Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T03:56:32.976Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

How Racial Injustice Undermines News Sources and News-Based Inferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Eric Bayruns García*
Affiliation:
California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA

Abstract

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alcoff, L.M. (1999). ‘On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?’ Philosophic Exchange 29(1), 122.Google Scholar
Alcoff, L.M. (2007). ‘Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types.’ In Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N. (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Bayruns García, E. (2019). ‘Expression-style Exclusion.’ Social Epistemology 33(3), 245–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benson, R. (2005). ‘American Journalism and the Politics of Diversity.’ Media, Culture and Society 27(1), 520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, M.A. (2010). ‘Why the Generality Problem is Everybody's Problem.’ Philosophical Studies 151(2), 285–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chideya, F. (2018). In the Shadow of Kerner: Fifty Years Later, Newsroom Diversity and Equity Stall. Cambridge, MA: Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.Google Scholar
Chisholm, R. (1989). Theory of Knowledge, 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Coady, C.A.J. (1992). Testimony: A Philosophical Study. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, P.H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Conee, E. and Feldman, R. (2004). Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darby, D. and Shelby, T. (eds) (2005). Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason. Chicago, IL: Open Court.Google Scholar
Davis, E. (2018). ‘On Epistemic Appropriation.Ethics 128(4), 702–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, T.L. (2017). ‘Good Guys are Still Always in White? Positive Change and Continued Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Local Television News.’ Communication Research 44(6), 775–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, T.L. and Linz, D. (2000). ‘Overrepresentation and Underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as Lawbreakers on Television News.’ Journal of Communication 50(2), 131–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, T.L. and Williams, C.L. (2015). ‘The Changing Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Network and Cable News.’ Journal of Communication 65, 2439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotson, K. (2011). ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.’ Hypatia 26(2), 236–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Elliot, A.J. and Devine, P.G. (1994). ‘On the Motivational Nature of Cognitive Dissonance: Dissonance as Psychological Discomfort.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76(3), 382–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Everbach, T. (2006). ‘The Culture of a Women-led Newspaper: An Ethnographic Study of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.’ Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 83(3), 477–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frissell, P., Ibrahim, A., Raghavendran, S. and Yang, A. (2017). ‘Missed Deadline: The Promise of Newsroom Diversity.Voices. https://voices.aaja.org/index/2017/7/25/missed-deadlines.Google Scholar
Godler, Y., Reich, Z. and Miller, B. (2020). ‘Social Epistemology as a New Paradigm for Journalism and Media Studies.’ New Media and Society 22(2), 213–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, S. (2010). Relying on Others. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, S. (2018). To the Best of our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic Normativity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A.I. (1979). ‘What is Justified Belief?’ In Pappas, G. (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, pp. 125. Boston, MA: D. Reidel.Google Scholar
Goldman, A.I. (1987). ‘Foundations of Social Epistemics.’ Synthese 73(1), 109–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A.I. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A.I. and Cox, J.C. (1996). ‘Speech, Truth, and the Free Market for Ideas.’ Legal Theory 2(1), 132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez, J. and Torres, J. (2011). News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Greco, J. (2016). ‘What is Transmission*?’ Episteme 13(4), 481–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greco, J. (2017). ‘Testimony and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge.’ Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 53(3), 1947.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, S. (1997). ‘The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.’ In Hall, S. (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, pp. 223–9. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Hampel, S., Heinrich, D. and Campbell, C. (2012). ‘Is an Advertisement Worth the Paper it's Printed on? The Impact of Premium Print Advertising on Consumer Perceptions.Journal of Advertising Research 52(1), 4150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harding, S. (1993). ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity?’ In Alcoff, L.M. and Potter, E. (eds), Feminist Epistemologies. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsock, N. (1987). ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.’ In Harding, S. (ed.), Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Johnston, G. (2019). ‘The Kids are All White: Examining Race and Representation in News Media Coverage of Opioid Overdose Deaths in Canada.Sociological Inquiry 90(1), 123–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kampa, S. (2018). ‘A New Statistical Solution to the Generality Problem.’ Episteme 15(2), 228–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, I. (1996). The Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khader, S. (2008). ‘Cognitive Disability, Capabilities, and Justice.’ Essays in Philosophy 9(1), 93112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khader, S. (2019). Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kitcher, P. (1990). ‘The Division of Cognitive Labor.’ Journal of Philosophy 87(1), 522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langer, T., Fischer, A. and Brune, P. (2013). ‘Choose Your Ad Paper Type Carefully: How Haptic Ad Paper Characteristics Affect Product Judgements.’ In Rosengren, S., Dahlen, M. and Okazaki, S. (eds), Advances in Advertising Research, Vol. 4. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler.Google Scholar
