The news media has a powerful role in democracy, even if it often doesn’t acknowledge that, says Kathy Roberts Forde, a journalism historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As she explained in a recent episode of TNR’s Right Now With Perry Bacon, in the Jim Crow era, many white-owned newspapers in the South helped legitimize and entrench Jim Crow, while Black papers and journalists told the stories of lynchings. In the 1950s and ’60s, Black reporters detailed the horrors of segregation and favorably covered the civil rights movement, helping lead to white-owned outlets to do the same. Forde argues that today’s Republican Party is using some of the authoritarian tactics that were employed in the American South in the twentieth century and by autocratic leaders abroad today. So she argues journalists can and should make those connections, even if that leads to Republicans attacking them as biased. Ford, who also is a dean of inclusion and equity, condemned the recent backlash against diversity efforts. She also explained her new initiative organizing students and professors to defend against the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. You can watch this episode here.
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