Double Standards in the Media

Emmeline Adkins

email: ea107017@ohio.edu

Representation is something that allows groups of people to see a reflection of themselves and their experiences. Hence, representation affects how outsiders view those groups as well. The media is an incredibly crucial aspect to this, and proper representation in the media is not just as simple as making sure all groups of people get equal headlines and airtime. In some cases, in fact, that becomes an issue when one group gets too much time spent on them for all the wrong reasons. When young Black people say they distrust the news media, they aren't distrustful because of a certain political figure crying fake news (typically), the reason is more to do with the lack of a positive relationship that news media has garnered with the Black community for decades. 

In most cases, the only time that some racial minorities get to see themselves depicted in the media is when someone in their community has caused a stir of some sort or was allegedly involved in criminal activity. Even then, the language that news media uses can often have a massive double standard in how journalists regard people of color as opposed to white people. For example, when George Floyd was killed by police earlier this year, some news outlets published stories on how he was allegedly trying to cash a counterfeit bill -- as if some sort of criminality would justify the actions taken by Derek Chauvin and his three fellow police officers. With the most recent police shooting of Jacob Blake, there are numerous videos circulating the internet in which people try to defend the police officers because Blake reaching into his car with his back to the police is somehow a perceived threat. Adversely, this past week, a 17-year-old white boy, Kyle Rittenhouse, fatally shot two Black Lives Matter protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin and there are two headlines on a New York Post and a Fox News article about how Rittenhouse was cleaning graffiti off of a school before he went out and killed two people. 

Kyle Rittenhouse cleaning graffiti, taken from the New York Post article

How can the relationship between the media and minorities be mended? A Forbes interview with the founder of Popsugar said that it is important to make sure the people writing articles reflect everybody. It is important that you have a diverse team with diverse viewpoints to make sure that everyone is ethically represented. It also went on to say that people working in the media have to be aware of their blind spots -- while it is important to hire people with all different experiences, it is still inevitable that some perspectives might get left out, and it is part of the job to be mindful of where your team is lacking. If more media and specifically news media teams took those two things into consideration more often, there might be less headlines of a Black man shot by police being found to have a criminal past and less quotes from the families of white school shooters saying, "They never could have seen this coming."