News with a racial slant

I was listening to NPR last night coming home from the gym and the show News and Notes with Ed Gordon was on. I’ve enjoyed listening to the variety of shows on NPR running the gamut of topics and styles. When the show “News and Notes” was first introduced, I had to check it out and quickly found it to be largely irrelevant.

The show claims to look at the news of the day with a Black perspective. I largely ignored the program, but, last nights commentary got me thinking about what this program was trying to do. The host and guests on the program were speaking of taking the days news and providing it in a manner most appropriate to the Black community. That would perhaps makes sense if the audience for a particular program was largely Black. However, the point was explicitly made on the program that the audience for this particular show was anywhere from 75% to 80% “White” and the remaining Black.

I say “White” because the host of this program and guests seem to draw a general divisional line which puts African Americans on one side as Blacks and everyone else on the other side as “Whites”. I, personally, could care less about any such divisions and classifications, but what got me writing this post is the notion that Blacks couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the news if relayed by White media. That, somehow, the information had to take on a Black slant to be understood.

I feel that this is, what I would deem, reverse discrimination. I happen to belong to a minority group in the US, but I don’t feel myself being delegated to some sub-par status because of it. I don’t necessarily feel like I need to go out of my way to find a media outlet that will speak at “my level” of understanding.

What shows like this and people who support it are doing is perpetuating the myth that Blacks need to be given information in a matter different from others. Youths of all communities will grow up with this myth embedded into them and take it far into the future. What, truly, is to be gained from this sort of media bias?

Cheers

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