Too White or Too Woke?
by Mariano Avila
Illustration created by Mariano Avila using DALL-E text to image generator
Pick a side: woke or not! That seems to be the framing that folks in partisan media want us all to adopt. NPR got dragged by Uri Berliner in his piece in the Free Press. The essay sparked an online backlash against Public Media among right wing influencers and trolls.
Trust in PBS remains high, but less and less folks under fifty are tuning in according to thePBS 2023 viewership report. Digital is growing, but won’t make up the difference with current trends.
So, is all this really a matter of whiteness or wokeness? Are identity politics to blame? And why am I comparing viewership decline with polemic framing?
The answer to both, I’d like to suggest, has to do with a lack of authentic relationships between many stations and the marginalized communities in their coverage area—including white ones.
Race plays a role in all things America, but the framework that we have to choose between white-centric and woke-centric storytelling misses the point and frankly hurts our ability to serve our audiences. I believe local stations have the best tools to engage marginalized and hyper-segmented audiences because they’re on the ground. That’s the system’s answer. Here’s a case study:
Case Study
In 2015, dual-licensee, WGVU in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hired me to develop their “inclusion” beat. It was largely defined around race and funded through a WK Kellogg Foundation grant. For a couple of years, I did it—covering police brutality, infant mortality among Black families, gentrification, the Standing Rock demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline, etc. I produced daily radio stories for NPR and hosted a monthly town hall for PBS under the brand Mutually Inclusive (going stronger now under Kylie Ambu).
The town halls brought people to our studio and made the station’s presence more visible throughout the community– conservative, progressive, white, and visible minorities. I started getting tips from all over the region, our shows started community debates and even prompted a city investigation into absentee landlords.
To help me understand the ever-changing landscape of inclusion and equity, I enlisted a small group of community advisors. They did not get editorial input, but they gave me insightful feedback on my work. One of my advisors, Breanna Alexander, who now heads DEI efforts at the Director’s Guild of America, asked me to consider what it might look like if I got out of the way of the very people whose stories I was trying to tell. Meaning, if I’m not part of a particular community–trans, Black women was her suggestion–if I’m not part of that community, how do I know the best questions to ask, what information to leave out, or what the best framing is? How do I get out of the way of their story?
In 2018, we produced a year-long media lab to train leaders from marginalized communities to become hosts and producers of their own shows. Rishi Singh, a Sikh business man from Michigan, took us to a monastic Gurdwara in England to host an interfaith conversation. Lin Bardwell, an urban, Native mother, reconnected with her ancestral lifeways exploring food sovereignty. Christine Mwangi, a Kenyan-American podcaster, used her immigration story to highlight differences between being a Black American from Africa and African American. In George Walker III’s cooking show, the young sommelier explored culture one ingredient, one dish, and one immigrant at a time. And Alice Jasper, a young, biracial woman from Brooklyn, organized outdoor expeditions to confront the historical reasons people of color don’t participate in outdoor recreation.
These shows created opportunities for WGVU to develop relationships with communities they had never covered before. Being that the shows were pilots, we didn’t put an engagement strategy together beyond the production. That was a key missed opportunity that I learned from. In 2020 COVID hit, killing all hopes of developing these shows further.
Still, Alice Jasper spent the next three years building up her outdoor community despite the the end of the grant, the shows being stalled, and other setbacks. Her show was just green lit for a full season at WGVU this year, based largely on her persistence and the authentic relationships or audiences, she’s built. With the right engagement strategy they can leverage her show to become sustainable and possibly easy to syndicate.
But wait, I implied that one doesn't have to accept the white vs woke framing, didn’t I?
White vs Woke
In 2021, I left WGVU for Milwaukee PBS and landed in the middle of a huge uproar. The station, a university licensee, had been told to halt all major productions. This was interpreted as the cancellation of a show called Around The Corner, which had better local numbers than syndicated shows and made Milwaukee PBS the most locally watched station in the country.
John McGivern, a white man in his sixties, hosted Around The Corner, featuring small towns and fancy homes in predominantly white areas--some quite rural. Reading the comments, much of the public outcry regarding the show’s halted production seemed to come largely from white folks, some very conservative, even if it wasn’t targeting them particularly.
The common thread between the shows we produced in West Michigan and Milwaukee’s Around The Corner is that they all told stories that spoke to a specific demographic. More importantly, they were built on authentic relationships. I contend that all content is political, but it doesn’t have to be about race or politics to be representative of the cultural truths its audience will recognize.
According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, over half of their radio and TV station grantees are considered rural.
My wife’s family is a large clan of cherry farmers in northern Michigan. Salt of the earth. They have been in their tight-knit community for about ten generations. I am an immigrant from the biggest city in our hemisphere– Mexico City. I lean progressive, and they’d mostly tell you they’re conservative. Yet when they learned I’d start working for PBS and NPR, they sent me a slew of leads and story ideas. They trusted me because we have a real relationship. They were willing to mine their network for ideas even if some of them didn’t listen to NPR regularly.
Their willingness to connect with my network made me ask: what would it look like if NPR and PBS stations were serious about engaging rural folks with a conservative worldview and racially homogenous communities? What if we were equally serious about engaging Native communities, religious minorities, or marginalized groups that our team of producers aren’t part of?
What if Public Media stations had authentic relationships with the many communities in their region and their content showed it?
If I’m Serious
If I was serious about this, I’d start as I did in Michigan. I’d foster relationships with advisors to find producers and hosts who could create the content we should be airing. Content designed from the ground up to build authentic relationships with their community. Public Media stations need to produce more seasons of appealing, locally-produced shows around which we can build an ecosystem of engagement.
In the newsroom, I would hire reporters to focus on rural communities as well as diverse journalists focused on racially marginalized communities. WGBH recruited a team centering diversity in Boston. WHYY, in Philadelphia, launched N.I.C.E to pair community members acting as reporters with trained journalists in their newsroom–ensuring both authenticity and journalistic standards.
On a budget, I’d establish ongoing partnerships with publications or journalists working within the communities I need to engage–local newspapers or news sites from Hispanic, Hmong, MiddleEastern, Bosinan, Ethiopian communities. I would do the same with small, rural publications.
With bigger budgets, host media labs like the one I organized in Michigan. It’s pivotal that we support leaders producing content for their own communities.
We need to be culturally competent before We can be authentically credible.
If you are well connected already in your community: congrats! You probably already know who to talk to to get started. Get your advisors, have them identify good candidates, vet them, audition them, invest in them, and organize work teams around them. Then make good on your promise to create and support their content.
Parting Shots and Tips
There is also much to be said about the irreversible trend of individuals vs brands, and about launching ecosystems vs products but those are different articles.
If I can leave you with anything it is this: an authentic engagement strategy with the different communities you serve will prove you don’t have to pick one community over another. White vs woke is a false dichotomy. Public Media is better than that. Let’s keep it that way.
