JOUR 4300 Race & Ethnicity in Journalism

4 semester hours

The course encourages students to understand media production as an act of social justice that crosses disciplinary boundaries of journalism, creative writing, literary studies, history, and rhetoric. We analyze how American journalism as a professional practice and news media viewership as cultural consumption can function to produce or reiterate ideas about race and ethnicity. Students will learn the role journalism has played in both perpetuating and challenging racist ideologies alongside contemporary issues of race and representation in newsrooms.
Topics covered in the class include: the trajectories of independent U.S. newspapers geared toward Black, Chicana/o, Asian, Indigenous, and other ethnic communities; how ideologies of race flow through and from health reporting, audio storytelling, and visual journalism, among other formats; the role of news media in civil rights and racial justice movements; and efforts to confront racism in the American newsroom from the 1990s to 2021.