Calls To Scholarship

Within each argument there are connections to academics who connect to the field, and spend large sums of time researching and gathering information on subjects. This is an important part of discussions on intense topics such as Critical Race Theory. After conducting research on fifty articles on Critical Race Theory, Those who are categorized as ‘Far left’ and ‘Far Right’ tend to use academic sources in their argument more often than those in ‘Left’, ‘Right’, and ‘Center’ categories. In order to find which articles used scholarly information I used quantitative coding of all fifty articles. When analyzing this data I looked at which articles used academic quotes, paraphrasing, and explanation of ideas. Coding for academic sources was split into two sections, first with quotes or paraphrasing from academics; second with mentioning’s and citations from academics.

           Through qualitative research I found the data points on use of academic sources to be surprising and interesting. I found that while ‘far left’ articles had more quotes from politicians, both ‘far left’ and ‘far right’ used more quotes from academics, eighteen and fourteen respectively, while others had seven or less. While both ‘far left’ and ‘far right’ had quotes from academics in their field, ‘far right’ cited or mentioned more reputable academic sources with a total of twenty-eight mentions, while the other four categories did not exceed five. In the ‘far left’ articles of CNN authors used their news articles in order to describe Critical Race Theory, one example being whole sections or articles on ‘What is Critical Race Theory’ where they used quotes and examples from Kimberly Crenshaw, ‘“Critical race theory is a practice. It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw” (Kariml, 2021). This is one of six quotes in this article using works from the founding theorists. Articles from the ‘far right’ used quotations from academics like Thomas Sowell, “Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood” (Smith, 2021), and Levinson “To close the civic-empowerment gap, levinson believes we must abandon the traditional view of American history” (Kurtz, 2022). In just these few examples there is a change in how ‘far left’ and ‘far right’ news sources tend to frame information for the public, while still using reputable academic sources.