Do you know the McMuffin man?
McDonald’s Sausage McMuffins are not the breakfast of champions. They’re the breakfast of white supremacists, according to The Atlantic.
Coverage of the insurrection at the Capitol has varied wildly among outlets and reporters, revealing, yet again, the media’s failure to adequately cover the white supremacy that existed in the United States long before the rise of President Donald Trump. Journalists of color remain unsurprised.
Some have made comparisons to “third-world riots,” like Jake Tapper, who commented, “I feel like I’m talking to a correspondent reporting from Bogotá,” ignoring the reality that mobs had not stormed the Colombian congress for decades, and that America has often incited the violence that prompts people to organize. Alex Kapitan urged people to avoid the words “crazy” and “insane” when describing the violence at the Capitol, given it was a “logical result of Trump’s rhetoric and white supremacy culture.”
Our Body Politic host Farai Chideya called out FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver as one of the editors who has “acted like they were protecting the truth from her” to demonstrate how Black journalists’ attempts to cover racial resentment and white nationalism have been routinely shut down. The Associated Press, in its guidance for covering the insurrection, said that reporters should avoid expression of “personal opinion about these political events.”
“Racism has always been about power,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones. So has white supremacy. It’s time for industry leaders to recognize elevating largely upper middle-class white male staff gives them the power to shape a narrative — devoid of historical, class and race analysis — that leaves people surprised at the insurrection.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/01/do-you-know-the-mcmuffin-man/