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In 2020, months after racial-justice protesters rose up throughout the country, the Black caucus at Free Press launched the Media 2070 project.

From the start, we knew we wanted to weave education into our mission of securing media reparations for harms inflicted on Black people. That’s why in 2022 we released our documentary Black in the Newsroom, which explores a mid-career journalist’s experience with low pay and systemic racism at The Arizona Republic. And it’s why we created our first-ever college course.

“Diagnosing the Media System” was a month-long class I taught in May at Colorado College, a small liberal-arts school in Colorado Springs. Seventeen students enrolled in the class, which featured guest lecturers including Media 2070 Project Director Collette Watson and Media 2070 co-founder Alicia Bell. Many of the students had read the 100-page Media 2070 research essay — which chronicles media harms as well as Black resistance — in their introduction to journalism course. Using the essay as a starting point, we examined how the media system has harmed communities of color for centuries.

Students who took the “Diagnosing the Media System” class at Colorado College

The Boston News Letter, the nation’s first continuously published newspaper, published a slave ad less than a month after its founding in 1704 — with the publisher serving as the broker. In 1898, the white-supremacist publisher and editor of Raleigh’s News & Observer, Josephus Daniels, engineered a disinformation campaign that helped incite a coup. The violent attack overthrew Wilmington, North Carolina’s multiracial government — the only armed overthrow of a local government in U.S. history.

In examining this history of harm, the class drew on texts including the historic 1968 Kerner Commission report — which faulted the media for contributing to the nation’s “black-white schism” — and News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, which Free Press’ Joseph Torres co-wrote. We explored how the crime beat parrots police talking points and stigmatizes Black people — and imagined alternatives that would center communities.

And we examined how the media operates as a system. Like the criminal-justice system and the health-care system, the media system was designed to hoard power, extract labor and primarily benefit the political and material interests of white men.

We also delved into the power of apologies. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, news outlets ranging from The Los Angeles Times to the Kansas City Star have apologized for harming Black communities. Some of these apologies have been superficial; we examined how The Guardian, on the other hand, engaged in a program of restorative justice after uncovering its founders’ links to the transatlantic slave trade.

We believe that it’s necessary to acknowledge the harmful history of U.S. media — and demand accountability — to build something better.

We believe care must be part of that future. In 2021, Media 2070 called on news organizations to sign a pledge to care for Black journalists and communities. Within the media-reparations college course, we looked more deeply at what processes could generate care. In one project, students created a harm audit of the media system as a whole; they then created a care plan for what they envisioned a future media could look like.

The Media 2070 team is hoping to take this course to other college campuses, especially Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). We’re also exploring ways to collaborate with professors to weave some of these teachings into existing coursework and academic programming.

None of this would be possible without the generosity of charitable foundations and people like you — we don’t take a single cent from business, government or political parties. If you can, please give today to sustain this critical work in the weeks and months ahead.

In solidarity,

Venneikia and the rest of the Media 2070 team
media2070.org
freepress.net