The Black Media and the Post-Civil Rights Presidency

• In Event: The US Presidency through the Lens of Race Relations

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide evidence that African-American media coverage of President Barack Obama was based in Black protectionism. I assess whether the African-American media was more sympathetic to President Barack Obama than his immediate predecessors in the post-civil rights era. I will use President Barack Obama’s EOS score as the dependent variable and Black unemployment and the Black/White economic gap as the independent variables to assess the factors that support my hypothesis. I will use time series methodology to measure the stationarity of the variables, casual relationships, and autoregression found within the data. This paper will act as an extension to Tillery and Walton’s findings regarding EOS and presidents, while using a time series methodology, and assessing whether there is evidence of Black protectionism in the African-American media’s coverage of President Barack Obama.

Author

• Justin Zimmerman, Northwestern University