Media, Soft Power, and African American Political Views

Introduction

Media plays a powerful role in politics in a variety of ways. Social media allows individuals to communicate ideas to followers. President Trump used social media—particularly Twitter—to great effect on the campaign trail, often firing off tweets to attack his political opponents. Supporters and critics alike have used social media to alter the way people view politics. One group that has received a great deal of media focus is the African American population. The African American vote is a very important factor in politics because this population has the potential to swing an election, to turn a blue state red or a red state blue.

The media, however, is only as powerful as those who wield it. Whether it is CNN, Fox News, or Twitter users, the aim is always the same: to alter the views of the target audience and sway them to embrace the message being delivered. The research question this paper asks is: Has the media altered the way African Americans view politics? The answer it proposes is that the media is always attempting to alter the way African Americans view politics, from both the right and the left. CNN, for example, will run stories about how Republicans do not care about Black Americans. Fox News, on the other hand, will run stories about how Trump has put African Americans back to work in increasing numbers. Kanye West will tweet about his support for President Trump while wearing a red MAGA hat.

In short, the media is a powerful tool that is constantly being used to alter the way in which African Americans view and feel about politics. This paper examines how that is done by looking at the concept of soft power, at what both right and left ends of the media spectrum are doing, at popular media, and particularly at what Robinson (2002) calls the "CNN effect"—the use of images and stories of human suffering typically used to garner support for humanitarian interventions abroad, but also useful for rousing antipathy against political opponents at home.

Soft Power and the Media

Soft power refers to the ability to sway the opinions of people by using subtle, non-coercive images and narratives to shape public opinion. Media is especially adept at this. Seib (2009) notes that "the effective exercise of soft power depends largely on its being a part of a comprehensive, well-designed public diplomacy effort" (p. 780). Today's media conglomerates are part of a large industry dominated by a handful of families and corporate entities. Dreier (1982) pointed out decades ago that by concentrating the power of the media in the hands of a few, it was easier for these groups to control narratives and the flow of information. People did not have to be subjected to overt state coercion. Instead, they could be moved to think in ways that the owners of mass media preferred, simply by turning on their televisions and listening to stories on the radio.

For this reason, the media has been called the "fourth estate" because of its ability to frame political narratives and paint political problems in the shades of its own choosing (Dreier, 1982, p. 298). In the old world, three estates dominated the way people thought about things: the church, the noble class (kings, dukes, lords, and so on), and the common class. Today, the fourth estate—the mass media—has perhaps the most powerful voice of all, for it is everywhere one looks: restaurants, bars, airports, bedrooms, living rooms, dens, cars, phones, and computers. Whereas dukes and lords once used force to compel public behavior, the media can use soft power—its subtle manipulation of the mind through emotionally resonant stories—to move people in desired directions.

The soft power effect can be seen on both sides of the political spectrum. If CNN represents the left and Fox News the right, the stories these two mainstream outlets put out to capture the attention of African Americans reveal how each uses soft power to steer this demographic. Maxine Waters and Cory Booker are two examples of African Americans who receive wide media coverage. Waters has been critical of both President Obama—for not doing enough to help African American communities—and President Trump (Dyson, 2016). How Waters is covered, however, depends entirely on the network. Fox News, for example, replays footage of Waters calling on supporters to confront members of the Trump Administration in order to build a narrative about the extremism of the left (Flood, 2018). CNN takes the same story and presents it sympathetically, arguing that her remarks were taken out of context (Erlich, 2018). Both approaches have an impact on the African American community and its perspective on politics.

Popular Media and the African American Audience

Research by DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) showed that African Americans make up only a small percentage of Fox News viewership, whose primary demographic consists of white conservatives. CNN, on the other hand, reaches a larger African American audience. Indeed, both CNN and The New York Times employ "a handful of Black journalists," and "by all measures, African Americans enjoy more power within the media industries" (Squires, 2009, p. 10). By including African American voices among their ranks, left-leaning media outlets are better positioned to capture that audience, which aligns with the Democratic Party's longstanding effort to appeal to the African American community.

Outliers such as Kanye West and the YouTube personalities Diamond and Silk—who appeared on Fox News to argue that "black people are behind President Trump" (Fox News, 2018)—have carved out their own niches through independent social media. West uses Twitter; Diamond and Silk use YouTube. Their messages diverge sharply from the narratives cultivated by left-leaning mainstream outlets: they are generally favorable toward President Trump and critical of the Democratic message. This has had a measurable effect. Rasmussen polls showed Trump polling at 36% among African Americans (Cummings, 2018). In response, the left-leaning Washington Post published an article denying the poll entirely, headlined: "No, one-third of African Americans don't support Trump. Not even close" (Tesler, 2018).

This back-and-forth—each side denying the stories the other creates—has contributed to the "fake news" phenomenon, which Trump himself frequently invoked, often pointing to antagonists in the mainstream media as sources of fabricated reporting. There is an obvious tension in American politics, and the media is at the center of it. The African American community is being targeted by voices across the political spectrum, and their opinions matter because they constitute a large and consequential voting bloc.

