Abstract
Marian Meyers’ book gives readers an excellent introduction on how to leverage the insights of Black feminist thought in analysis of news. Meyers uses intersectionality as a lens to investigate how African American women are framed in everyday and spectacular journalistic situations. In so doing, she provides deep readings of news coverage that reveal that many things have and have not changed since media scholars began using concepts such as “modern racism” to understand how race matters in news.
Importantly, the book illustrates how attending to gender, class and race can reveals subtle and not-so-subtle differences in framing compared to findings of classic studies done by Entman (1990) and Dixon and Linz (2000).
As Meyers explains in the introduction, “while modern racism may characterize some news stories about African American women, Black women also may be depicted through the lens of paternalistic racism” (p.13).
The book is composed of six case studies, with chapters focused on the following: local television news; cable TV news; YouTube videos of Michelle Obama; print coverage of the Juanita Bynum domestic violence case; the infamous Atlanta college party, Freaknik; and the “crack mom.” Each case is explored using qualitative textual analysis, and Meyers’ astute readings make connections between old stereotypes, such as “Mammy,” and emerging stereotypes not imagined in earlier studies of Black women and news, such as the “Black Lady” and “Black Bitch.” The patterns she finds resonate with results of earlier studies – for example, an overemphasis on Black crime – but evince new problems, such as troubling questions of how the news frames certain Black women as victims, while portraying others as culpable in their own brutalization.
Through intersectional analysis, Meyers shows how studies that only focus on race might find overrepresentation of crime and poverty in the news, but miss how gender contributes to whether the news frames a victim as sympathetic or not.
These questions are highlighted in Chapter Two, “African American Women on Local TV News,” where she finds sympathetic coverage of individual Black female victims of natural disasters and crime on Atlanta news stations. Contrastingly, in Chapter Six, “Violence Against African American Women in Local News: Freaknik as a Case Study,” she discovers that Atlanta news coverage of victims of sexual violence “blamed them for their own victimization and minimized the seriousness of the violence,” in accord with long-standing stereotypes of Black women such as the hypersexual Jezebel.
Chapter Four, “‘Tubing with Michelle Obama,” and Chapter Five, “Juanita Bynum in Black and White (News),” testify to the emerging stereotypes of the Black Bitch and her doppelganger, the Black Lady. These types – which have been added to the cast of “controlling images” of Black women first formulated by Patricia H Collins (2005) – result from the growing visibility of upwardly mobile Black women, such as Oprah Winfrey, who came into wider public consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on this work, these two chapters complicate our thinking about the myriad ways Black women can simultaneously be anchored to stereotypes of the antebellum era and contemporary discourses of “post-racial” success. Meyers cautions us to not assume that mainstream portrayals of Black women will simply follow the patterns of the past, and urges us to discern when and how “old” stereotypes inflect or depart entirely from the new.
The strength of this book is in its careful attention to the nexus of race, gender and class, but I wish Meyers had also provided more discussion of the nexus of these cases. For example, what are the connections between depictions of middle- and working-class women of Atlanta in local news and Michelle Obama’s image on YouTube? What about connections between the portrayals of the victims of sexual violence at Freaknik and Bynum? As written, these read like stand-alone chapters and the reader has to determine what, if any, connections exist.
One of the most important interventions here is demonstrating how earlier studies of race and news did not attend to gender, and I wish Meyers had pushed this point further. In particular, I would have liked a discussion of the ways the “modern racism” thesis requires updating in the “post-racial” era. There is a lot of recent work that could have been incorporated here to make stronger claims about how her study contributes to scholarship in critical race and media studies.
I also wish there was more comparison data. The chapter on Bynum, for example, compares Black newspapers to mainstream press coverage. But because the Black press does not publish as often as mainstream dailies, the sample size is very small, and could be leavened with papers from other cities, as well as magazines that reach national audiences, such as Ebony. The inclusion of Essence would be of interest, since it has regularly included discussions of domestic violence in its pages, as well as interviews with Black feminists. In a book focused on Black women in the news, it would be nice to have analysis of the major magazine targeted at Black women.
The other chapter that I felt needed another point of comparison was the cable news case, which pitted CNN against FOX. Although I agree FOX “represents a conservative extreme” (p.46), it would be nice to contrast that “extreme” not only with CNN’s more tempered approach, but also with a channel that represents a liberal view, such as MSNBC or PBS. This would be particularly interesting, since MSNBC has put multiple Black women in front of the camera over the past six years. Likewise, PBS’ Gwen Ifill is one of the few African American women in a prominent position on a “serious” news show.
But I would be remiss if I ended this review going on about additional comparisons that could have been made. I hope that this book inspires scholars to go ahead and make them. We desperately need more research like Meyers’ to help us make sense of the continued life of old stereotypes, as well to make sure we do not miss the new, sometimes hopeful, trends engendered by the increasing visibility of Black women (and other women of color) in the news. I hope these future studies are undertaken with the clarity and care that Professor Meyers has displayed in this book.