The media has played a huge role in shaping culture for many, many reasons. Its footprints are in all our lives: How we receive information. How we report information. How we see others. How we engage and how we learn about the world.

Whether we know it or not, virtually all of us interact with the media on a daily basis, so it makes sense to truly examine the role it plays in our lives.

The media can also be used as a tool for negative perpetuation if we are not careful.

Negative perpetuation happens because of three reasons: ignorance, incomplete stories being circulated, and fake news.

Let's take a look at the 2016 U.S. presidential election. On one side, we had the Republicans, and on the other, we had the Democrats. We even had a large group of people who didn't identify with either, so there was lots of dissension in the ranks. However, one of the things that all sides could agree on was that there was a lot of false information, or fake news, going around. There are several studies that show that thousands of people fell for the allure of completely fabricated news. In fact, Google had to banish more than 200 sites from its AdSense network and change its news feed algorithm to combat fake news.

Not only that, there were troll farms being set up in multiple places with the deliberate goal of spreading disinformation. A troll farm is an organized operation of many users who may work together in a “factory” or from different places across a distributed network to generate online traffic aimed at affecting public opinion and to spread misinformation and disinformation. These highly organized propaganda factories infiltrated several forms of media to incite division, violence, and influence election results.

There's a whole industry built on clickbait news, so we need to be better fact checkers and be careful about where we get our information. It is our responsibility to be engaged as global citizens and, more important, to accept the idea that multiple perspectives can be right.

Fake news, as I said earlier, leads to incomplete stories and watered-down history lessons. If we don't address these, they have the potential to reinforce dangerous beliefs and create echo chambers (an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that align with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered).

We have to fight this because lies like these can be weaponized into dangerous messages of propaganda and division.

In the following chapters, I will be addressing this idea, as well as three aspects of media that we can improve on today to improve connection across divides: journalism, platforms, and entertainment.

Journalism

Henry Anatole Grunwald, the former managing editor of TIME magazine, once said that “journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault,” and I tend to agree. What journalists say or don't say impact our world for better or worse. I'd like for us to get back to independent, trusted journalism, one that is devoid of outside influence or motivated solely by profit. At its best, journalism should be used for investigating the truth of issues and/or telling stories of the world as it is. Some would say that journalism is a voice for the voiceless. At its worst, journalism can be used as a propaganda machine that pumps out biased or misleading pieces of information used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Journalism needs to practice engagement, representation, transparency, and partnership. Let's get into what I mean exactly.

JOURNALISM CANNOT FORGET ENGAGEMENT

I first heard of engaged journalism while interviewing Emmy award–winning innovation strategist and the inaugural Chair in Journalism Innovation and Civic Engagement for the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication, Andrew DeVigal. DeVigal believes that journalists shouldn't just think of the public as “audiences” and “experts.” Rather, they should also think of the public as collaborators. I like this because this promotes humanization and respect. We discussed the current nature of media and what seems to be missing from it. It seems like there is a competition between networks to have the loudest talking heads who say outlandish things for shock value and ratings (obviously, not all networks are like that).

It seems like we have deviated from including the public in the narrative, due to the cash-strapped and resource-strapped nature of the industry, where clicks and volume of stories have taken precedence over authentic storytelling. What journalism misses out on in this process is building relationships with the audience it serves. We need to promote relational engagement over transactional engagement. The good thing is that this doesn't just apply to journalists—it applies to all of us. Figure 10.1 is what DeVigal calls the Continuum of Public Engagement in Journalism.

Shown on one side of the continuum are learn, follow, and endorse. These are transactional types of relationships because you give something to a publisher that they give back to you in a transactional way. It's usually a one-sided relationship.

To learn, you could read articles or blogs or listen to podcasts. When you follow, you are deciding to subscribe to a newsletter or news feed and when you endorse, you're buying a membership or choosing to share a story with your audience.

On the other side of the continuum are participate, collaborate, and lead. These are relational forms of engagement.

To participate, you could submit questions to entities that can answer questions about your environment or you can attend community gatherings that include people who disseminate information around you, like reporters, journalist, statisticians, anthropologists, and so on. These community gatherings can be city hall or town hall meetings. Newsrooms can do this by organizing their own meetings and engagements with the public so as to facilitate open dialogue. They can discuss what should be covered and what should be the focal stories. You essentially are participating in your local information ecosystem. Can you trust the data and information that describe the world around you and can you participate in producing it?

