From "On Being" with Trabian Shorters
Tippett: the original lede of a story, for example, and it’s just so familiar: [laughs] “The Latinx community in the United States has always been, for the most part, on the bottom half on income, in the American society. The struggle to have access to health and mental care is part of the history; however, the COVID-19 pandemic has come to intensify the problems.” And that’s how it starts; it goes on. And that’s a very familiar way into a story.
And then here’s a revised lede that I think your team took a look at, and it starts this way: so, “Since 2014, Latinx people have constituted the largest ethnic group in the nation’s largest state. They now represent 39 percent of the California population.” And then it goes on to talk about “in recent years Latinx residents have made advances in economic well-being measured by metrics like reduced poverty rates, growth in business ownership.” And then after a couple of sentences like that, people elected to school boards, local offices.
Tippett:And then, “Despite this impressive social and economic progress, Latinx residents have lagged behind other Californians in achieving important goals like home ownership and income growth, and we can now add to that list the disproportionate harm visited on the community by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Trabian says that the media is a co-conspirator:
And so to your point about the role that media plays, I’ve said this to David Bornstein, who is the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, that if there is a sort of narrative of racial hatred in the United States, then the news media is co-author of that narrative and co-conspirator in the cover-up. It’s very easy to understand, from a sociological standpoint, that when the media reports on populations and cities and neighborhoods a very specific and particular way, and never counterbalances that narrative with any positives, then the only patterns that our brain have to draw upon are fear triggers.
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