Getting It Right

Given the historic nature of this year’s election, the issue of race has been repeatedly brought up in news coverage of the election, whether for Senator Joe Biden’s (D-Del.) controversial “clean” and “articulate” remarks, allegations of unfair attacks by the Hillary Clinton (D-NY) campaign, or John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) claim that the Barack Obama (D-Ill.) campaign was illegitimately using the “race card” during his campaign speeches.

According to Keith Woods, the Dean of Faculty at the Poynter Institute, it is not necessarily a bad thing for reporters to cover racial issues, but he argues that the media has been doing so improperly. During a News University webinar on election coverage, he complained about how the media has improperly conflated Obama’s presidential aspirations with his ethnic background.

“I’ve often seen in reporting, though, this phrase, that [Obama] ‘strives to become the first African-American president,’ and here we have taken two facts. (This is in the LA Times online),” he said during the webinar. “We have taken the fact that he strives to become president and the fact that if elected he becomes the first African-American and we have taken motivation and result and combined them into this sentence—and now his motivation is to become the first black president.”

Woods specializes in diversity and race relations. Co-author of The Authentic Voice/The Best Reporting on Race & Ethnicity, Woods condemned such statements as shoddy journalism, saying,

“It is almost like saying that ‘John McCain strives to become the oldest person ever elected to the presidency’ and I would venture that McCain would not like to see that phrasing in any story although it is equally true.”

He believes that Obama seeks not to be the first African-American president, but simply to be president. That Obama would become the first African-American president is merely a positive side effect and not the candidate’s main motivation, Woods contends.

After reviewing news coverage from both conservative and liberal media outlets, Woods offered several principles to guide journalists’ decision to include race or ethnicity in their reporting:

• don’t include race when it is not the focus of the story. “And again, I say it’s a simple point but we aught to think more about it because our journalistic habit is often to see difference—someone who is of a different race or ethnicity than ourselves, whatever we are—and immediately inject that difference into the story without thinking about whether this is a story about that at all,” he said.

• include the issue if a) the source deliberately brings it up, or b) race is central to the story.

• in the midst of controversy, abandon attempts to gauge whether candidates or public figures are racist and focus instead on informing the public about what was said and why. “The final question that we are often asking in this reporting is ‘is he a racist?’ and I want to say that that is very much the wrong question,” he said.

• replace euphemisms with precise, accurate information.

“I would say that rather than using that kind of throw-away phrasing [like ‘politically incorrect’], those euphemisms, say what you mean,” Woods argued. He continued,

“More often than not that requires more reporting by the journalist and many times, as might have been the case with the race card discussion that we had not so long bit ago, you’d discover that it was a fairly muddy little universe of possibility to begin with and nobody really knew what everybody was complaining about.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.

Bethany Stotts