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As discussions surrounding fair and informed journalism continue, it remains clear that many Black Americans are eager to see changes in news coverage that accurately reflect their experiences and perspectives. That perspective became more pronounced with the release of a new report by the Pew Research Center, which sheds light on the perceptions of Black Americans regarding news coverage that often portrays them negatively compared to other racial and ethnic groups.

Based on a comprehensive survey of 4,742 U.S. Black adults conducted from February 22 to March 5, 2023, along with nine online focus groups held between July and August 2022, African Americans have expressed a growing desire for fair and informed reporting. The key findings of the multi-method report provide a nuanced understanding of Black

Americans’ views on news coverage include:

1. Perceptions of Coverage: The report reveals that 63% of Black Americans believe that news coverage about Black people tends to be more negative than that of other racial and ethnic groups. Additionally, more than half of Black adults (57%) feel that news about Black people only covers certain segments of their communities, while 50% think it often lacks essential information. Only 9% believe that the news adequately covers a diverse range of Black experiences and consistently provides the whole story. Worryingly, just 14% of Black Americans are optimistic that fair coverage of Black people will become a reality in their lifetimes, with 38% believing it is unlikely to happen.

2. Steps for Improvement: A significant majority of Black Americans, 76%, emphasize the importance of journalists covering all sides of an issue when reporting on Black people, while 73% stress the necessity of understanding the historical context behind the stories. Roughly half (48%) also call for journalists to advocate for Black people when covering them. Furthermore, 64% of those who have encountered racially insensitive coverage believe that educating all journalists about issues affecting Black Americans would be highly effective in achieving fairer news coverage. A substantial proportion also supports the inclusion of more Black voices as sources (54%), the hiring of more Black individuals as newsroom leaders (53%), and journalists (44%).

3. Newsroom Representation: Many Black Americans believe that Black journalists play a crucial role in reporting race and racial inequality news. Approximately 45% feel that Black journalists excel at covering these issues, with 44% stating that Black journalists better understand them. However, few Black Americans consider the journalist’s race as a key factor in the credibility of a news story, with just 14% believing it is vital for news to come from Black journalists, regardless of the topic.

4. Concerns Across the Black Population: Concerns about negative news coverage are widespread among Black Americans, transcending political affiliations. Both Black Republicans and Black Democrats (including leaners) express similar concerns, with 46% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats agreeing that coverage often stereotypes Black people. This starkly contrasts with the 11% in both groups who believe it does not. Additionally, Black Americans with higher education and income levels tend to hold more negative views regarding the media’s coverage of Black people.

5. The Role of Black Identity: The study reveals that Black Americans’ perceptions of news coverage vary significantly based on their identity. The vast majority (82%) of those who consider being Black highly important to their identity emphasize the importance of journalists understanding the historical context of stories. This number decreases to 55% among those who place less importance on their Black identity.

6. Sources of News and Information: The report also delves into news sources for Black Americans. At least a third of Black Americans report getting news from local news outlets, national news outlets, social media sites, and friends, family, and acquaintances. Notably, 24% state that they often receive news from Black news outlets, with an additional 40% occasionally turning to them.

The margin of sampling error for the survey’s total sample of 4,742 respondents is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

“In 1967, the Kerner Commission – undertaken by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to investigate the causes behind urban riots – took a harsh view on the news media’s stance toward Black Americans,” the report’s researchers wrote. “The commission’s report cited sensationalist and divisive coverage as well as inaccurate and unfair representations of Black communities, concluding that ‘the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring and promoting’ Black people, and ‘the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.’”

The researchers continued: “More than half a century later, there is continued discussion of many of the themes raised in the report. This new study asks Black Americans themselves about their experience with news today, including views around portrayals of Black people in news stories, representation in newsrooms, and where they go and whom they trust for information.”

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President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris held a roundtable discussion inside the Roosevelt Room of the White House with the Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The event included key figures like Dr. Tony Allen, Chair of the Board of Advisors and Delaware State University President, and Mayor Steve Benjamin, Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Biden, humorously recalling their past collaborations, commended Allen’s contributions and emphasized the transformative impact of HBCUs. Allen, highlighting the unprecedented support from the current administration, lauded their $7 billion investment in the Department of Education. He underscored the vital role of HBCUs in enabling low-resourced African American students to ascend to the middle class.

“HBCUs produce 40% of all Black engineers in America, 50% of all Black lawyers, 70% of all Black doctors and dentists, and 80% of all Black judges,” Biden asserted. “And HBCUs are engineers of economic mobility helping to increase the Black middle class. When the middle class does well, everybody does well. The poor have a road up, and the wealthy still do well although they’ve got to start paying their taxes. That’s why it’s critical we invest in these universities.”

During the meeting, Allen revealed a list of recommendations, all centered on four crucial tenets set by President Biden and Vice President Harris:

1. Infrastructure Investment: This encompasses physical and technological infrastructure, aiming to align the quality of living and learning spaces with the top-tier education that HBCUs offer.

2. Research Capacity Building: Dr. Allen emphasized the unique expertise across diverse disciplines in HBCUs, with numerous institutions poised to attain R1 status.

