Introduction -- Professionalizing and palatable "blackness" -- Branding and marketing "blackness" -- From stumbling block to stepping stone -- Owning the "ghetto" shows -- Rules of engagement: the politics of race, gender, and sexuality -- Barack and Michelle Obama as signs of progress and threat -- Concluding remarks
Summary
This book explores the written and unwritten requirements Black journalists face in their efforts to get and keep jobs in television news. Informed by interviews with journalists themselves, Lewis examines how raced Black journalists and their journalism organizations process their circumstances and choose to respond to the corporate and institutional constraints they face. She uncovers the social construction and attempted control of "Blackness" in news production and its subversion by Black journalists negotiating issues of objectivity, authority, voice, and appearance along sites of multiple differences of race, gender, and sexuality
