Major media shouldn’t replay graphic videos of the deaths of Black people at the hands of police, several leading Black journalism scholars said.
Video and images of death from 9/11, mass shootings, and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were quickly taken out of circulation, USC journalism professor and author Allissa Richardson noted at Fortune’s online Brainstorm design conference on March 2. She called for the same treatment of video clips like the death of George Floyd, which was filmed by a bystander in May and then widely shown on television and online for months afterwards.
“African Americans are the only ones that have to watch themselves die on prime time television over and over again,” Richardson said.
“We have made decisions about who deserves to be entombed online and who doesn’t,” she added, noting the difference with 9/11 videos. “That must stop and we must elevate these videos to the level of lynching photographs almost. And just as you would be very careful about putting a lynching photograph on your social media feed, we have to be very careful about how we circulate these videos often without trigger warnings and in their entirety.”
The video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck and preventing him from breathing for more than eight minutes ignited a movement against the use of excessive force against Black people, with Black Lives Matter demonstrations in dozens of major U.S. cities that then spread worldwide. Attention on the Floyd video was also followed by the release of videos of many similar incidents that led to the death of other unarmed Black people at the hands of police, such as Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia and Mike Ramos in Austin, Tex.
Mia Birdsong, an author and senior fellow at the nonprofit Economic Security Project who also spoke at the Fortune event, co-presented by Salesforce and IBM, agreed with Richardson that the continued exposure to such videos was harmful.
“We’re not trying to hide what is tragic or painful about dealing with white supremacy, about dealing with patriarchy, about dealing with economic justice—but being Black is not itself a tragedy,” Birdsong said.
She also called for media to cover a much broader range of stories about African Americans, saying she wanted to see “fuller, richer stories about our lives that are not just about Black pain and Black trauma but are also about Black pleasure and Black joy.”