To collaborate, you could accompany reporters and contribute to news stories. Jennifer Brandel, the cofounder and CEO of Hearken, a platform that helps journalists do work that better reflects the information needs and desires of their audience, has a great framework for this. Her platform cultivates questions from their audience of what they hadn't seen covered in the news. The Hearken team then curates the best questions that they believe would be of interest to the larger audience before putting those questions up for a public vote on their website. This puts the audience in the position of editor. The person whose question ultimately wins gets to accompany a reporter on some aspect of the reporting process. Hearken works with their audience to set the news agenda. Brilliant!

Although this might not be scalable or applicable to all journalism institutions, I believe elements of Brandel's model can be applied to every newsroom.

News organizations can also collaborate with each other on specific investigative series. We live in a digital world, so let's use those platforms to connect and collaborate.

To lead, you could join a news organization's community advisory board. If one doesn't exist, you could encourage your local news station to create a community advisory board so that they have feedback and there's the relationship built in to help tell representative stories. You could also form a local news cooperative by connecting with trusted members and representatives of your community. You can support a healthy information ecosystem in your community.

This last point is actually how I fell into media. I wasn't satisfied with the way news outlets covered stories of people like me, who constantly lived in between cultures, so I figured I would launch a podcast to create a platform for this underserved audience. What evolved was a community and ecosystem of people who started to feel seen, heard, and understood. As my podcast, As Told By Nomads, found an audience, I started getting requests to collaborate on projects in institutions, which ultimately let to my current career. My podcast, which is the freest thing, has ultimately created room to tell a wide range of stories. It has also allowed me to collaborate with my audience to get more representative stories. Everyone can do this on a micro or macro level. Focus on the connections you're making and how you can learn from different stories you learn and you'll find yourself telling more stories representative of our world today.

Ultimately, I believe the media is an institution that needs to be more collaborative when telling stories of the community. It needs to authentically include the public and communities into the process of journalism. You can't tell the story about the community without them. Like DeVigal says, “in our radically connected world, journalism has to be connected to the people and include the knowledge, insights and experience of the public to help tell the stories of the public.”

Journalism can build relationships, especially when it represents underrepresented and underserved people. Diversify the coverage and the newsrooms. Create opportunities for these people to tell their stories. No one wants to be defined by others. The public needs to be media-literate and the media needs to be more community-literate. The future of journalism has to be collaborative for trust to be restored because it has been eroded—however, I don't believe that it has been eroded beyond repair.

Platforms Have to Acknowledge Their Power

Platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other social media platforms have a lot of power in the digital age. The very ecosystem that allows social media to connect people all over the world is the same one that allows disinformation to thrive. Disinformation is the dissemination of false information, rumors, hoaxes, or propaganda with the intent to mislead and influence public opinion. Various institutions, including governments and corporations, use this all the time. This isn't new but has intensified in recent years due to social platforms. Today it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between real and fake information.

Take the unfortunate ethnic cleansing that started happening in Myanmar on August 25, 2017. More than 700,000 of the mostly Muslim country's Rohingya minority group fled the country because of systematic and organized attacks, rapes, and murders organized by the government. The Myanmar military used social media to heighten anti-Rohingya propaganda and incite these heinous crimes, thereby causing the largest forced human migration in recent history. People with knowledge of the campaign have said that hundreds of military personnel created troll accounts, news, and celebrity pages on Facebook and used these pages to create fake stories and spread false stories to both Muslim and Buddhist groups about impending attacks from the other side. These posts were being sent out at peak viewership times. Under the cover of popular pages, the military used Facebook Messenger to send warnings and spread rumors of Jihad attacks to the Buddhist groups. They sent different messages to Muslim groups about anti-Muslim protests. All these, as you can imagine, caused rampant sentiments of tension and uneasiness that positioned Myanmar's military to be the saviors.

Platforms can no longer pretend that they don't have a role in how people receive information. Leaders of these platforms have to decide if their services will be breeding grounds for extremism or tools for citizen journalism and connection. On his brilliant show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj said it best when he said that platforms are getting all the benefits of publishers with none of the risks.

