Libby Lewis Book Talk

Dr. Libby Lewis discusses her book, which 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, Dr. 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. Dr. Lewis graduated with a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Institute of American Cultures, hosted by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.1209B Bunche Hall