Journalistic Norms and Their Role in the Perpetuation of Racial Inequities

This chapter explores the role of journalistic adherence to newsroom norms and journalistic practices to understand how this mindset and cycle perpetuate racial inequities. Specifically, it examines the key professional norms of journalism: fairness, credibility, objectivity, transparency, neutrality, and unbiased reporting. This chapter investigates how these concepts not only evoke power structures historically associated with racial power but also affect reporting of issues related to policy and people of color. By examining different levels of analysis, I argue that the current system of reporting centers White experience as the basis for building credibility and trust with news audiences, including among partisan media, which allows bias to creep into stories about race-related issues, perpetuating stories and experiences that can compound racial inequities.