Abstract
Juan González and Joseph Torres took the initial move towards this book in 2004 when they co-wrote a pamphlet on the fight for racial and ethnic equality in the US news media. At the time, they were both closely associated with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, as president and deputy director respectively. From the acorn comes the oak, for this is a major contribution to the history of news media in North America. Throughout that history racial inequality and discrimination have been persistent issues, with the media doing far more to mislead the public and reproduce racist attitudes than to oppose them and provide accurate information about the realities facing non-white minorities. This made commercial sense. Reinforcing racial fears and hostilities has long helped increase the sales of newspapers and boost broadcast ratings. It has also served the economic and political interests of the most powerful groups in American society, and it has done so by creating support for policies compatible with those interests and by weakening opposition to them among ethnic minorities and the white and non-white working class.
Across the historical development of the American media we can see an abiding power alliance between media owners and government. This was clear from the early nineteenth century with the emergence of the commercial penny press and its support for territorial expansion, its pro-slavery values and its efforts to turn white urban workers away from political activism and channels of social dissent. It was at this time that such workers attained the right to vote. Such tendencies were reinforced by commercialization, which itself fostered centralization, with smaller newspapers being swallowed up by their larger competitors. Conglomeration within and across different media sectors became increasingly the same old familiar story. Same, old and familiar in the sense that it has generally unfolded in ways detrimental to both democratic participation and inter-ethnic relations.
Although González and Torres show that this has long been opposed by non-white groups largely excluded from mainstream media and largely stereotyped by them, for the most part First Nation American, African American, Asian American and Hispanic journalists were absent from the newsrooms of such media. Worse, from time to time the white press stirred up mass violence against non-white communities. González and Torres discuss a number of examples of this, from the anti-abolitionist riots of 1835 through to the virulent response to the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962. Of these examples they write: ‘What amazed us as we delved into the facts behind each incident is how often the white press portrayed the victims of such racial attacks as the instigators or perpetrators of violence’ (p. 9). Belligerent racism did not go entirely unchallenged, for there has existed a segregated alternative press for the past two centuries or so, and González and Torres devote the whole of their second section to dealing with it, so bringing back into the light a range of figures far less known than people like Frederick Douglass and Ida B Wells. Take Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, for example, founding editors of Freedom’s Journal, the first black-owned newspaper in America, and hear how their words from the first issue of the paper continue to resonate today:
From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented. Men whom we equally love and admire have not hesitated to represent us disadvantageously, without becoming personally acquainted with the true state of things, nor discerning between virtue and vice among us. The virtuous part of our people feel themselves sorely aggrieved under the existing state of things – they are not appreciated. (cited p. 109)
This wide-ranging historical survey shows how the US news media came to be as they are, and puts us into contact with a broad spectrum of memorable characters on both sides of the abiding fault-line of race. The struggle by members of ethnic minorities in North America to make their voices heard is often heroic, always stirring, and certainly worth celebrating. It was directed against an entrenched system of racial oppression, division and inequality, and what this involved should not be forgotten. Thanks to González and Torres that is now much less likely.