How the Media Drives Radical ‘Wokeness’

Daily Signal - Media drives radical wokeness

August 14, 2020

 “Fake news” isn’t the only media problem in 2020. An important analysis in media trends of the past decade shows how activist journalism is promoting radical racial “wokeness.” There was a time when the woke ideology was firmly ensconced in the ivory tower and limited to radical corners of our university system. But now it’s everywhere, and America seemingly can’t stop talking about race, racism, and anti-racism all the time. More than that, the George Floyd protests have turned into the 1619 riots, where the very idea of America is being called into question as a part of some grand racial reckoning.

But where is all of this coming from?

An in-depth analysis at Tablet magazine from Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University, shows that at the very least, America’s most elite media institutions have been the conduit for these ideas to become ubiquitous.

Once obscure academic jargon like “white privilege” and “microaggression,” Goldberg notes in his Aug. 4 piece, has been picked up by liberal journalists while the word “racism” has been redefined.

As I wrote in my analysis of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and the “anti-racist” movement, racism is “not just an individual act of discrimination or prejudice toward a person or a people based on their race.”

Instead, racism is a “collective condition leading to inequities in society.”

Being racially colorblind or demanding equal treatment under the law now are considered racist if societal inequities persist.

In his Tablet piece, Goldberg lays out just how rapidly and widely “wokeness” has been disseminated among Americans. The chief culprit being media, more specifically elite media institutions such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

That process accelerated over the summer, Goldberg writes, as countless articles in these elite publications, typically portrayed as straight news, “illustrate a prevailing new political morality on questions of race and justice that has taken power at the Times and Post—a worldview sometimes abbreviated as ‘wokeness’ that combines the sensibilities of highly educated and hyperliberal white professionals with elements of Black nationalism and academic critical race theory.”

“Wokeness” is a term most Americans were mostly unfamiliar with even a few years ago, but now its prevailing ideas are everywhere. Wokeness, which combines elements of Marxist ideology and critical race theory, increasingly has become the dominant ethos of America’s higher education institutions, newsrooms, and boardrooms.

To those who may think that coverage of race and racism revived after the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, Goldberg’s analysis shows that this surge actually began years earlier, coinciding more closely with the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second term in office in 2013.

“In 2011, the terms racist/racists/racism accounted for 0.0027% and 0.0029% of all words in The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively,” Goldberg writes, adding: