This story was originally published at The Objective, a nonprofit newsroom examining systems of power and inequity in journalism.
I am from a city that claims to influence everything. For better or worse, it's true — Atlanta really does influence everything. We are home to the hip-hop epicenter of the world. We are the cradle of the historic Civil Rights Movement. We have been known as the "Black Mecca" since the 1970s and, more recently, have become the "Hollywood of the South." Atlanta is certainly one of the largest cultural hubs and exporters; and the same can be said of the South as a region.
Nearly a decade into my writing career, as an Atlanta-based journalist, I've become accustomed to national media turning a blind eye to the South.
As one of the first journalists to report on Cop City and the Stop Cop City movement, mostly through Atlanta-based outlet Mainline, I spent many hours over the last four years reaching out to bigger outlets, mainstream news reporters, and writing pitch emails, which largely met with silence until the violent police killing of 26-year-old climate activist Tortuguita in January 2023.
It showed me what the country thinks of us in the South and "our" problems. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois said, "As the South goes, so goes the nation." Like Cop City, each horrific headline in the news maps onto one that had already occurred in the South and was ignored.
Last month, President Donald Trump said American cities should be used to train the military — the same purpose reporters, researchers, and organizers identified in Cop City, which included a mock city for militarized police training. Over 80 similar facilities are now being planned across the U.S. after the first multi-million dollar one was built in Atlanta, sitting on hundreds of acres of destroyed forest land.
On October 15, the Justice Department brought its first federal terrorism case in the administration's crackdown on antifascist protesters (colloquially called "antifa") — a path significantly carved by the Georgia Attorney General's sweeping racketeering and conspiracy indictment, which included domestic terrorism charges, against 61 protesters. (Prior to the indictment in August 2023, over 40 people were charged with domestic terrorism for their protest against Cop City.)
And on Atlanta soil, Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara became the first journalist to be detained and ultimately deported by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement after being apprehended for livestreaming police activity at a mass protest. Though some of the top free press organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) were behind him, a glaring void of national media coverage around Guevara's case remained. While the national mainstream media clamored around Jimmy Kimmel to cover the dangerous implications of his censorship, Guevara sat in a detention facility.
ICE has successfully detained and deported a journalist for the first time on U.S. soil, and the national media barely blinked an eye or informed the public. But this geographical bias in mainstream and legacy media against the South isn't new, said four other born-and-raised Southern journalists and authors — Da'Shaun Harrison (publisher at Scalawag Magazine, originally from Wilmington, N.C.), Tea Troutman (editor at Scalawag Magazine, originally from Macon and Atlanta, Ga.), Neesha Powell-Ingabire (movement journalist and cultural organizer, originally from Brunswick, Ga.), and Rae Garringer (audio producer and oral historian, originally from West Virginia). My conversations with them have been edited and arranged into an oral history format below.
We need history to understand geographical bias against the South
Da'Shaun Harrison: I think history helps us explain the media landscape, because we have always witnessed the Black South in particular be engaged in this way. There is no way to talk about the South without thinking about or talking about Blackness, because of slavery. There is no point in our history wherein the South was not engaged as something to be disciplined or to be whipped while also thinking about us as folks who are supposed to be the savior.
People have a real misunderstanding of the South and I think history helps us explain this relationship to the South through thinking about our relationship to slavery. When we hear Du Bois say and others repeat, "So goes the South, so goes the nation," it is because there is no nation, there is no U.S., there is no world without slavery.
This world-making capacity comes online through the making of the slave; and there is no making of the slave, there is no world-making capacity without the South. And so people have this disinterest in the South because they're either trying to separate themselves from slavery or remove it from their own memory … this sort of mis-memory of slavery to get rid of any sort of history that could be associated with the South. But again, you can't disassociate the South from slavery, and therefore, you can't talk about the South without talking about slavery. And people don't like doing that.
Tea Troutman: What always comes to mind is this double-edged sword. The Black South is the lineage of sharecroppers, or down-home Southern cooking. I think in a movement sense, too, a lot of people forget the South is a militant space, which is a big talking point amongst the Left, trying to decry that we aren't the sanitized, pacified version of the MLK politics that gets circulated. People think the South's politics is just the civil rights movement. I feel like we are constantly having to poke holes through that bias. In terms of narrative and media, we're seen as the frontline of disaster, the frontline of disinvestment … the South is seen as the place that everybody has to always come into and save and tell these horror stories, which is also consistent with how we think of the global south, too.
Harrison: There is this relationship that people outside the South have where they believe southerners are both the heart of America's "downfall" and are simultaneously America's savior. It's something imposed onto the South while at the same time this complete dissociation from the South happens.
Rae Garringer: In Appalachia, there's many cultures and I try to resist this kind of monolithic flattening that happens both internally and externally by national media. National coverage is so focused on electoral dynamics and red and blue, whereas the way that people interact with each other one-to-one as neighbors here has a lot of really beautiful expansive power in it. That mutual aid is built into rural communities and how they've always survived.
And some really incredible radical histories within the region, like the West Virginia mine wars, which were the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history, aren't taught in public schools. There's such incredible histories and ongoing realities of resistance here, but that history gets erased. And for a long time, the only media you could find that had anything to do with queer people in rural areas was about the murder of queer and trans people. There's so much about this place that isn't about these really restricted and flattened and oversimplified narratives of tragedy and violence.
Neesha Powell-Ingabire: There are just so many different movements happening down here that don't get any national coverage at all, because national mainstream outlets just simply do not know about them. And the people in their newsrooms do not come from historically oppressed communities.
When they do hear about it, the movement has usually already been happening for years … I feel like it's been that way since the civil rights movement. In the South, we've always been fighting, even though it's been erased. We've always had blueprints for resistance here. We have so much to teach the rest of the country.
When national media is present, it oversimplifies
Troutman: I always argue that pop culture is Southern culture, just refined. Whether it be our rich histories in terms of politics, music, or media culture, people mine the South for its resources, and not just its natural resources. There is no American industrialism without the cultural and natural resources you mine from the South. So I think that dynamic makes both the structure of abandonment — the idea we need to always be saved — and the way that the South is only good when people need to march down here and mine us for our wealth, while also exploiting people via their labor. The people of the South are never invested in long-term; it's only invested in enough to get the story.
Powell-Ingabire: The things I've reported about like reproductive justice, abortion bans, fake clinics, environmental racism in coastal Georgia, the displacement of Gullah Geechee culture and the destruction of their land… they do not get covered enough. And when they get covered by mainstream, national, or corporate outlets, they don't have the full context. It's essentially parachute journalism, which ends up causing a lot of harm, because they don't know the full story, they don't know the community.
That's something different about my reporting — I'm actually a part of these communities and these movements I'm reporting on. Southern media in general is so under-resourced, underfunded, neglected, and overlooked. And when it finally is covered, it's not necessarily covered in accurate, evidence-based ways.
Garringer: I rarely feel good about national media coverage of my home. It's rare that I read or listen to something in a national news source that I feel like gets it right. Maybe this is burnout from years of producing nuanced, community-based content in and from the region about rural people that tries to add nuance and humanity … but I'm not actually sure that the national media business model wants rural stories that are accurate. I don't know if the market wants it.
Powell-Ingabire: Folks from historically oppressed communities in the south haven't had the opportunity to tell our stories. There's just so much rich Black and Indigenous history here in the South that is just undertold. When I was writing my book, I found out about so many different acts of rebellion and resistance that had happened on the coast of Georgia that Black folks down there have made happen.
From the sources I was reading and looking at and being exposed to [in school], you would think that Black people … just let this racism happen and they never fought back. But that's so not true. And also the fact that there are Indigenous folks in the south is something that is often erased.
The national media ecosystem is extractive by design
Garringer: There are so many people in rural Appalachia creating documentary, storytelling, and journalism work who cannot get funding to make a living to do this in our own communities. I do think working with local media makers and smaller-scale media outfits that exist in a supportive way is what I would like to see … as opposed to this extractive model that's existed for a long time.
Harrison: I think to understand national media, you have to understand the state apparatus. In order for the state to exist, there has to be media narrativizing the power, the success, and the authority of the state … national mainstream media or legacy media functions as a part of the state.
It is part of the state apparatus; therefore its job is to make sure that fascism has a media home, that fascists … are allowed to have a space where they can create narratives and submit those narratives through propaganda. Mainstream media, legacy media … its entire purpose is to propagandize and indoctrinate the public into fascist thinking, or "right-wing" thinking.
Troutman: We've been talking about the race massacres [in the South during the Reconstruction] and how some of the first assaults were on the media apparatus. We know in Atlanta there was a leftist, Max Barber, that ran The Voice of the Negro newspaper, and he was run out of town during the Atlanta Race Massacre as the white supremacists took over this narrative production. In the time of genocide, we've seen Gaza be home to the largest direct targeting of journalists.
They're killing the journalists and they're not allowing outside people in, because in order for the Zionist entity to exist, they have to maintain a tight narrative that not only serves their existence, but keeps the settler population rooting for Israel. So the masses can't experience any of the truths of what's happening with the genocide. The targeting of journalists is also happening in Sudan. That's why you literally don't see reporting about what's happening in Sudan.
It worries me that most of the South — be it rural, small-town, or even big cities like Atlanta — their local media ecosystem looks a lot like them just getting doused with the national consensus that manufactures consent, not just for genocide and colonial exploitation, but in a continued quieting and discipline of the South.