plans, “I chose to work with The Undefeated because I respect their passion, creativity, and storytelling.” Notably absent from Hill’s reasons for job change was any reference to the objectivity of professional journalism; in fact, in highlighting the value of passion and creativity, Hill is offering an implicit critique of the limits, which her own experience illustrates well, of a professional journalism that cannot engage its own whiteness, particularly in such turbulent times.

Taken together, the examples of Melissa Harris-Perry and Jemele Hill point to the structural limits of critiquing white supremacy within white professional media. In our neoliberal multicultural era, Harris-Perry and Hill’s unwillingness to abide by journalism’s narrow definition of objectivity—and the response this elicited—illustrates how contemporary media can only countenance an abstract form of racial equality incapable of unsettling the relationship between racial capitalism and liberal antiracism (Melamed 2011).

Conclusion

The resurgent visibility of white nationalist media may open new possibilities for conversation about the racialization of news. But this will require journalists to look squarely at how professional journalism fails to explain historical forms of racial exclusion and, in its inability to confront its own enduring whiteness, helps to reproduce, even in its liberal critique of white nationalism, unremitting forms of white privilege.

In this context, the Black Lives Matter movement and the reemergent Black press are powerful because they serve as valuable interventions that disrupt narratives produced by both white professional media and white nationalist media. The history of racial capitalism and the Black press, however, teach us that white supremacy is quite adept at co-opting social movements that make material demands for justice. These demands become watered down to fit the discursive values of neoliberal media markets. Even more, assigning value to these important interventions relative to white professional or white nationalist media risks affirming the normative value systems that white supremacy and neoliberalism require to thrive even as they continue to devalue other nonnormative subjects (Cacho 2012). Still new media suggest critical possibilities for challenging foundational assumptions implicit in professional journalism about race, authority, and privilege.