The 1619 Project Moral Panic: The Role of Cable News

Abstract

The U.S. right is in the throes of a moral panic over the study of race and racism in schools. This panic developed in part through the backlash to the 1619 Project, an effort by the New York Times to reframe American history around the legacy of slavery. How was a publication with anti-racist ambitions co-opted by a movement to reject the teaching of anti-racism? I argue that a key element is cable news coverage of the 1619 Project, which over a two-year period moved from explaining structural racism through references to the Project toward characterizing the Project as a threat to schoolchildren. To parse this Fox News-led transformation, I draw on Stuart Hall’s analysis of the media’s role in fomenting a mugging moral panic, which provides a model for integrating research on meaning-making with media routines. Analyzing an original archive of 567 news segments, I conceptualize three methods of discursive articulation, namely acts that connect distinct meanings with the Project, to explain this transformation. While “reverberations” initially echoed the 1619 Project’s structural arguments, “redirections” created connections to controversies and “reductions” tied the Project to terms laden with anti-American associations.