ABSTRACT
Blatant forms of racism have become mainstream in the years of the Trump Presidency and beyond, and the news media are instrumental in the current racial landscape. Even so-called liberal media are locked into practices underpinned by ideologies of fairness and objectivity that enable and reinscribe racist ideas. This chapter argues that the 21st-Century structure, economics, and professional culture of news make the U.S. media ill-prepared to reckon with the country’s racist past and present. While contemporary mainstream journalism abhors explicit acts of racist speech and violence, it remains wary of naming racism as such and of making connections between explicit racism and its more subtle forms that circulate in progressive circles. Journalism’s adherence to practices that define what counts as news and dictate how news should be presented combine with a commercial economic model to reinscribe banal yet powerful racisms in institutions and in everyday interactions. The advancement of overt racism, enabled through Trump-era rhetoric, can be seen in the media’s coverage of white supremacist acts, including mass killings, in its relationship with state apparatuses, and in the minoritization of Asian communities during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.
