Today’s Toxic Political Rhetoric Draws from a Well of Racism in Our Media System

In communities across the nation, millions of immigrants are living in harmony with native-born residents, with neighbors, coworkers, and friends collectively caring for each other. Yet we rarely see those stories uplifted on the nightly news or on the front pages of local newspapers; those stories never go viral on social-media platforms. That’s because these kinds of stories don’t help the politically powerful in our country, and they don’t boost the profits of corporate media empires.

Instead we see, on repeat, the lie that noncitizen immigrants are voting in droves. People with millions of followers—like Elon Musk—are routinely spreading this lie on social media.

We see hateful rhetoric about immigrants of color. During a Univision town hall last month, Donald Trump re-upped the notorious lie about Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community.

Our nation has yet to reckon with the deadly role our media system has played in the creation and distribution of narratives that have harmed countless people, including Ohio’s Haitian community.

We see coordinated campaigns to dissuade Black and Latino voters from participating in our democracy, with baseless claims that the U.S. election might not happen, or that police will be monitoring polling stations to round up voters who lack the “proper” documentation.

The intent of this rhetoric is to scare voters of color from going to the polls, to pander to anti-immigrant sentiments, to stir up fear and hysteria, to drive voter turnout of white people who are scared about the changing demographics of this country, and to legitimize authoritarian power grabs based on lack of trust in our electoral process.

And our nation’s dominant media and tech companies are complicit in all of this.

Far-right figures, including Ohio’s junior senator, continue to spread the falsehood that Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are eating pets. Both traditional and social media have amplified this conspiracy theory—and an entire community of innocent people continues to live in fear.

Many of us understand that these are outlandish lies—yet they are resonating with people who have fallen prey to anti-Haitian, anti-Black, and xenophobic talking points that are disseminated on media outlets like Fox News or on social-media platforms. This is part of a pattern in media coverage that stretches back hundreds of years.

The nation’s earliest newspapers supported enslavement by profiting off ads promoting the sale of enslaved people and the recapture of those who fled for freedom. In the ensuing years, powerful media institutions supported lynching and racial segregation.

More recently, several newspapers apologized for their histories of supporting segregation and white supremacy. But these outlets have yet to redress the harm they’ve caused or their roles in supporting racial hierarchies. Meanwhile, local-TV newscasts dehumanize communities of color through their crime coverage, reporting that has long proven lucrative for media conglomerates.

It’s not surprising that most people in the United States know very little about immigrants of color since the dominant narrative in corporate media portrays immigrants as criminals who are dangerous invaders.

The sober truth is that racism is profitable for social and traditional media companies alike. If-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage and “copaganda” serve as strategies to attract larger audiences. And powerful media figures are happy to look the other way if it means this incendiary rhetoric will help their companies’ bottom lines. Former CBS chairman and CEO Les Moonves admitted this when discussing the 2016 Trump campaign at an investor conference:

“Who would have thought that this circus would come to town?” said Moonves. “But, you know, it may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. The money’s rolling in.” Never mind the harmful impacts that Trump’s white-nationalist screeds were having on Black and Brown people across the country.

Many media executives share this sentiment, which helps explain why so little coverage illustrates the humanity of people who are forced to leave their homes and loved ones to escape violence and political instability stemming from histories of colonialism, and environmental destruction resulting from climate change. It explains why there are so few stories on people who are seeking employment and a better life for their families.

Even less coverage focuses on how U.S. foreign policy has economically, politically, and socially destabilized countries in the Americas like Haiti—and prompted thousands to flee their homelands. Despite our country’s long history of interventionist policies in Haiti—which has included an occupation and the support of deadly dictatorships—the public knows very little about the country, and the people we are told to fear.

“Haiti has been and continues to be the main laboratory for U.S. imperial machinations in the region and throughout the world,” University of British Columbia Professor Jemima Pierre wrote last year.

University of Toledo Professor Ayendy Bonifacio’s article “Tracing the Anti-Haitianism Behind the Springfield Scapegoating” explains that when Haitians overthrew their colonial enslavers to form the world’s first Black republic in 1804, it struck “fear into the hearts of slaveholders and their political allies, who wielded considerable influence over the nation’s major newspapers.”

Bonifacio notes that “during and after the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. press frequently reported on the supposed barbarism and primitiveness of Haiti and its people. Indeed, stories have circulated about Haitians eating animals and practicing cannibalism since the country’s founding.”

This anti-Haitian—and anti-Black—rhetoric has extended to other communities of color. In recent years, the Asian American Pacific Islander community has suffered from an increase in xenophobic news coverage that has criminalized both immigrants and U.S.-born residents. Reporting that fomented anti-Asian hate played a significant role in the adoption of racist policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times issued apologies over the past decade for supporting the imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

Meanwhile, hateful government policies and the media coverage that propped them up resulted in the deportation of more than 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the early 1930s—and then again in a 1954 campaign with the racist name “Operation Wetback.” The latter received supportive coverage from papers like the Los Angeles Times, which acknowledged in 2020 that the publication had served as an “uncritical mouthpiece for Washington.”

Our nation has yet to reckon with the deadly role our media system has played in the creation and distribution of narratives that have harmed countless people, including Ohio’s Haitian community.

We need government policies that support the development of a new media system that redresses this history of racism and xenophobia—a system where journalism supports the realization of a multiracial democracy rather than one that undermines it.