The Media Needs Black Trauma More Than It Needs Black Triumph

Here is a story the media will never tell, because there is no money in it. Prince George’s County, Maryland, is the wealthiest majority-Black county in the United States. Its median household income exceeds $90,000. Its homeownership rate is over 62 percent. Its public schools send students to every elite university in the country. It has shopping centers and medical complexes and golf courses and gated communities where Black families live in houses worth $600,000 to over a million dollars. It is twenty minutes from the newsrooms of Washington, D.C. — CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, NPR, all within driving distance. And in the thirty years I have spent in media, I have never — not once — seen a major network do a prime-time feature on Prince George’s County as a model of Black achievement. The cameras go to Baltimore, forty minutes north. They do not come to Bowie, or Mitchellville, or Fort Washington. There is a reason for that. The reason is economics, and the economics are brutal.

The media does not have a bias toward truth. The media has a bias toward engagement. Engagement is driven by emotion. The most potent emotions are fear, anger, and grief. And in the American media ecosystem, no subject generates those emotions more reliably than Black suffering. A Black man killed by police is a five-day story. A Black neighborhood with a thriving business district is not a story at all. A Black teenager shot on a street corner is the lead segment. A Black teenager who wins a science fair is a thirty-second kicker before the weather. This is not conspiracy. It is business. And business has consequences.

The Data on Distortion

In 2000, Travis Dixon and Daniel Linz published one of the most comprehensive content analyses of race and television news ever conducted. They examined a random sample of local television news programming in Los Angeles and Orange County and measured the representation of racial groups as perpetrators and victims of crime relative to their actual crime statistics. Their findings were not ambiguous. Black people were significantly overrepresented as criminal perpetrators in television news coverage compared to their actual arrest rates. White people were significantly overrepresented as victims. The effect was a systematic distortion: television news portrayed a world in which Black people committed more crime, and white people suffered more from it, than reality warranted.

Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki expanded this analysis in The Black Image in the White Mind, a study that examined network news coverage, local news, entertainment programming, and advertising. Their finding: across all categories, Black Americans were portrayed in a narrower range of roles than any other racial group. When Black people appeared in news coverage, they appeared predominantly in stories about crime, poverty, and social dysfunction. Stories about Black professional achievement, Black family life, Black community institutions, and Black economic success were statistically negligible.

The numbers from more recent research have not improved. A 2017 study by Color of Change and the Norman Lear Center at USC examined a full week of news coverage across every local television station in New York and Los Angeles. Their findings: Black people constituted 51 percent of suspects shown in crime stories across New York stations, despite comprising 23 percent of those actually arrested for crimes in the city. In Los Angeles, Black people were shown as suspects at rates nearly double their actual arrest rates. Meanwhile, stories about Black people in non-criminal contexts — as business owners, community leaders, parents, professionals — were virtually absent.

The Economics of Black Pain

Why does this distortion persist? Because it is profitable. The foundational rule of American media, documented across decades of audience research, is simple: fear sells. And in the American imagination, shaped by three centuries of racial hierarchy, Black bodies are the most efficient delivery mechanism for fear.

A 2014 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrated that simply seeing a Black face activates threat-related neural pathways in white viewers at measurably higher rates than seeing a white face in identical contexts. This is not a commentary on individual racism. It is a commentary on what media exposure has done to the American brain over decades. When the primary context in which white Americans see Black Americans is crime coverage, the association becomes neurological. The media did not create American racism. But it has industrialized it — turned it into a stimulus-response loop that generates engagement, and therefore advertising revenue, and therefore profit.

Consider the business model in explicit terms. A local television station in a major market generates between $30 million and $100 million in annual advertising revenue. That revenue is directly tied to ratings. Ratings are driven by viewership. Viewership is driven by the emotional intensity of content. Crime stories are the most emotionally intense content available to a news operation, and they are the cheapest to produce: a reporter, a camera operator, police tape, a crying relative. The cost per minute of crime coverage is a fraction of the cost of investigative reporting, long-form features, or community profiles. Black crime stories are the most cost-effective content a local news station can air. They are cheap to produce and they generate maximum emotional response. That is the equation. It is not complicated. It is not hidden. It is the business model of American local news, and Black people are its raw material.

The Trauma Porn Economy

The distortion extends beyond news into entertainment — the industry I have spent thirty years in, the industry I know from the inside. Consider the films about Black life that have received the highest critical acclaim and the most prestigious awards in the last two decades:

12 Years a Slave (2013): slavery. Precious (2009): sexual abuse, poverty, illiteracy. Moonlight (2016): poverty, drug addiction, absent father, homophobic violence. The Color Purple (2023 remake): domestic violence, sexual abuse, racism. Fruitvale Station (2013): police killing. When They See Us (2019): wrongful imprisonment. Selma (2014): racist violence and political oppression. Just Mercy (2019): wrongful conviction. Judas and the Black Messiah (2021): assassination by the state.

