Race is an issue some reporters find hard to talk about. It sometimes feels like they sometimes don’t know how to talk about it.
“I think that the way race should be covered in the news is that people who are actually minorities have a voice instead of giving white men the power to talk for them and giving them their own platform to talk about their own problems,” Emily Manetz, a student at the University of Michigan said.
In this upcoming 2020 year, the realization of how much race is all around us.
In the article, Black journalist push media to cover ‘hyper-racial’ moments in politics by Michael Calderone, it is discussed how Errin Haines Whack is assigned to cover political campaigns and how they go about race.
As President Donald Trump has a defining element of race become a part of his campaign this year which has been acknowledged by The Associated Press.
This article I found interesting because as I conducted interviews politics seemed to come up quite often.
“We should be able to discuss it without politically motivated reasoning,” Amanda Baumgartner, a student at Oakland University said.
Calderone wrote “Whack, the AP reporter and a veteran on the race beat, said journalists “need to get past our discomfort in talking about and covering race” and honestly and accurately describe what is happening.”
Pulling this from that article really takes in perspective how sometimes we tip toe around racial issues because some reporters or news companies might not know how to go about reporting them.
“No one wants to talk about it,” Manetz said. “I just feel it shouldn’t be that way, it should be openly discussed.”
To help solve that problem another article, Covering a country where race is everywhere by Collier Meyerson talks about how to start reporting on race there should be a known background of history.
This article claims that reading about history can help educate yourself on how to discuss racial issues in a way that helps inform readers. The you can add diverse aspects into reporting can cause for e more relevant piece and help improve the way readers think.
“To write or report on race is to understand that it begins with comprehending how we fit into the stories; it is to understand the way we are perceived; it is to understand the way we have been taught to perceive others.”
This point is well made because since reporting on racial issues is something our country is struggling with at the moment, taking time to reflect on the mistakes make in the past and learning to understand how to better those incidents.
In an Instagram poll where participants were asked “are racial issues fairly covered in the news?” about 92% of voters said no.
This can show how aware people are of this problem. But it doesn’t have to continue like this in the future, we can change how well the media covers race and how fairly it is done.
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