The Great Un-Blackening: How Trump Tears and White Fragility Are Remaking Media

How did Jillian Michaels become a CNN-certified slavery scholar? The answer is in Joe Scarborough's text messages.

But perhaps the greatest contribution of the Negro press is this: it is one major voice of the conscience of our nation… And this is of vital importance. For there are millions of Americans who know American Negroes only through their press.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

On March 1, 1669, eight lord proprietors of the Carolina colony granted every white person the “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.” Seven months later, the Virginia Colonial Assembly passed a law that gave enslavers the right to murder the Africans who resisted their authority. An enslaved woman was 750 times more likely to be raped (58%) than to be set free (3,000 out of 3.9 million in 1860).

Most of the Founding Fathers and every single one of the first 12 presidents (including the Adamses) participated in America’s race-based, constitutionally protected, violence-enforced human chattel system. Not only did the U.S. Constitution legalize slavery, but Congress passed laws that essentially made every American a part-time slave catcher. When one million white men took up arms against their country to fight for slavery in 1860, there were more slave owners (383,637) than white people fighting slavery (255,000).

While a Pew Research poll would likely find a very low approval rating for slavery, most Americans don’t know the details of this country’s involvement in perpetuating centuries of institutional rape, murder and violence against Black Americans. That’s why the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture exists—to teach these uncomfortable truths with the hope that the combination of discomfort and knowledge will motivate them to make America a more perfect union.

But, like most gangbangers, criminals and descendants of degenerate murderers and rapists who get the heebie jeebies in history class, Donald Trump doesn’t appreciate anyone throwing dirt on his OGs’ names.

To be fair, the president has more in common with the aristocratic founders, slave-owning presidents and original recipe Jeffrey Epsteins than he does with Black Americans, anti-racists or people who are interested in learning the truth. That’s why his administration ordered an internal review of the materials and exhibits at eight Smithsonian Institution museums on Aug. 12. That’s also why, on Thursday, Aug. 14, the OG fitness influencer Jillian Michaels appeared on CNN’s “NewsNight With Abby Phillip” and sided with Trump.

More importantly, that’s also why Phillip's opening monologue on Tuesday night featured a very controversial thesis:

Slavery is bad.

White media is back, baby!

Every night at 10 p.m., viewers get to see Phillip, a Harvard graduate with more than a decade of experience as a political journalist, host a “platform for discussion and debate.” The show regularly finishes as CNN’s highest-rated program in the most coveted demographics.

“NewsNight” might reflect “the real differences that exist in our country,” but the Jillian Michaels discourse proves that the show is not substantially different from the “echo chambers” CNN is supposedly challenging. The fact that an award-winning, Ivy League-educated, successful journalist had to correct the narrative of someone who tells people to do more sit-ups is the epitome of “both sides.”

This is white media.

And yes, there is such a thing as white media. While “colorblind” people who view everything through the lens of whiteness might refer to these institutions as “mainstream” media, no one can define what “mainstream” means. Journalist Roland Martin regularly has more viewers than CNN. “The Breakfast Club’s” audience is bigger than “The Today Show” and “The Tonight Show” combined. If it weren’t for airports, Applebee’s and hotel lobby bars, I truly believe CNN would have 17 viewers (most of whom are probably Abby Phillip’s cousins). The only reason “the most trusted name in news” is not regarded as a niche news outlet is that “mainstream” is just another word for “white.”

To be fair, most journalists—not just non-whites—will acknowledge the inherent racial homogeneity of the industry. According to a 2022 Pew survey, 53% of white journalists and 58% of Black journalists said their news organization does not have enough racial and ethnic diversity. (Unfortunately, individual white journalists took the same approach that white people did for slavery, Jim Crow and racial terrorism—they did nothing.) Still, after the George Floyd uprising, news organizations like the Kansas City Star and the Los Angeles Times apologized for their histories of racist news coverage, and many news organizations changed their hiring practices and increased diversity efforts.

But with 90% of Donald Trump’s second term still ahead of us, the American media is making journalism “mainstream” again.

After years without a Black member on its editorial board, the Washington Post has lost columnist Karen Attiah and Associate Editor Jonathan Capehart. Additionally, columnist Eugene Robinson, White House Bureau Chief Toluse Olorunnipa, Managing Editor Krissah Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Monica Norton recently took buyouts. The exodus has also affected the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and … basically every newspaper except the Final Call.

This great un-Blackening is not just affecting Black journalists in the newspaper industry. Aside from being the targets of this reversion to whiteness, this trend has very little to do with Black people. Like museum exhibits and CNN programming, the Make Journalism White Again movement is about making white people comfortable.

CNN hired Chris Licht as CEO to woo Trump supporters (he was later fired). NBC News caused an uproar when it hired former GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to appeal to conservatives. ABC News paid a $16 million settlement to appease Trump. MSNBC (rebranded as MS NOW) network canceled host Tiffany Cross after Tucker Carlson attacked her. When CNN fired Don Lemon, the bastions of objectivity at the Associated Press referred to Lemon’s tenure as “divisive.” Attiah reportedly refused a Washington Post buyout after an “uncomfortable” meeting with the paper’s new editor.

MSNBC (I’ll never call it MS NOW. It’s like Twitter. As one great scholar said: “His mama named him Cassius, imma call him Cassius”) got rid of Ayman Mohyeldin and canceled Mehdi Hasan’s show after the journalists criticized the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Joy Reid says she still doesn’t know why MSNBC fired her, but I’m sure it had nothing to do with the Trump administration opening an investigation into the network’s parent company for DEI policies that promote “invidious forms of discrimination.” Or this.

or this:

or this.

These outlets aren’t just purging themselves of award-winning, credentialed journalists; they are filling the empty slots with kinder, gentler replacements. MSNBC’s 7 p.m. ratings plummeted after the “shakeup” that threw Reid to the MAGA wolves. MSNBC pinned its hopes on Jen Psaki, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Michael Steele.

Instead of having to digest Lemon’s “divisiveness,” CNN’s audience gets to watch Phillip share the spotlight with CNN contributor and award-winning brow-furrower Scott Jennings, who might be more “mainstream” than Michaels. Jennings is regularly schooled by Phillip, Tiffany Cross and even fellow conservative Tara Setmayer. Other viral moments include that time Reid educated CNN contributor Brad Todd on Iran and when Bakari Sellers taught CNN contributor Kevin O’Leary about school choice.

Do you see it yet?

OK, let me make it more mainstream:

CNN replaced a show hosted by a Black man with three decades of journalism experience with a show featuring white people whose biggest achievements are furrowing their brow, being on “Shark Tank” or telling obese people to exercise. The demonstrably less-informed white people are pitted as the intellectual equals of Ivy League-educated Black women (Reid, Phillip or Setmayer—pick one) or Black people who studied and practiced journalism (Cross, Reid, Phillip or Setmayer). And since CNN is considered “mainstream,” the less-educated, less-experienced, less-informed white people get to argue civil rights against an actual civil rights lawyer (Sellers) whose father is a certified civil rights hero. It’s the only place in the known universe where a white man’s opinion on women and Black voters holds as much weight as a journalist who literally wrote a book about Black voters (Cross). It’s where a woman who studied public journalism and policy after growing up in a family of police officers (Setmayer) has to listen to a lecture about policing from a man whose only oath is to protect and serve the badge of whiteness.

And whenever this volcano of white mediocrity erupts, they get an actual smart person like Abby Phillip to calm the villagers.

Perhaps the best example of the white media happened a few hours before Jillian Michaels took off her white hood on “NewsNight.”

---

On the day Michaels defended Donald Trump for whitewashing 250 years of institutionalized white supremacist violence, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was busy whitesplaining that the Trump-ordered military occupation of the nation’s capital wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I love “Morning Joe.”

Other cable networks might have a better collection of indignant, outright racists, but when it comes to whitesplaining, CNN’s collection of conservative Caucasian whisperers can’t hold a candle to Joe Scarborough (he blows harder). I don’t partake in coffee or cocaine, so MSNBC’s four-hour roundtable is part of my morning routine. Every weekday morning, I lie in bed hate-watching Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski until a combination of rage and the inability to suppress my gag reflex catapults me out of bed.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Joe Scarborough is the unapologetic caucasity that permeates his news coverage. He has no education, experience or expertise in journalism prior to his career as a cable network blowhard. (To be fair, Scarborough served five-and-a-half years as an elected official, which almost compares to great American statesmen such as Jesse Ventura, Clint Eastwood and Jerry Springer.) But, like his longtime buddy Donald Trump, Joe Scarborough will never admit that Joe Scarborough is wrong. As David Frum knows, simply insinuating that Scarborough is mistaken can cause an explosion in his Central Whiteness System (the part of the cerebral cortex that regulates privilege, colorblindness and audacity).

Speaking to an all-white panel as pure and Caucasian as a Constitutional Convention, Scarborough pulled out a text message from an unnamed friend who felt “unsafe” in D.C. During a later panel, Eugene Robinson pointed out that most people are concerned about crime. But by then, the white men had already certified Scarborough’s thesis—that “people” like his text buddy don’t feel safe in majority-white cities—as legitimate, and I had already tossed my remote at the television and started my day.

Scarborough’s fellow MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend rightfully pushed back against Scarborough’s asinine premise. Rather than dismissing the crime that does exist for the sake of partisanship, she noted that people generally believe crime is increasing, regardless of the actual crime rate. It was almost as if she knew things. And after all that, Scarborough persisted: “You don’t think police make streets safer?”

“I'm a Black woman in America. I do not always think that more police make streets safer," Sanders-Townsend explained, Blackly. "When you walk down the streets of Georgetown, you don't see a police officer on every corner, but you don't feel unsafe. So what is it about talking about places like Southeast D.C.?”

