Wednesday, December 20, 2017
By Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report

During a recent review of how Black families are portrayed by various corporate media outlets, media scholar Travis Dixon observed that Fox News portrayed Black families as poor or in need of welfare assistance eight times more often than white families. On hit shows like "Hannity" and "The Kelly File," Black fathers were portrayed as unavailable to their children several times, but absentee white dads never came up.

Laura Ingraham even mentioned "the fatherless issue" during a 2015 episode of "The Kelly File" while discussing a racially charged videotape, reinforcing an old, harmful media myth that persists despite evidence showing that Black fathers are actually often more involved in parenting than white fathers.

Fox News is known for its conservative bias, but the misrepresentations span the political spectrum, according to a report Dixon authored for the online digital rights group Color of Change. The New York Times ranked second to Breitbart among print and digital news outlets that represented Black families as poor far more often than white families.

Overall, Dixon found that the media overrepresented Black families in depictions of poverty and crime compared to actual rates of poverty and crime among Blacks, while white families were underrepresented. This reinforces racist stereotypes of Black people, particularly when the structural roots of Black poverty stretching back to segregation and slavery are not examined.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42975-net-neutrality-repeal-undermines-black-efforts-to-combat-racial-bias-in-the-media-activists-say

Susan K Smith, Contributor
Rev. Dr.

12/12/2017 04:16 pm ET Updated Dec 14, 2017

In this current political atmosphere, many people who have fought for justice are feeling a sense of futility and frustration. The comfort we may have had about the “checks and balances” built into our government has all but gone away as the Congress sits by and lets the Executive Branch have its way, and the Judicial Branch seems to be headed toward being a preserver of white supremacist values, at the expense of so many American citizens.

The phrase “white supremacy” is misleading, as it makes people think that the battle is only between black and white people, but the battle is really between wealthy, white men…and everyone else. Women, children, the elderly, the disabled, the poor , members of the LGBTQ community – these and other disaffected groups are at the mercy, it seems, of a few white men who have no regard for anyone but themselves.

It seems that the quest for a master race has never completely been abandoned. The makeup of the federal government is, unfortunately, predominantly wealthy white men. There is a wicked irony in the president’s words that he is in Washington to “drain the swamp” only because his definition of “swamp” seems to have been those who were not white and wealthy and male. The clear implication of candidate Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” was that he would rid Washington of corruption. Corruption, though, seems to have been defined by race and sex. In his administration, people of color and women are visibly absent. They were “the swamp” of which the candidate spoke. They have been removed, replaced by wealthy white males, many of whom have worked for the very institutions the president criticized when he was running for office..

The swamp of inclusion has been drained to make room for murky waters of a new swamp.

The problem, however, is that this “new swamp” isn’t new at all, but is instead a return to a white supremacist world that came before the wave of social change that brought more rights not only to black people, but to brown people, women, the poor, and to anyone suffering from unjust policies in our country.

Making America great again is about putting non-whites and females “back in their places” which allows wealthy white men to more easily wield the control they think is their birthright.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-maddening-frustration-of-fighting-white-supremacy_us_5a304552e4b04bd8793e9538