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Media Ignore What It Means to Have a Real Conversation About Race - BillMoyers.com

This is the journalism of resignation. It shrugs its shoulders. It says, in effect, polarization is everywhere and absolute. It says that the truth here is signed, sealed, and delivered. If there is any contrary evidence to be gathered, the reader won’t know. A “conversation about race” is not accomplished by acts of stenography, tit versus tat, black hats versus white hats. A conversation jostles assumptions. A conversation seeks to grasp and explore more than two points of view. It investigates why people say what they say, and whether any of them change their minds because they might have heard — if they were listening — something other than what they expected to hear. Journalists can expedite that conversation, or they can spin their wheels and contribute to the vast blindness afflicting an agonized nation that, at least sometimes, strives to learn something it doesn’t already know.