The scientific racism of ‘race realist’ Nathan Cofnas, isn’t limited to the academy, it is also quite at home in journalism, it is one of the reasons Solutions Journalism exists.
In addition to antagonizing journalism’s essential critical function—Who, What, When, Where, and Why—Solutions Journalism replaces open-ended investigation with a pre-packaged answer and limits public discourse to a tiny corner of the room where you hide things you don’t want others to see, like a pair of dirty panties (or a dirty sock).
Solutions Journalism inverts—or rather perverts—this. It forces writing into a rigid, pseudo-scientific Toulmin model (claim, data, warrant, rebuttal) that seeks a conclusive argument and limits discussion to topics with solutions the wealthy deem best.
“And that’s why WAYMO self-driving cars are awesome and will save many lives—-and probably YOURS!”
The reason behind this, and why they are so insistent on it being for people in what they call “media deserts”—I prefer media apartheid—it is an idea that is similar to the achievement gap. The achievement-gap premise grew from the study Johnny Can’t Read. At the conclusion of the study, researchers felt Black people couldn’t read because they were inferior humans and couldn’t suspend disbelief, so what needed to happen was stories based on REAL life (the real life of the [B]lack/working class according to the ‘unimagination’ of hegemony) because that way Black people could at least learn enough to follow simple instructions at a job.
”Dig the hole here, boy.”
The same theory is behind Solutions Journalism. That is why media foundations find me so abhorrent: it isn’t that I don’t do quality media, it’s that I refuse to submit to the idea that Black people and racialized people aren’t human.
But keep in mind that to the wealthy, anyone who works a job is subhuman; they just start with Black and other racialized people, then slowly roll out their sadism to anyone without a trustfund.
I refuse to practice Solutions Journalism because I refuse to get funding based on the idea that Black people are subhuman, that the working class is subhuman because that, my friends, is the real idea behind ‘local’ ‘solutions journalism.’
I really advise you to watch people who take the money a little more closely.
Your guard against neoliberalism can’t just stop at the ballot box. Cofnas is one of the many symptoms of the disease of neoliberalism.