If platforms are going to be used as publishers, they have to take ownership and clean up hate speech and troll farms being set up on their networks. If they don't, they risk feeding into systems of oppression, and systems of oppression are disconnectors. Feigning ignorance is no longer an option.

Entertainment (Movies, Music, Books, and TV)

Here, I am basically referring to pop culture and its influence in our world today. Pop culture can be described as the mix of ideas, videos, images, attitudes, and perspectives that characterize a given culture and is loved and accepted by the mainstream population. It is culture that is considered popular and transmitted via the mass media.

For many, entertainment is often the introduction to other cultures. If you recall, in the first story I shared to start this section, I talked about how the older white lady thanked me for not being like other black men who had braids and gold teeth. It is clear that that she saw black people as a monolith and I was a shock to her. It is also clear that she had opened her mind to understand that people can wear whatever they want and that shouldn't be used to demean their status in society.

Entertainment is very important in today's world, so the gatekeepers of this institution have a big responsibility to make it representative of our world. Don't take my word for it; check out what the late great Stan Lee said about entertainment: “I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people's lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you're able to entertain people, you're doing a good thing.”

The more visible you make people, the more connected we'll be to our humanity. In the past few years, Black Panther, Hidden Figures, Crazy Rich Asians, and Wonder Woman have been released in the cinema. I saw each of them at least three times.

Why did I do that?

It's because I felt an enormous sense of pride. I felt this pride because the more I write, speak, podcast, and consult with companies and educational institutions, the more people I meet and the more I'm struck by how many people long to see themselves in stories; to see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the screen or in pages. They talk about not just being issues or think pieces to be addressed or icons for social commentary. They talk about their desire to simply be seen as people and heroes who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. I can't really explain it, but it's a beautiful experience to find yourself on the pages and screens of an entertainment channel. It's…uh…what's the word?

Magical!

When you experience this as a storyteller, you quickly realize that you have tremendous power and potential to literally empower people who have for many years felt like they didn't exist because their histories have been erased. You realize that you have the power to celebrate humanity in a beautiful and inclusive way. The great thing about this realization is that it's accessible to all of us if we decide to act, advocate, and support.

I remember watching Black Panther on the Thursday it came out—then the following day and the day after. With each viewing, I sat there smiling, laughing, and crying at random times. As a Nigerian, it felt so good to see my continent represented on the big screen and not in a patronizing way. I had waited for this day for such a long time and, in many ways, I didn't realize how much I needed it. The powerful thing about entertainment being used to tell inclusive stories can be summed up in one word:

• REPRESENTATION

Superheroes are some of the first leaders that little kids gravitate toward, giving them a chance to imagine themselves doing amazing things. That was certainly the case for me with Superman, as I explained earlier. It's also why to this day I refer to myself as the African Superman. Yes, the African Superman.

But I digress …

The point is that since superheroes are one of the first way kids come into contact with leadership, let's make the heroes look more like them.

This does a few things.

It inspires confidence in underrepresented groups and gives them the ability to locate themselves in different stories.

It neutralizes bias.

It also offers us a chance to learn about new cultures and histories. More on this later when I talk about education as an institution, but let's consider the importance of a movie like Hidden Figures, which came out in 2016. In the movie, one troubling fact is brought to light—which is that Hollywood and our education systems have engaged in revisionist history for far too long. The fact that many people, including me, did not know about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson was troubling and embarrassing to me. Why didn't I know about these three ladies when I learned about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon? It speaks to how little we have used a platform as powerful as entertainment to tell stories of our world. Stories that have gotten us here. This goes for fiction and nonfiction stories alike.

Movies like Wonder Woman, Crazy Rich Asians, and Black Panther can inspire curiosity in all of us. Even though they are fiction, I believe that the deep-rooted sense of pride the protagonists had for their cultures is enough to get people more curious about the continents of Africa and Asia, as well as Greek/Roman mythology. When truly representative, entertainment can help bridge the chasms and divides that exist today, while celebrating diversity.

The media is an institution that plays a big role in how we receive information and see the world. Now, let's focus on the two institutions we spend most of lives in: educational institutions and workplaces. I'll start off with workplaces.