Every one of these films was well-made. Several were brilliant. But notice the pattern: the Black experience that Hollywood considers worth telling is, overwhelmingly, the Black experience of suffering. The Academy Awards have never nominated a film about a Black family that simply works — a married couple raising children, building a business, navigating the ordinary challenges of middle-class life. There is no Oscar-nominated film about Prince George’s County. There is no Oscar-nominated film about the Black engineer at NASA (until Hidden Figures, which was the exception that proves the rule, and which the industry treated as a novelty rather than a template). There is no Oscar-nominated film about the Black teacher who transforms a school without a white savior arriving to help.

The industry has a term for this. They call it “prestige.” Black suffering is prestige content. Black success is not. A screenplay about a Black man wrongfully imprisoned will attract A-list talent and festival invitations. A screenplay about a Black man who builds a successful plumbing company and sends three children to college will attract nothing. It will not be produced. It will not be funded. It will not be seen. Because suffering is cinematic and success is boring — unless the success belongs to a white person, in which case it is inspirational.

The Wakanda Paradox

Black Panther (2018) grossed $1.35 billion worldwide. It was, at the time, the highest-grossing solo superhero film in history. It was the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It generated cultural euphoria in the Black community on a scale that had no precedent in modern cinema. And the core of its appeal was a simple, devastating insight: the most commercially successful Black film in history was a fantasy, because Hollywood could not imagine real Black excellence.

Wakanda — a technologically advanced, culturally rich, economically self-sufficient African nation that had never been colonized — was not based on a real place. It was based on an absence: the absence, in the American cultural imagination, of any model for Black civilization that did not include suffering. The audiences who wept in theaters were not weeping for a fictional kingdom. They were weeping because they had never been offered a vision of Black life that was not defined by pain. Wakanda was what Black triumph looked like when it was finally freed from the obligation to be a response to white oppression. And it had to be set in a fantasy world because the real world’s media infrastructure cannot accommodate that vision.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” The New York Times Book Review (1962)

The thing that must be faced is this: the most powerful storytelling apparatus in human history — the American media and entertainment industry — has constructed a narrative about Black life that is functionally a prison. The walls of the prison are made of trauma. The ceiling is made of tragedy. And the guards are the editorial decisions, the programming choices, and the funding mechanisms that ensure the only Black stories that get told are stories of suffering. Not because those stories are not real — they are — but because they are the only stories treated as real.

What It Does to Black Children

George Gerbner, the communications scholar who spent forty years studying the effects of television on human consciousness, developed what he called “cultivation theory” in 1976. The theory is simple and its implications are vast: people who consume large amounts of media gradually adopt the worldview that media presents. Heavy television viewers come to believe that the world is more violent, more dangerous, and more hostile than it actually is. Gerbner called this the “Mean World Syndrome.”

Now apply cultivation theory to a Black child growing up in America. The media she consumes tells her the following story: Black people are disproportionately criminal. Black neighborhoods are disproportionately dangerous. Black families are disproportionately broken. Black history is disproportionately painful. The stories that receive awards, attention, and cultural validation are stories of Black suffering. The Black people who appear on the news are suspects, victims, and protesters. The Black people who appear in prestige entertainment are enslaved, abused, imprisoned, or killed.

What does this child internalize? Not the reality of Black life in America — which includes millions of functioning families, thriving businesses, successful professionals, and stable communities — but the media representation of Black life, which is a curated selection of the worst outcomes filtered through an editorial apparatus that profits from fear and grief. Cultivation theory predicts, and research confirms, that this child will develop a diminished sense of possibility, a heightened sense of threat, and a constricted vision of what her own life can become.

This is not theoretical. A 2012 study published in Communication Research found that television exposure was associated with lower self-esteem among Black children, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, family structure, and other variables. The mechanism is straightforward: when the dominant images of people who look like you are images of failure, dysfunction, and victimhood, your sense of what is possible for people who look like you contracts. You do not need to be explicitly told you are inferior. The images do the work for you, hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

The Cameras That Never Come

Let me tell you about the neighborhoods the cameras never visit, because I have been to them, and they exist, and their existence is a rebuke to every media narrative about Black America.

Baldwin Hills, California. Median household income: over $70,000. Homeownership rate: over 70 percent. A neighborhood of Black professionals — doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives — that has existed since the 1960s. It is sometimes called “the Black Beverly Hills.” It is fifteen minutes from every major news studio in Los Angeles. No prime-time feature. No documentary. No series.

DeKalb County, Georgia. Home to a substantial Black middle and upper-middle class. Black median household income exceeds the national median for all races. Corporate headquarters, medical centers, thriving commercial districts. It is in metropolitan Atlanta, where CNN is headquartered. The cameras go to the West Side. They do not come to Stonecrest or Lithonia.

