Is the media amplifying Trump’s racism? (with Whitney Phillips)

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2019

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Some podcasts I do are easy. There’s a problem and, hey look, here’s a great answer! Some are hard. There’s a problem and, well, there may not be a good answer. This is one of those. When Donald Trump tweeted that four new Democratic members of Congress (commonly known as ‘the Squad’) should “go back” to the “corrupt” countries he said they are from, the media went into frenzy. When he said he didn’t worry if the comment was racist, because “many people agree with me,” it got worse. Trump’s racism — and his justification of it — dominated the news. Under the “sunlight disinfects” model of media, that’s a good thing. But, as communications scholar Whitney Phillips argues, sunlight also does something else: it makes things grow. What if, by letting Trump focus the national conversation on his most vile comments at will, we’re nourishing the very ideas we’re trying to bleach? Behind this conversation lurks some of the hardest questions in media. What makes something newsworthy? When do we let Trump set the agenda, and when don’t we? And is the theory under which we give the worst comments the most coverage true, or is it making us part of the problem? Book Recommendations: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer Klu Klux by Elaine Parsons White Racial Framing by Joe Feagin Check out Whitney Phillips’ previous appearance on the show. ******************************************************* The Ezra Klein Show has been nominated for best Society- culture podcast in this year’s People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for The Ezra Klein Show at https://www.podcastawards.com/app/signup before July 31st. One vote per category. Please send guest suggestions for our upcoming series on climate change to [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:22.0	A powerfully perfect combo.
0:24.0	Sweet tarts dare to combine.
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0:52.0	What he wants us to cover is the smallest little sliver of the world.
0:57.0	There's a bunch of other people in the room who have different vantage points that could be tapped.
1:15.0	Hello and welcome to Mr. Clancho on the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:19.0	Before we begin today in the Rutger Breggman episode, which I hope you all enjoyed.
1:24.0	We talked, or I talked actually, a bit about an old sci-fi story that I thought had been written by Ursula Luguin about patents and intellectual property in a post-abundance world.
1:35.0	And the way it could rob people of their search for meaning and the story, like I remembered it from when I was a kid, but I did not, as a bunch of you pointed out, remember the author correctly.
1:43.0	Stories by Spider Robinson, and it is called Melancholy Elephants.
1:47.0	And I'll put a link to it here and show notes. It's a beautiful short story and it's worth taking a couple minutes to read.
1:53.0	But today, today, this is not the conversation I'd intended to have in this episode.
2:00.0	It's when I kind of set up a little bit quickly because over the weekend, I literally was up overnight thinking about this question of,
2:09.0	are we just getting, are we in the media just getting how to cover this era wrong?
2:13.0	And I was thinking about it in terms of the attacks Donald Trump has been launching on the squad on Alexandria, Cassio Cortez and Rashida Toulib and Ilhan Omar and I on a press conference.
	...

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