After a long history of anti-Black racism in journalism, what would reparations look like? That’s what the founders of Media 2070 decided to explore, seeing that 50 years after the Kerner Commission report, not much has changed.
Media 2070, which includes a research essay compiled by staff from the nonprofit Free Press, launched this week. The project details the history of U.S. media participation in anti-Black racism and harm.
We reached out to Alicia Bell, Collette Watson, and Joseph Torres — three of the creators of Media 2070 — to tell us about the project and how they hope newsrooms will repair past harms and create a more equitable future.
Alicia Bell 
Collette Watson 
Joseph Torres
(Images courtesy of media2070.org.)
Can you share more on the inspiration behind Media 2070?
Media 2070: As Black staffers, we were inspired by the increased public support for reparations in recent years. This inspired us to address how anti-Black racism has always been part of our media system’s DNA and explore the harms our nation’s white-dominant media companies inflicted on Black people. It’s something that’s come up several times in our work to organize with communities around community-rooted journalism and information equity — almost anytime we’d ask Black folks and Black communities about their relationship to news, they’d either express having no relationship or having a harmful relational history with white-led news organizations. We know that’s just a symptom though and not a root cause. And we have also been inspired by the racial uprisings that have taken place this year that are forcing a racial reckoning in our nation, including its newsrooms from The New York Times to The Washington Post to the Philadelphia Inquirer and all the way over to the LA Times.
In addition, the Movement 4 Black Lives published a reparations tool kit last year that listed several reasons why Black people are owed reparations that includes the creation of the myth of Black inferiority. We wanted to focus on the media’s role in the creation of this myth by publishing an essay that examines the harms inherent in government policies that consolidated media power with white owners and made anti-Black racism a central fixture of our media system since colonial times.
In the essay, we address how media organizations were complicit in the slave trade and profited off of chattel slavery; how a powerful newspaper publisher helped lead the deadly overthrow of a local government in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Black people held power; how racist journalism has led to countless lynchings; southern broadcast stations have opposed integration; and, in the 21st century, how powerful social media and tech companies are allowing white supremacists to use their platforms to organize, fundraise, recruit and spread hate.
We published this essay coinciding with the launch of Media2070 project that is an effort to radically transform who has the capital to tell their own stories by 2070. The project also seeks to highlight how the media can serve as a lever for racial justice — and underscore the repair and reconciliation necessary to build strong, free, democratic communities. To achieve full freedom and democracy, it’s critical to change entrenched media narratives about Black people.
What was your process for collecting the timelines?
Media 2070: The timelines were inspired from the events we described in the essay that address both the harm caused by dominant white media companies on Black people as well as government media policies that have centralized control of our media system in the hands of white dominant media companies. We also address the heroism of Black journalists in challenging racism in our society and anti-Black racism in our media system.
Even the 2070 in the name of this project is a bit of a timeline that points to the Chicago Commission of 1919’s indictment of journalism as a contributing factor in racial violence, the Kerner Commission saying the same thing approximately 50 years later in 1968, and then the racial justice uprisings we’re experiencing now. Overwhelmingly, the conversations about the media’s role in corroborating anti-Black racism have been the same for at least the past 100 years and this work seeks to shift it within the next 50, so that we’re not at the same place we’re at now.
What do you hope that leadership in media will take away from the essay?
Media 2070: White leaders in newsrooms, media support organizations, and media policy organizations have to grapple with whether their organizations and institutions need white leadership to carry them into a future abundant with racial justice and democracy that’s accessible to everyone. If the answer, in conversation with Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color is yes, the reasoning has to be strategic. And if the answer is no, transition plans have to be created. There are a lot of skills and experiences that white leaders can contribute to building the future of media. And there is an abundance of skill and vision and strategy amongst Black and Indigenous media leadership. Many of the skills and experiences that white leaders have can be used in support or mentorship roles as we figure out how to practice multiracial racial justice. We’ve only ever had a media system that’s been abundant with white leadership and that system has never served all of us, so now is as good a time as any to figure out what innovation there is to glean — economically and otherwise — from an abundance of Black and Indigenous news media leadership.
Why are “media reparations” so important now?
Media 2070: There is a racial reckoning happening right now in our country, including in newsrooms. This is happening at a time when our country is grappling with the question of whether a multi-racial democracy is possible in our country, when democracy has yet to be fully realized. The dominant white news media has played a central role from colonial times to the present in perpetuating the myth of Black inferiority in protecting and promoting a White racial hierarchy in our society. And lawmakers have adopted policies that have resulted in massive media consolidation that has created a de-facto media-apartheid system where the vast majority of radio, TV, cable and broadband networks are owned and controlled by white companies. Institutional and structural racism in our media system has played a central role in building popular support for unjust policies that have dehumanized and criminalized Black bodies. We have to reconcile and repair the harm caused by our media system in the struggle to ensure democracy is fully realized by all.
How can newsrooms work with Media 2070 to build better relationships with Black communities?
Media 2070: To start, most Black newsrooms have better relationships with Black communities already, even if those relationships aren’t representative of all the nuances found in our community.
For other newsrooms, it’s critical that newsrooms are willing to engage reconciling and repairing the harm that has been caused to the Black community. To make that happen, it is critical that media institutions reconcile with the history of harm they have caused to the Black community and then work with the community to repair those harms so they are not repeated. Several media outlets apologized over the past two decades for the harm they have caused the Black community with The Los Angeles Times being the latest to apologize for its history of racist coverage. It is critical for these institutions to be in relationship with Black communities to implement the repairs that are needed to prevent these harms from happening again. But it is Black communities who should determine the action that a media institution should take or policies lawmakers should enact to repair the harms as part of the reparations process.
Our sibling project, News Voices, has been working over the past five years with newsrooms across the country from New Jersey to North Carolina to Colorado to figure out deeper community engagement, culture shift, and ways to build power and sustainable relationships with the community a newsroom serves. And we see examples of community rooted news with strong relationships to Black communities in the work of individual Black journalists across the country as well as in organizations like Flint Beat, Outlier Media, MLK50, Scalawag and so many more. So we know it’s possible; it’s just a matter of will.
How has the response been so far?
Media 2070: We have received great initial feedback and support from both Black and non-Black journalists, media makers and activists. Folks know that something has to shift, but making that shift is easier said than done. But people are ready to dream and move towards something different, which is what we believe is so galvanizing about this work. We are seeking to work in a coalition that is abundant with journalists, technologists, artists, activists, policymakers, media makers, organizers and scholars, including those who have long fought for reparations in an effort to create a world that has never really existed. We want to advocate for a world where we can steward our stories from ideation through distribution and only have those stories go through white hands when we have agency to choose that instead of as a result of structural inequity.
Because here’s the thing, media reparations could create a future of journalism — and media more broadly — that journalists, media-makers and all other community members alike can fight to sustain and support. Media reparations can create a future of journalism abundant with economic equity. And who doesn’t want that?