Past, Present, Postulations

Opinions surround daily thinking in both personal and professional worlds. However, how can readers determine what is a correct opinion and what is complete blasphemy? In this theme there is a look at the past-history of Critical race theory and how the authors described it. Another look at the present and how legislation comes into play with Critical Race Theory. The final look is at how postulations or opinions are framed in this research. Going back to the research question, ‘What is the effect of political orientation bias on media portrayal of Critical Race Theory in online written news sources from the years 2020 to 2022?’ articles show how some politically oriented media pages show more opinion pieces rather than informative and vice versa. To find results on previous works, legality, and framing of discussions around CRT, I used both quantitative and interpretive (qualitative) data analysis.

           In the ‘Calls to Scholarship’ section I discussed the use of academic works and citations in the news articles, which covers the ‘past’ portion of this theme. When looking at the ‘present’ or legality portion, The ‘center’ category also had a trend in quotes and statistics from laws, totaling thirty-eight quotes from legislation, and thirty-one law statistics. Other categories had a far smaller amount totaling fifteen, eight, zero and one from ‘far left,’ ‘left,’ ‘right,’ and ‘far right’ respectively. When looking at this section in an interpretive view, I looked at if the articles were framed in an explanatory way towards laws, or if the article had a different field of view. These results also showed that ‘center’ categories still used a legal view to look at CRT, however, the results were similar for all totaling no more than three legal framing articles. Forbes (Greene, 2022) allowed the ‘center’ category to have the majority of the information to be legal in a quantitative view because of the use of articles to look at each state individually. Although articles did discuss topics of legislation in Critical Race Theory, there were still opinions in each section of political media bias.

           To look at the ‘postulations’ section of this theme, I took into account how news sources framed their works in an interpretive view. I found that in looking at articles with only an opinion and no explanation of Critical Race Theory, ‘far right’ had an overwhelming amount of opinion pieces rather than explanatory totaling ten. This means that each article from the ‘far right’ was framed in an opinion rather than an explanatory view. This is also seen through the use of quantitative analysis using generalizations with and without statistics as coding. In ‘far right’ categories articles totaled twelve generalizations without factual evidence (statistics) and seven articles with factual evidence (statistics). As a comparison, ‘far left’ totaled ten generalizations without factual evidence (statistics), and nine generalizations with factual evidence (statistics). One example of the ‘far right’ using opinion is in the article titles “Where Critical Race Theory Comes From” where it discusses Critical Race Theory news in this light, “ We must absolutely confront the media-grabbling practices such as privilege walks, but picking such battles is akin to wiping away a few mold spots from rotting floorboards” (Buck, 2022). The article goes on to discuss CRT in education rooting in Plato and then romantics including Rousseau in this list. As a comparison, ‘far left’ articles from New York Times, wrote, “in fact, the frenzy around critical race theory is just the latest in a long line of manufactured outrages meant to tap into this same fear, and the strategy has proved depressingly effective” (Blow, 2021). The article then goes on to include politician quotes rather than providing academic quotes. Each side is showing a different view on Critical Race Theory in both opinion and explanation, which is causing a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Critical Race Theory for its readers.