Part of the problem for left-leaning media in 2016 was that the Black vote was unmotivated by Hillary Clinton, and turnout did not reach levels sufficient to deliver a victory (Jackson, Davis, & Alston, 2017). Jackson et al. (2017) found that "the lower black turnout itself is attributable to several factors, but one factor specifically in the LIS realm was the prevalence of low-quality information and rhetoric and a susceptibility that some black voters had to this low-quality information and rhetoric" (p. 236). The characterization of the information as "low-quality" is itself a subjective conclusion, since there is no significant digital divide preventing African Americans from accessing television, radio, or internet news. The problem in 2016 was more fundamentally that many Black voters were not drawn to Clinton—they perceived her as inauthentic and unlike her husband, whom Black voters had supported in large numbers during the 1990s. Kurtzleben (2016) ran a piece for NPR exploring Black voters' affinity for the Clintons, illustrated at the top of the online article with a large photograph of Hillary Clinton surrounded by enthusiastic Black female supporters. The image was clearly intended to convey warmth and broad support within the community.

However, a prominent Black critic of Hillary Clinton, the Clintons generally, and Barack Obama was former NFL safety and CEO of the Brewer Group, Jack Brewer (2016), who appeared on CNN in the aftermath of the election to explain why Clinton did not win. CNN, which had firmly supported Clinton leading up to the election, now needed to account for her defeat and turned to a critic who could speak credibly to that failure. Brewer argued that Clinton never genuinely cared about Black Americans—just as her husband and Obama had not—and that none of them had delivered meaningful results for the African American community. He cited statistics on incarceration and employment to support his case. This was CNN's way of distancing itself from its losing candidate while retaining its African American audience by centering a Black voice in the critique.

All of this illustrates that media operates across both spectrums—right and left—to craft narratives aimed at specific audiences. For the African American community, two conflicting messages arrive simultaneously from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both in mainstream and social media. Black audiences must determine which version is credible and which is distortion. Even non-Black audiences are caught in this crossfire, since media cannot be neatly restricted to a single target demographic. When Rasmussen reports that more than a third of Black Americans support Trump and the Washington Post declares that figure false, the conflict is visible to all who encounter it. These competing narratives raise fundamental questions: Which outlet is telling the truth? What are the aims of these media organizations? What is the purpose of a poll? What is the purpose of a newspaper? Audiences must ask these questions themselves.

With social media now playing a growing role in how people process information, the African American community can find representatives of its own experience in those spaces as well. Whether they turn to Kanye West, Diamond and Silk, or countless others, the underlying dynamic is the same: media is in conflict with itself, and that conflict creates the conditions in which the African American community's political views can be shifted—or reinforced—in any number of directions.

Conclusion

To answer the question of whether the media has altered the way African Americans view politics, the answer must be unconditionally yes—of course it has. It alters everyone's view all the time. Everyone learns from some form of media, whether print, digital, or audio. Everyone forms opinions, including political opinions, by interacting with media. It is one of the primary means by which people make sense of what is happening around them. It is not, however, the only means. Mass media would prefer if it were, because that would concentrate all interpretive power in its hands and communities like the Black community would be entirely dependent on it for their political worldview. But thanks to the rise of social media, alternative voices now exist, and African Americans have more options than ever for finding perspectives that speak to their experience.

Yet the soft power being deployed by Fox News, CNN, Google, Facebook, and Twitter is only part of the story. The CNN effect is only so potent domestically because people can step outside and observe for themselves the conditions in which they actually live. African Americans have done exactly that—and, depending on whether one believes Rasmussen or The Washington Post—a significant portion of them have arrived at conclusions that diverge from what the mainstream media expected.

References

Bandura, A. (2018). Toward a psychology of human agency: Pathways and reflections. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 130–136.

Brewer, J. (2016). Why Hillary Clinton couldn't rally the black vote. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/11/why-hillary-clinton-couldnt-rally-the-black-vote-commentary.html

Cummings, W. (2018). Trump at 36 percent approval among African-Americans, new poll finds. Retrieved from

DellaVigna, S., & Kaplan, E. (2007). The Fox News effect: Media bias and voting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 1187–1234.

Dreier, P. (1982). The position of the press in the US power structure. Social Problems, 29(3), 298–310.

Dyson, M. E. (2016). The Black presidency: Barack Obama and the politics of race in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Erlich, J. (2018). Maxine Waters encourages supporters to harass Trump administration officials. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/maxine-waters-trump-officials/index.html

Flood, B. (2018). Maxine Waters wins media award, uses speech to bad-mouth Trump to newspaper publishers: 'I don't like him'. Retrieved from https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/maxine-waters-wins-media-award-uses-speech-to-bad-mouth-trump-to-newspaper-publishers-i-dont-like-him

Fox News. (2018). Diamond and Silk. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6deuXRjLl2s

Jackson, A. P., Davis, D., & Alston, J. K. (2017). Remotivating the Black vote: The effect of low-quality information on Black voters in the 2016 presidential election and how librarians can intervene. The Library Quarterly, 87(3), 236–242.

Kurtzleben, D. (2016). Understanding the Clintons' popularity with Black voters. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2016/03/01/468185698/understanding-the-clintons-popularity-with-black-voters

Robinson, P. (2002). The CNN effect. Routledge.

Seib, P. (2009). Public diplomacy and journalism. American Behavioral Scientist, 52(5), 772–786.

Squires, C. (2009). African Americans and the media. Polity.

Tesler, M. (2018). No, one-third of African Americans don't support Trump. Not even close. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/08/17/no-one-third-of-african-americans-dont-support-trump-not-even-close/