Poynter College Media Project

The staff of the A&T Register
Project Lead – Alexis Wray

The Black Narrative examines how local media outlets in Greensboro, N.C. cover North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (N.C. A&T).

N.C. A&T is the largest public HBCU (historically black college/university) in the nation and just like other HBCUs, N.C. A&T holds a lot of history. N.C. A&T is well known for the A&T Four (four students of N.C. A&T that started the sit-in movement 1960 at Woolworth’s Lunch Counter), as well as the 1969 Greensboro Uprising; along with these two prominent moments in history are stories of activism, bravery, history, and black individuals whose stories are untold, misconstrued, unbalanced, and lost.

N.C. A&T receives local media coverage for a variety of events, including a recently announced $9 million STEM grant and the two-time MEAC-champion-winning football team.

However, when crimes occur near campus, the local media outlets are quick to link the crime to both the campus and the students. Such coverage seems to target the school’s location and perpetuates a stereotype that N.C. A&T is a dangerous university.

The purpose of our project became clear once we realized the narratives that were being forgotten and misconstrued by the local media. The consistent lack of the black perspective in their coverage to us now means we could become a part of the solution and change how the media portrays the “Black Narrative.”

Project Findings

We conducted an in-depth media analysis for the calendar year 2018 of crimes near our campus. We added five additional categories to the research because we did not find what we sought. Our initial search term was “crime.”

When we did not find that, we broadened the scope of our investigation to include these categories and to include coverage of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) to our research to give a wider pool of comparison:

Athletics/sports
Arts/Clubs/Entertainment
General/Broader topic
Homecoming
Academic

With this, we found that local media outlets were not only linking those few crimes to N.C. A&T by using locator words like, near and close to, but that they were covering the athletic achievements of the university more than anything else.

To us, it is obvious that there is a bias in media coverage of communities of color. Media tend to either criminalize black communities or only highlight athletic achievements based on stereotypical implications.

Solutions

Apart from what we have found and suspected, we want to ensure that storytelling can evolve into more balanced coverage for N.C. A&T; therefore we present four solutions we feel will not only offer a second chance for better coverage but suggest for more inclusive student stories.

The A&T Register will create content that adds depth to the perspectives of the school represented in local news outlets content
1. This partnership has already started with the News&Record and will continue to be upheld with the cooperation of the editor of the News&Record and the editor A&T Register.
2. A link to the first article in partnership with the News&Recordhttps://www.greensboro.com/news/local_news/jesse-jackson-reflects-on-sit-in-at-greensboro-woolworth-s/article_83e67a1d-f9b7-536d-b3b2-6db33c06b273.html

2. NC A&T students, voice to your community boards, advisory boards, & editorial focus groups to help ensure that your coverage is thorough and more representative.

3. Improvement of local media outlets online archive system.

4. Share coded language dictionary with publications to inform them of words that allude to stereotypes.
https://ncatregister.com/15656/the-yard/solutions-black-narrative/