Le Morvan, P. and Peels, R. (2016). ‘The Nature of Ignorance: Two Views.’ In Peels, R. and Blaauw, M. (eds), The Epistemic Dimension of Ignorance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Locke, J. (1988). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, J.C. (2019). ‘Algorithm and Parameters: Solving the Generality Problem for Reliabilism.’ Philosophical Review 128(4), 463509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2016). ‘Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias.’ Noûs 50(3), 629–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2018). ‘Troubles with Bayesianism: An Introduction to the Psychological Immune System.Mind and Language. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12205.Google Scholar
Maras, S. (2013). Objectivity in Journalism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Marlow, N. and Jansson-Boyd, C.V. (2011). ‘To Touch or Not to Touch; That is the Question: Should Consumers Always be Encouraged to Touch Products, and Does It Always Alter Product Perception.’ Psychology and Marketing 28(3), 256–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medina, J. (2013 a). ‘Color Blindness, Meta-ignorance, and the Racial Imagination.’ Critical Philosophy of Race 1(1), 3867.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medina, J. (2013 b). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, C.W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mills, C.W. (2007). ‘White Ignorance.’ In Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N. (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, pp. 1338. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Mindich, D.T. (2000). Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American Journalism. New York, NY: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R. and Ross, L. (1980). Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgement. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omi, M. and Winant, H. (1994). Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pedersen, N.J.L.L. and Kallestrup, J. (2013). ‘The Epistemology of Absence-based Inference.’ Synthese 190, 2573–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pohlhaus, G. Jr. (2012). ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.’ Hypatia 27(4), 715–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchard, D. (2010). ‘Knowledge and Understanding.’ In Duncan, P., Millar, A. and Haddock, A. (eds), The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawls, J. (2001). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Reinarman, R. and Levine, H.G. (2004). ‘Crack in the Rearview Mirror: Deconstructing Drug War Mythology.’ Social Justice 31(1), 182–99.Google Scholar
Robinson, S. and Batzen Culver, K. (2016). ‘When White Reporters Cover Race: News Media, Objectivity and Community (Dis)trust.’ Journalism 20(3), 375–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rousseau, J. (1997). The Social Contract and other Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Saul, J. (2018). ‘Negligent Falsehood, White Ignorance, and False News.’ In Michaelson, E. and Stokke, A. (eds), Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics, pp. 246–61. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schafer, K. (2014). ‘Doxastic Planning and Epistemic Internalism.’ Synthese 191(12), 2571–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoenfield, M. (2019). ‘Permissivism and the Value of Rationality: A Challenge to the Uniqueness Thesis.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99(2), 286–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, A. (1992). Inequality Reexamined. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Somani, I.S. and Hopkinson, N. (2018). ‘Color, Cast and the Public Sphere.Journalism Practice. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2018.1426999.Google Scholar
Smith, V. (ed.) (1997). Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Stanley, J. (2015). How Propaganda Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sylvie, G. (2011). ‘The Call and Challenge for Diversity.’ In Lowrey, W. and Gade, P.J. (eds), Changing the News: The Forces Shaping Journalism in Uncertain Times, pp. 83101. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Taylor, P.C. (2013). Race: A Philosophical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, P.C. (2016). Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, S.J. (2005). The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Wong, A. (2013). ‘The Effects Of Consumers’ Subject Knowledge on Evaluative Extremity and Product Differentiation.’ In Rosengren, S., Dahlen, M. and Okazaki, S. (eds), Advances in Advertising Research, Vol. 4. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler.Google Scholar
Woomer, L. (2019). ‘Agential Insensitivity.’ Episteme 16(1), 7391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zeldes, G.A., Fico, F. and Diddi, A. (2007). ‘Race and Gender: An Analysis of the Sources and Reporters in Local Television Coverage of the 2002 Michigan Gubernatorial Campaign.’ Mass Communication and Society 10(3), 345–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zollman, K.J.S. (2011). ‘The Communication Structure of Epistemic Communities.’ Philosophy of Science 74(5), 574–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar