Abstract
Leading up to and in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, journalists and scholars gave sustained attention to the apparently marginalized voices of Whites living in rural and exurban communities. The voices of White skilled and working-class people received powerful representation in popular works such as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and scholarly books such as Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land and Kathy Cramer-Walsh’s The Politics of Resentment. In these books and others, writers sought to explain the depth of anger behind Donald Trump’s shocking presidential run and, broadly, to articulate a call for a new recognition of the hardships faced by many outside of booming coastal cities.
The voices of people of color in the United States did not receive the same amount of attention—which is ironic, given that African Americans and Latinos lag behind their White counterparts in economic security, health outcomes, and life expectancy. Hillary Clinton’s failure to turn out voters of color likely proved far more consequential to the 2016 outcome than the resentment of anxious Whites. After all, had Clinton achieved Barack Obama’s voter turnout in a handful of states, President Trump would not be in office.
Into this void steps Sue Robinson’s excellent Networked News, Racial Divides. It is an achievement on three primary levels. First, it explicitly takes up questions of race, media, and politics—questions that too often have been far from the center of the field of communication—and brilliantly shows how race structures power and privilege in progressive communities. Second, it illustrates the power of a mixed-methods approach—via a network ethnography (encompassing network analysis, field observations, focus groups, and interviews)—to reveal communicative structures and processes. This approach enables Robinson to chart the macrodynamics of media ecologies while showing how microlevel changes in local networks can shape those ecologies. Finally, it demonstrates the power of field theory to show how individuals and fields act in structured ways that too often preserve racial power and privilege. Taken together, this is an important work with a decidedly normative cast: In empirically revealing the ways that we fall short of having a robust discourse around race in America, Robinson attempts to chart a path toward greater inclusivity.
The power of Robinson’s analysis lies in her choice of critical cases that have theoretical generalizability: If we find power and privilege around race in progressive communities, we should expect to find it everywhere. Robinson’s careful selection of cases enables her to chart systematic differences in the power of marginalized voices to be heard in primarily White, “hyperliberal” media ecologies. Analytically, Robinson charts new ground in communication research by coupling field, ecological, and network approaches, which enables her to show how fields structure ideology, identity, and ultimately power. The sheer empirical scope of this book is impressive: Robinson compiled a dataset encompassing over 6,000 units of analysis and combined network analysis with personal narratives and insightful reflections from 71 interviews and three focus groups, yet the data analysis is still presented in a compelling and surprisingly intimate way.
All of this is ultimately in the service of helping readers think through ways that the structure of media ecologies can be transformed to create greater equality. Robinson focuses on creating the capacity for more inclusive dialogue and calls on White journalists to “challenge the identity constructions that prevent participation” by more explicitly recognizing their privilege and conscientiously building relationships with people of color. Robinson, who is a professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, models this in deeply self-reflexive passages where she describes and confronts her own racial biases through a “humbling and often embarrassing journey,” and even hires an African American graduate student to read the final manuscript with an eye toward White privilege. Networked News, Racial Divides is a model of research reflexivity, one that serves as a plea for others going forward to think about how identity and structures shape the voices that are heard in the public sphere.
As a solution to a detailed set of structural and political problems, Robinson ultimately proposes dialogue, which is—to her credit—deeply attentive to race, power, inequality, structure, and inclusion. Robinson’s focus on these things goes far beyond the routine normative stances articulated in the course of empirical work and even much explicit theorizing around deliberative democracy, and it places the responsibility and imperative of inclusion on Whites who enjoy powerful and privileged positions in fields and media ecologies. But the reader is left wondering if more inclusive communication—“a plea for progressives to stay in the room”—can eradicate the institutional, field, and media structures that Robinson so clearly elucidates.
If there is an oversight in the book, it is that potential approaches outside of dialogue are generally absent. Why, for instance, does Networked News, Racial Divides focus on the public sphere and dialogue, not voting or social protest? Why is the emphasis on hearings and forums, not the behind-the-scenes deal-cutting, long-term political coalition-building, mobilization, or public pressure tactics that are the work of politics? In the end, this book reflects the orientations of our field in focusing on media ecologies, discourse, and dialogue, not political institutions, the interests that shape governance, and the messy and often conflictual work of politics. In the process, the guiding assumption is that media ecologies shape political outcomes and ultimately democratic equality, but what if that is not the case?