Episode 14 - Framing the Black Family: Dr. Travis Dixon on Race and Media Misrepresentation in America

Amid competing concerns about “fake news” and media bias — whether coming from conservatives who think the media is slanted left, or progressives who feel the press carries too much water for Trump, Wall Street and the right — one thing is certain: the media continues to present disproportionately negative images of black families, contributing to racial bias and reactionary public policy. On this week’s episode Tim speaks with Dr. Travis Dixon (University of Illinois), a media effects scholar who studies racial stereotypes in mass media and the impact of stereotypical imagery on audience members. They discuss his latest study, conducted for Color Of Change and Family Story, which examined the way media frames stories about African American families.Dixon found a clear tendency for media to over-represent black families as poor, welfare dependent, criminal and lacking in paternal involvement, relative to the what the factual data says about the state of black families in America. The policy implications of these findings are discussed, as are solutions to the problem of racial bias in media narratives. Also on this episode, Tim’s weekly commentary concerns the resurrection of budgetary “Scroogism” among Republicans as they push tax cuts for the wealthy and threaten program cuts for the neediest among us.