Unmoved, Scarborough brought up all the white things, including defund the police, his Black friends and—I kid you not—drug dealers hanging on corners. After bringing up the text from his white, “lifelong Democrat” friend, he reverted to the age-old option: Why does everything have to be about race? Since then, Scarborough has launched a still-ongoing crusade to show that he was not wrong. The former Republican congressman-turned-television host has equated the displeasure with the militarization of the nation’s capital to the defund-the-police movement. He has dismissed D.C.’s declining crime statistics by discussing polls showing how D.C. residents are concerned about crime.

This was not a debate.

Joe Scarborough’s entire premise was based on how white people, Black people he never met and his anonymous text buddy feel about crime. Sanders-Townsend was explaining what she knows about juvenile crime. Scarborough was talking about police making streets safe. But Trump hasn’t dispatched police to D.C.; Sanders-Townsend was talking about soldiers.

And, to be fair, Sanders-Townsend has the exact same journalist credentials as Scarborough. But in a conversation about soldiers, Black people and juvenile crime, Symone Sanders-Townsend’s position might be based on her experience as the former national chair of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice’s committee, which is “dedicated to preventing children and youth from becoming involved in the courts and upholding the highest standards of care when youth are charged with wrongdoing and enter the justice system.” Or perhaps it comes from a father who “retired from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers” and a mother who is “the former publisher of the Omaha Star and former executive director for the Great Plains Black History Museum.”

And Joe Scarborough has an iPhone.

Caitlyn Clark is a great athlete and one of the most popular players in the WNBA. A boxing match against Claressa Shields might garner incredible ratings, but it wouldn’t be a “fight.” If CNN aired a show where Usain Bolt faced off against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in the 100-meter dash, it might be interesting, but no one would call it a “race” (unless, of course, they were race baiting”). And, while I would rather watch two non-journalists argue over the effectiveness of fairy dust or whether Santa’s elves need college degrees, it wouldn’t be a “debate.”

Then again, white media’s return to the “mainstream” has little to do with facts, partisan politics, crime or Black history. It’s not about Abby Phillip or Symone Sanders-Townsend. It’s not even about CNN or MSNBC. It’s not even about Black people.

It’s about them.

Politics can be contentious, and journalists should include varying perspectives. It is possible for news outlets to be informative while appealing to their audiences. But by pitting ignorant, simple-minded white dimwits against the best and brightest Black minds, the entire format reinforces the fundamental premise of white supremacy. These unenlightened know-nothings don’t have to endure the harm, erasure or the violence left in the wake of their indignant ignorance; we do. That’s probably why Nikole Hannah-Jones deemed it necessary to address this tale told by a fitness idiot, signifying nothing.

In this make-believe universe, Joe Scarborough’s group chat, white people’s feelings and Donald Trump’s tweets are more important than laws, Black people’s safety and 30 years of crime statistics. To them, the views of a white woman who screams at people doing jumping jacks are as credible as the research of Black scholars, museum curators and scholars at one of the most prestigious institutions on the planet.

White media was as complicit in the lynching epidemic as the legislators and the pro-lynching white Christians who said, “Let any vile brute of a negro touch a white woman North or South and the faggots are kindled.” The New York Times didn’t attack Ida B. Wells because she insulted white people; it called her a “dirty-minded mulatress” because she presented statistical evidence that exposed “the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women."

If you read white media, Black people didn’t care about segregation or equal rights until they started listening to “communist-inspired,” “outside agitators.” But in 1946, nearly a decade before white people heard about this “civil rights movement,” in a letter using actual facts, a 17-year-old kid reminded white media that the concern over “race-mixing” was an attempt to “obscure the real question of Black people’s constitutional rights … It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity.”

Why was Martin Luther King Jr. so divisive?

(Charles Brooks/Birmingham News)

And yes, Black people can also benefit from the elevation of white incompetence. It’s the only reason Bill Maher and Sean Hannity want to know what Stephen A. Smith thinks about Kamala Harris. It’s why great replacement theorist Tucker Carlson will sit down with Ice Cube to talk policy. It’s why—despite never consulting a successful political campaign—“political campaign consultant” Shermichael Singleton can get jobs at CNN and MSNBC. They not only share the same political positions, expertise and experience as the Oval Office’s current occupant, they’re just as politically astute as Kevin O’Leary, the Trump-supporting “‘Shark Tank’ star and billionaire entrepreneur” who technically doesn’t have a billion dollars and failed at nearly every business he ever created. If you’re Black, being ESPN’s most prominent sportsball hollerer or having a reputation as a nigga with an abundant supply of attitude is the equivalent of a conservative, failed Canadian businessman weighing in on Biden’s economic policy.

They’re mainstream.

Of course, we know that mainstream is just another word for “white supremacy.” Whether it’s museums, crime or the feelings of people who don’t know shit, calling out “white supremacy” is as controversial as defunding the police or reparations or showing the true history of this country. It’s “negative.” It’s “divisive.” It’s downright un-American.

And, yes, slavery was kinda unpleasant.

Welcome back, white media.