Give up media sources that uphold racist stereotypes and do not accurately and adequately cover racism.

Much of mainstream media ignores or minimizes the voices and experiences of Indigenous, Black and other POC on the one hand, and inflates crime statistics and negative imagery on the other.

In an analysis of news coverage by mainstream media in Pittsburgh, 64 out of 74 (87%) of television news stories featuring Black American men were about crime.

A review of the Canadian media depiction of BIPOC by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation concluded that the denial of racism and negative reporting on immigrants is a persistent and common theme in the Canadian press. The biases, erroneous assumptions, and stereotypical thinking appear to be invisible to journalists and editors who are largely white, male and middle class.

In Wesley Lowery’s New York Times article A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists he notes:

“Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity, the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses. And those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers. On opinion pages, the contours of acceptable public debate have largely been determined through the gaze of white editors.The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral.”

Tip: Seek out media that hire BIPOC journalists, editors and management and have proven their commitment to publishing stories on systemic racism that challenge the conventional narrative. Examples include The Tyee (especially their “Under the White Gaze” series), the Narwal, APTN, The Conversation, Democracy Now and The Black News Channel.

As Anna Maria Tremonti put it in a recent interview “When we talk about objective journalism, that objectivity is a white man's subjective construct. The fundamental rules of reporting have been skewed by news organizations dominated by men of European descent whose own lives and views set the standard of what constitutes news and how to report it. And while that is just so glaringly flawed and damaging to the search for real truth and accountability, we still see people fighting to hang onto it.”