Today commemorates the fight for an eight-hour workday and workers’ struggles — so people throughout the country are protesting and striking today against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, military funding, and overreach against federal power. In a nod to archiving how journalism has connected to this moment, our newsletter’s top story contextualizes how norms around mainstream coverage on ICE reflect the long history of anti-Blackness in journalism.

An abbreviated version of our media links is on Instagram each week, focusing on what a handful of those stories say about how power and identity impact journalism. (Previous week’s here.)

A reminder for Chicagoans: On May 7, we’ll be at a collaborative panel on independent media celebrating 50 years of Project Censored’s muckraking journalism. More details here.

—James Salanga

The U.S. government has forcibly removed around 8.5 million immigrants through deportation orders issued from 1895 to now, Diné cartographer Mariah Tso and historian Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández found in their project Mapping Deportations. The two mapped the history of immigration patrol and deportations across the U.S. since 1970, and while ICE is not explicitly mentioned in their timeline, deportation orders have clearly increased since the department’s founding in 2003.

"The migration story is predicated upon native elimination and chattel slavery," Lytle Hernández said in an episode of Red Nation. "That's what we describe as the foundations of immigration patrol."

Mainstream coverage of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter’s killings shows how anti-Black news standards desensitize communities to state violence. While Pretti and Good received global news attention, that same investigative and critical news focus has not been afforded to non-white people, particularly Black people, killed by police throughout history — which media scholars like Joseph Torres, part of the Media 2070 team, say is linked to the "foundational" anti-Blackness in the development of the U.S. and its media systems.

Read the full story.

💁‍♀️💁‍♂️ The New York Times only quoted trans people or trans rights advocates in 20% of its coverage of stories with the words “trans,” “transgender,” “gender identity,” “gender ideology,” and “biological sex” this year, according to analysis by Assigned Media. This contrasts sharply with The 19th, who quoted trans people or allies supporting trans rights in more than 70% of its articles featuring the same.

🤔 An NPR affiliate is “still workshopping its position on chattel slavery,” founder of modern-day abolitionist newsroom Kansas City Defender Ryan Sorrell dryly remarked after KCUR (based in Kansas City) published an article with the initial headline “Was abolitionist John Brown a hero or menace? In Kansas, the question still matters." (They later changed it to “Kansas educators wrestle with teaching about John Brown as schools face scrutiny on race.”) Sorrell published an editorial critiquing the white press more broadly for still entertaining this as a question worthy of debate.

👉 CONTEXT: Forbes published a story about a Louisiana man that killed 8 children that ended with a toss to ForbesPredict, where readers could vote on whether or not this would inspire Congress to do anything about gun control. While the prediction market is new, newspapers gamifying the tragic deaths of children is not.

🏫 Pseudonyms, unpublishing articles by request, and granting anonymity to writers: these practices go against long-standing J-school teachings, but are used by modern journalism students to cover unprecedented events like Operation Metro Surge and deportations of fellow students.

👉 FOLLOW-UP: Pulled back from the brink of closure, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Guild has written a one-page letter to new owners Venetoulis Institute to urge them to retain staff and bargain with the guild in good faith.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This issue is by James Salanga and Marlee Baldridge. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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