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