The New Yorker, May 29, 2018: How Alexandra Bell is disrupting racism in journalism
The artist and journalist Alexandra Bell has long been a scrutinizing reader of news media. As a young child, in Chicago, she relished receiving copies of the historically black newspaper the Chicago Defender,which she often read from front to back alongside her mother. Its explicit political anima, visible in the contrast between the Defender’s tone and mainstream news coverage, made a lasting impression on Bell. She earned a master’s degree in journalism, from Columbia University, in 2013, and has since honed a public-art practice that exposes biases in print journalism. Her “Counternarratives” series interrogates the shaping and spreading of information, and the ways in which narratives in reportage advance the agendas of the powerful. She uses redaction, omission, annotation, and text editing to alter articles, primarily from the Times. She then prints out enlarged versions of her deconstructions and plasters them onto walls around the city.
The series had its clandestine début, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, on New Year’s Eve in 2016. Bell critiqued the Times’s coverage of the death of Mike Brown, in 2014, in which the paper ran side-by-side profiles of the victim and his killer, Darren Wilson, under the joint headline “Two Lives at a Crossroads in Ferguson.” Bell and many other readers felt that the framing of equivalence, and of tragic coincidence, diminished what had happened that August afternoon. Bell erected a diptych of her own, with Wilson’s profile whittled down to read, simply, “Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.” The second panel bore the new headline “A Teenager with Promise,” I noted last year, when I interviewed Bell.