3. Connected Pathways: The President and Vice President’s advocacy for industry collaboration ensures that HBCU students have genuine opportunities from matriculation to graduate studies.

4. HBCU Preservation and Growth: Given their pivotal role in African American students’ upward mobility, preserving and expanding HBCUs remains paramount.
Biden, resonating with Dr. Allen’s sentiments, spotlighted the substantial impact of HBCUs on various professional domains, such as engineering, law, medicine, and judiciary. He stressed that investing in these institutions is not only an investment in the Black community but a step towards fortifying the nation’s overall prosperity.

Addressing misconceptions about funding cuts, Biden reaffirmed his commitment to historic investments in HBCUs, including research allocations and significant increases in Pell Grants. He emphasized the necessity of advanced facilities, particularly laboratories, to bolster competitiveness in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Biden also touched on the urgency of supporting HBCU students through increased Pell Grants, reiterating their vital role in enhancing access to higher education. He said he’s worked for bipartisan support in helping HBCUs. “Just a few months ago, the Speaker of the House and I agreed to spending levels for the government. We were up right to the very edge, almost reneged on our debt, and — that we could fund essential priorities and still cut the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade,” Biden noted.

“Now, a small group of extreme House Republicans, they don’t want to live up to that deal, and everyone in America could be faced with paying the price for that. They’re changing it. We made a deal. We shook hands. We said, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and now they’re reneging on the deal, which is not much of a surprise these days. And the Black community, in particular, is going to suffer if that occurs. For example, a shutdown is going to risk nutrition assistance to nearly 7 million moms and children, and it’s going to disproportionately affect Black families.”

Harris, the first HBCU graduate to ascend to vice president, expressed her deep appreciation for the work of the Board. She underscored HBCUs’ role in cultivating academic excellence and their potential to drive innovation across critical fields, from public health to artificial intelligence.

Harris emphasized the need for diverse perspectives in shaping decisions about emerging technologies, highlighting the importance of HBCU graduates in these discussions. The vice president also stressed the relevance of HBCU voices in media, ensuring comprehensive representation in storytelling.

“I strongly believe — based on experience and knowledge about what our country needs, in terms of its strength and growth and development — that our HBCUs are extraordinary centers of academic excellence and must continue to be supported, not only because of the historical role that they have played in building and helping to contribute to America’s leadership and global leadership, but also because, as the President has said: As we look forward, we know that our HBCUs are also pipelines for very extraordinary young people to enter the fields of work that we require to cure disease, to create that which we have not imagined, to supply us with the innovative approaches that will allow us to continue to work on the strength, prosperity, and security of our nation,” Harris said.

Mayor Benjamin echoed the sentiments, acknowledging the significant challenges HBCUs face, including smaller endowments, infrastructure needs, and a predominantly Pell Grant-eligible student population. He praised the administration’s dedication to addressing these issues.

Biden and Harris both highlighted the profound impact HBCUs have on the nation, emphasizing their role as engines of progress for all American, with the president noting that most HBCUs are land-grant universities.

“Land-grant universities used to be robustly supported by their state legislative bodies. They would support, in some cases, up to 60 percent of the land-grant budget for that university,” Biden stated. “From 1987 to 2000, land-grant universities have lost — Black and white — more than $13 billion in investments from the state — from the states and government to help them. And that has exacerbated the problem — particularly for Black land-grant universities, HBCUs. Everybody does better in the whole United States when the potential of HBCUs is realized. Everybody. I make no apologies for the kind of effort we’re expending on HBCUs.”

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BOSTON (AP) — Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.

“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”

Tran also loves math. This summer, he studied calculus five hours a day with other high schoolers in a program at Northeastern University.

But Tran and his friends are not the norm. Many Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further.

The nation needs people who are good at math, employers say, in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes. They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

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The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

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“The advances in technology that are going to drive where the world goes in the next 50 years are going to come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don’t,” said Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the process of teaching and learning subjects including math.

The Defense Department has called for a major initiative to support education in science, technology, education and math, or STEM. It says there are eight times as many college graduates in these disciplines in China and four times as many engineers in Russia as in the United States.

“This is not an educational question alone,” said Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute think tank. In July, the think tank warned that other nations are challenging America’s technological dominance.

“We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China,” the Aspen report says, calling this a “dangerous” failure and urging decisionmakers to make education a national security priority.

Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — positions that “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data and solve problems” — will increase by more than 30,000 per year through the end of this decade, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. That’s much faster than most other kinds of jobs.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

Tennessee Tech runs a summer camp teaching cybersecurity, which requires math, to high school students. “That lightbulb goes off and they say, ‘That’s why I need to know that,’” Allen said. Computer-related jobs — ranging from software development to semiconductor production — require math, too. Analysts say those fields have or will develop labor shortages.

But most American students aren’t prepared for those jobs. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest. Only one in five college-bound American high school students is prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council.

One result: Students from other countries are preparing to lead these fields. Only one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports. The rest come from abroad. Most will leave the U.S. when they finish their programs.

In the U.S., poor math skills could mean lower salaries for today’s kids. A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2% to 9% less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic.

