The Associated Press earlier this year shifted a national race and ethnicity reporter to its 2020 election team, an acknowledgment that race has become a defining element of President Donald Trump’s campaigns.
That beat, assigned to reporter Errin Haines Whack, is fairly unusual among major news organizations. And media outlets’ approach to covering race is frustrating some prominent journalists of color at a time when Trump’s language — as he recently called a civil rights leader a “con man” and referring to a predominantly black district, which includes much of Baltimore, as a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” this week — is threatening to define the campaign.
Some journalists of color are growing increasingly vocal in their push for media outlets to take race head-on in political coverage — and they are publicly highlighting the ways they say Trump’s words and the semantic debates over whether to call them “racist” weigh on them personally.
Continue reading at Politico here, courtesy of Michael Calderone.