Keywords don’t lie: US media’s COVID-19 coverage has largely ignored race
In mid-September, a study threw up a horrifying statistic — one in 1,000 African Americans had died of COVID-19.
According to the study, Black and Indigenous Americans have the highest death tolls from the pandemic. But Danielle Kilgo said her research shows the U.S. media’s coverage of the pandemic doesn’t reflect that reality.
Kilgo, a researcher from the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, spoke on Friday about this discrepancy in reporting and the numbers at Carleton University’s Journalism in the Time of Crisis’ conference. Kilgo is the John & Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.
Other panelists at the session, titled ‘Missing the Story: Underreporting of the Racialized Impact of COVID-19,’ were Beverly Bain, who teaches Women and Gender Studies in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga; Ashton Lattimore, editor-in-chief of Prism, a U.S.-based, BIPOC-led non-profit news outlet; and Shree Paradkar, a Toronto Star race and gender columnist, the 2018–2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and the Star’s first “internal ombud.”
The panel was moderated by CBC broadcaster Adrian Harewood, anchor of the network’s main Ottawa newscasts and an instructor at Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication. Harewood created a new course at Carleton this year on journalism and race.
Kilgo analyzed more than 5.8 million articles about the coronavirus. “What I did after that was run a set of keywords that corresponded with the number of times journalism articles mentioned things like racial disparities or racism generally,” she said at the panel.
Of the 5.8 million articles on the virus, Kilgo found only 0.22 per cent mentioned anything to do with racism or how the pandemic affected racialized groups. There were two major spikes in mentions of racism — one in March and another in June.
While the second spike followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Kilgo said it was protests by healthcare professionals that set the agenda. “This press agenda that links coronavirus with racism, again, was widely set by labor protesters that included doctors and nurses that said racism was also a health pandemic in the United States,” she said.
Black citizens were not the only racial minority ignored in media coverage. Kilgo said her research found that only 0.09 per cent of the articles had references to Indigenous communities, who also bore a disproportionate impact of the pandemic.
References to Asian Americans spiked in March, after hate crimes were reported against them. While hate crimes continued much later into the pandemic, coverage around such incidents dropped.
Lattimore also spoke about the racialized impact of COVID-19. According to Lattimore, U.S. media ignoring the impact of diseases on racial minorities is not a new phenomenon.
“The HIV/AIDS epidemic was largely ignored by both the government and by mainstream press in the early stages, and then largely neglected, except by the Black press (and) the queer press in the United States,” she said.
Lattimore said the media needed to focus on how the pandemic affected people not just by race, but at the multiple intersections of a person’s lived reality.
“When you’re thinking about meatpacking plants, they’re some of the most dangerous places to be with widespread outbreaks around the country. North Carolina and Minnesota are some places that we’ve seen significant outbreaks. These plants are largely staffed by immigrants, black and brown immigrants, often Latino women, many of them who are undocumented,” said Lattimore.
With less than two weeks to go before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Lattimore flagged COVID-19 as a tool that is being used for voter suppression.
“Our electoral system in the United States is highly racialized. Voter suppression was already racially targeted before this moment. What we’re now is that the pandemic has offered new levers of suppressing the votes of people of colour.”
Between a global pandemic, a presidential election and systemic racial injustice, Lattimore said people of colour in America are facing a multi-faceted challenge. “I think there’s been a lack of understanding about how these issues are stacking on top of each other for people of colour throughout the country.”
The full video of the panel discussion can be found here.