Charles County, Maryland. Majority-Black. Median household income over $100,000. One of the wealthiest majority-Black jurisdictions in the country. Excellent schools, low crime, high homeownership. It is an hour from Washington, D.C. It does not exist in the national media narrative. It has never existed there. Because its existence contradicts the story that the media needs Black America to be.

The Alternative Exists — It Is Just Not Funded

The counternarrative is not absent. It is underfunded. Afrotech, which covers Black innovation and technology entrepreneurship, has built an audience of millions without a single story about Black victimhood. Black Enterprise, founded in 1970 by Earl Graves Sr., has spent over fifty years documenting Black business success, wealth-building strategies, and economic achievement. The Grio, Blavity, and Essence all include coverage of Black achievement alongside coverage of Black challenges. Local journalists in every major city write stories about Black entrepreneurs, Black educators, and Black community leaders that never make it beyond the local section.

These outlets exist at a fraction of the budget and reach of the mainstream media organizations that dominate the narrative. Afrotech’s annual budget would not fund a single week of programming at CNN. Black Enterprise’s entire operation could be run on what a major network spends on one prime-time special about racial injustice. The asymmetry is not accidental. The market rewards trauma. It does not reward triumph. And the market shapes what gets produced, what gets seen, and therefore what gets believed.

But the alternative matters, because it demonstrates what is possible. When a Black child sees a Black entrepreneur on Afrotech who raised $10 million in venture funding, that image competes with the image of the Black suspect on the eleven o’clock news. When a Black teenager reads about a Black CEO in Black Enterprise who built a company from nothing, that narrative competes with the narrative of Black helplessness that pervades prestige entertainment. The competition is unequal — the trauma narrative has a hundred times the reach — but it exists, and its existence proves that the audience for Black triumph is real, large, and willing to pay for it.

The Responsibility Within

I would be dishonest if I did not also say this: the Black community bears a portion of the responsibility for its own media representation. The most-streamed music in the Black community glorifies the same dysfunction that the news cameras exploit. The most-watched reality television in the Black community — the Love & Hip Hop franchise, the Real Housewives of Atlanta — presents Black life as a carnival of conflict, infidelity, and material obsession. These shows are produced by Black executives, starred in by Black performers, and consumed by Black audiences in numbers that dwarf the viewership of Afrotech or Black Enterprise.

The media gives people what they consume. If the Black community consumed stories of Black achievement at the same rate it consumes stories of Black dysfunction, the market would respond. It always does. The audience is not powerless. The remote control is a voting device. The streaming subscription is an editorial decision. Every hour spent watching a reality show about Black people fighting is an hour not spent watching — or demanding — a documentary about Black people building. The demand shapes the supply. This is not a comfortable truth. But it is a truth, and ignoring it because it is uncomfortable is how we arrived at this crisis in the first place.

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” — James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Breaking the Frame

The solution is not to pretend that Black suffering does not exist. It exists. It is documented. It is real. Police brutality is real. Mass incarceration is real. Housing discrimination is real. These stories must be told, and told with the full moral weight they deserve. The solution is to refuse the exclusivity of the suffering narrative — to demand, with the same intensity that we demand coverage of injustice, coverage of the communities that work, the families that function, the businesses that thrive, the schools that educate, the neighborhoods that are safe.

The solution is to build what the mainstream media will not build: media infrastructure that tells the full story of Black America, not the curated trauma reel that generates advertising revenue. The tools exist. The platforms exist. The audience exists. What does not yet exist at sufficient scale is the will — the decision, made by enough Black creators, investors, and consumers, to fund and support media that reflects the reality of their lives rather than the distortion of their suffering.

What would happen if the cameras went to Prince George’s County? What would happen if the prime-time special was about how Black families in Charles County built median incomes over $100,000? What would happen if the prestige film was about a Black couple who stayed married for forty years, raised three children, built a business, and retired with dignity? What would happen if a Black child turned on the television and saw, not suffering, not victimhood, not trauma, but a reflection of what her own life could be?

I will tell you what would happen. The fear would contract. The possibility would expand. The Mean World Syndrome that George Gerbner identified would begin to weaken its grip on the Black imagination. And a child who had been taught, hour by hour, image by image, that her people were defined by their pain would begin to understand that her people are defined by what they build — and that the building has never stopped, not for a single day, no matter how hard the cameras have tried to look the other way.

A people whose story is told exclusively through suffering will eventually believe suffering is their story. But a people who take control of their own narrative — who build their own media, support their own storytellers, and demand that their full humanity be represented — will discover something the cameras never intended them to see: that triumph is not the exception in Black America. It is the rule. The exception is the coverage.