Racializing Objectivity

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"When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as "Negro" in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and "objectivity," even as white subjects went unlabeled. This weaponization of journalism standards-particularly the idea of objectivity-was used to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy. Gwyneth Mellinger exposes how these standards were used as rationalization for white supremacy and as a political strategy to resist desegregation, while arguing that white privilege gave these professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest. Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press' cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, as well as about northern whites and democracy itself"--