But it also means the country’s productivity and competitiveness could slide.

“Math just underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s MiSTEM initiative, which tries to get more students into STEM. “It’s extremely important for the future prosperity of our students and communities, but also our entire state.”

In Massachusetts, employers are anticipating a shortage over the next five years of 11,000 workers in the life sciences alone.

“It’s not a small problem,” said Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “We’re just not starting students, particularly students of color and from lower-resourced families, on career paths related to math and computer science and those things in which we need to stay competitive, or starting them early enough.”

The Bridge to Calculus program at Northeastern, where Kevin Tran spent his summer, is one response to that. The 113 participating students were paid $15 an hour, most of it from Boston and its public schools, said the program’s coordinator, Bindu Veetel. The university provided the classroom space and some of the teachers.

The students’ days began at 7:30 a.m., when teacher Jeremy Howland had them run exercises in their heads. “Bada-bing,” Howland said whenever they were right.

Students learned to apply that knowledge in coding, data analysis, robotics and elementary electrical engineering classes.

It’s not just a good deed that Northeastern is doing. Some of the graduates of Bridge to Calculus end up enrolling there and proceeding to its highly ranked computer science and engineering programs, which — like those at other U.S. universities — struggle to attract homegrown talent.

These American high school students said they get why their classmates don’t like math.

“It’s a struggle. It’s constant thinking,” said Steven Ramos, 16, who said he plans to become a computer or electrical engineer instead of following his brother and other relatives into construction work.

But with time, the answers come into focus, said Wintana Tewolde, also 16, who wants to be a doctor. “It’s not easy to understand, but once you do, you see it.”

Peter St. Louis-Severe, 17, said math, to him, is fun. “It’s the only subject I can truly understand, because most of the time it has only one answer,” said St. Louis-Severe, who hopes to be a mechanical or chemical engineer.

Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.

What employers really want “is trainability, the aptitude of people being able to learn the systems and solve problems,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA, an information technology trade association. Other countries, he said, “are dying for the way our kids learn creativity.”

Back in class, the students fielded Howland’s questions about polynomial functions. And after an occasional stumble, they got all the exercises right.

“Bada-bing,” their teacher happily responded.

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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Magic Johnson’s love for his Los Angeles Lakers has kept him from considering ownership of any other NBA team.

The New York Knicks would be the one franchise that could make him have second thoughts.

“I think it would be intriguing,” Johnson said Tuesday. “The only team I would actually probably think about is the New York Knicks.”

Johnson arrived in New York for a speaking engagement at a YMCA from Washington, where the member of the Commanders’ new ownership group watched his NFL team lose to the Buffalo Bills on Sunday.

Once back in Los Angeles, he will gear up for his Dodgers to begin play in baseball’s postseason. But the basketball Hall of Famer repeatedly has passed on opportunities for ownership in the sport he knows best.

Johnson named the Golden State Warriors, Detroit Pistons and Atlanta Hawks as teams he turned down, rather than find himself in competition with the Lakers. The Knicks, though, offer something different.

“I think because of the way fans love basketball you might have to think about that one, because I love coming to New York and going to the Garden and watching the Knicks play,” Johnson said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I love being with fans who are so passionate about their team and the Knick fans are, and they’re smart. They’re smart basketball fans and so that one I would have to think about. I think that other than that, I would probably never think about ever being a part of another franchise.”

Johnson said he hasn’t spoken with Madison Square Garden Executive Chairman James Dolan about the idea and isn’t looking for an opportunity, content to watch the Lakers as a fan after serving as their president of basketball operations for two seasons before resigning in 2019.

But if the conversation did happen, Johnson would listen.

“That one you would really have to think about, in terms of being a minority owner of that team,” he said. “But other than that, I would just stay with the Lakers and even with my role now, just being a fan, I’m happy just doing that with the Lakers because, again, I bleed purple and gold.”

Johnson, who was in charge when the Lakers signed LeBron James, believes they can play for a second NBA title in five years.

“I think they’re going to be the best team in the West this year,” Johnson said.

Johnson, 64, had to retire as a Lakers player in 1991 after contracting HIV. Former NBA Commissioner David Stern allowed him to return and play in the 1992 All-Star Game, a decision Johnson believes helped encourage and educate people in the fight against AIDS.

He remains a passionate advocate for health education and on Tuesday led a discussion about the risks of RSV, a contagious virus affecting the lungs and breathing passages that causes an estimated 14,000 deaths annually in adults 65 and over.

“I’ve always talked about, whether it was HIV, AIDS and now RSV, it’s really important that I come to the people,” he said of the “ Sideline RSV ” campaign from GSK, formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline. “It’s one thing to do a commercial, it’s another thing to be live and in person and shake people’s hands and really tell them: ‘Look, get your physicals. If you’re feeling something, go to the doctor,’ because a lot of times what happens, we don’t go when we first feel something, right, and RSV, you can be a healthy person and don’t even know you have it.”

Johnson told the audience that early detection helped him when he was infected with HIV. He said he gets a physical every January and receives recommended vaccinations, with one for RSV now available.

“I’m trying to be here for a long time,” he said, “so sign a brother up.”

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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA

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