Constructing Race in Black and Whiteness: Media Coverage of Public Support for President Clinton

Abstract

This study employs a framing analysis of media explanations regarding public support for President Clinton during the 1998 coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. An analysis of broadcast, newspaper, and magazine stories during the scandal reveals that media coverage of support for the President focused exclusively on African Americans. Five discursive frames were used to explain African American support: morality, political pragmatism, distrust of the criminal justice system, forgiveness/redemption, and Clinton's rapport with African Americans. Although these frames construct blackness using a variety of characteristics seldom found in the media, they also construct the concept of blackness in near universal and essentialist terms. Media explanations of Black support at the expense of explanations of White support (or lack thereof) for the President reinforce a racial hierarchy whereby whiteness serves as an invisible racial norm.

White Knights: Leadership as the heroicisation of whiteness

“…Explorations of race in media studies have observed how the pervasiveness of white perspectives in the media is one of the media’s most powerful attributes (Croteau et al., 2012). The normalisation of whiteness as the taken-for-granted standard against which other racial groups are judged underpins media reporting from journalists and commentators of all racial identifications (Brooks and Rada, 2002; Croteau et al., 2012; Gabriel, 1998). Indeed, as Nakayama (2000) observes, media discourses of whiteness serve to reinforce not only a system of racial domination, but also gender, class, sexuality, location and nationality.…”

Learning who we (and they) are: Popular culture as pedagogy

“…Structuring Race, Class, and Gender Through Popular Culture Brooks and Rada (2002) argue that the media shape our ideas about race through the cultural production of meaning. Critical studies of media and popular culture have produced abundant evidence of just how social structures are reproduced through media.…”

“Others Among Their Own People”: The Social Construction of Ethiopian Immigrants in the Israeli National Press

“…The power of whiteness lies in its nonvisibility, its appearance as universal (Nakayama & Krizek, ; Shome, ). Thus whiteness serves as a norm by which non‐Whites are measured (Brooks & Rada, ).…”

“…The power of whiteness lies in its nonvisibility, its appearance as universal (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995;Shome, 2000). Thus whiteness serves as a norm by which non-Whites are measured (Brooks & Rada, 2002). Brooks and Rada (2002) examined the media coverage of public support for former U.S. president Bill Clinton in 1998, when he was involved in the Lewinsky sex scandal.…”

“…Thus whiteness serves as a norm by which non-Whites are measured (Brooks & Rada, 2002). Brooks and Rada (2002) examined the media coverage of public support for former U.S. president Bill Clinton in 1998, when he was involved in the Lewinsky sex scandal. According to them, this discourse focused exclusively on African Americans' support of Clinton, bearing a racial Black-White duality, in which whiteness functions as a social norm and serves to strengthen whiteness as a racial standard.…”