‘Creaturely Racism’ in the Media: Issues and solutions for speciesism in the Anthropocene
Racism and speciesism, are deeply interconnected and may continue to persist when challenged separately. What is needed is a common frame of media ethics that addresses the diverse ways in which the culture, politics, and histories of systemic racism and speciesism intersect in mediated forms of communication. This common frame is important because it will allow us to create popular, more successful resistance to both forms of prejudice.
FRONTIERS IN COMMUNICATION: Decades of political struggles and social pressure from enlightened publics have forced the media to heed its ethical role in reflecting and creating discourses on racial minorities and other vulnerable populations. One of the last holdouts is admitting nonhuman animals into the group of vulnerable populations. Today, ethical media guidelines are freely available for best practices in reporting on animals as sentient beings (ASB) . Turning such guidelines into common practice, though, has faced many challenges. Prejudices like racism and speciesism continue to obstruct the creation of an accountable, responsible media.
For instance, in 2021, most US media broadcast the image of a manatee with the word ‘Trump’ etched into her back, without any contextual explication of either the suffering involved in the action of etching or her belonging to a species that has become vulnerable. This shows us how evening television news and social media spread unethical, inhumane accounts of ASB as ‘humorous’ memes… These two prejudices, racism and speciesism, are deeply interconnected and may continue to persist when challenged separately. What we need today, then, is a new popular direction that goes beyond fighting each prejudice separately…
Specifically, we need a common frame of media ethics that addresses the diverse ways in which the culture, politics, and histories of systemic racism and speciesism intersect in mediated forms of communication. This common frame is important because it will allow us to create popular, more successful resistance to both forms of prejudice. The value of this Research Topic, then, comes from exploring how the study of mediated communication helps us understand our world and the increasing role technology plays in it…
In particular, contributors can foster such connections by building on the important work by Nuria Almiron, Carrie P. Freeman, Carol Adams, and other leaders in the multidisciplinary area of critical media/critical cultural studies in the Anthropocene. Contributors can also build on the research of… legal scholars like Josh Milburn and Alasdair Cochrane, whose works focus on ‘biotic’ or ‘creaturely racism,’ to consider how to incorporate nuanced, respectful, and ethical perspectives in portrayals of sentient beings (aside or beyond human animals) in the present context of the racialized social underpinnings of media. SOURCE…
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