I spent most of my academic career documenting the lack of racial diversity in Canadian newsrooms, and studying the stereotypical and inaccurate coverage it often helped to produce, particularly when the news involved Muslims, Blacks and Indigenous people. I politely called it “blind spots” or being “out of touch with your community.” It was really something much worse—institutional or systemic racism. As the world comes to grips with the very public murder of a Black man in Minneapolis by a white police officer, and as militarized police forces take to the streets to stifle the subsequent protests, questions are being asked about how equitable society’s major institutions are, and whether some—like the justice system—are infected by systemic racism. No one has yet asked if we can rely on our news media to investigate it. I say we may have a problem. For anyone who wants to know what the face of systemic racism looks like, watch the YouTube video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee down on the neck of a handcuffed George Floyd for more than eight minutes as bystanders plead with him to stop. The video shows Chauvin just staring at the camera with his hand casually on his hip as Floyd’s life drained away. He looks like he thought he could really get away with it. For his part, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has acknowledged that systemic racism exists in Canada. He has called it out several times since Floyd’s killing, and late last week committed himself to “changing the systems that do not do right by too many Indigenous people and racialized Canadians.” He stopped short of saying how to do that. Others, like columnist Rex Murphy and Quebec Premier François Legault, deny such a thing could exist in Canada. While Legault acknowledged past incidences of discrimination in his province, he downplayed their severity, telling reporters, “We have this discussion very often. I think that there is discrimination in Quebec, but there is not systemic discrimination. There’s no system of discrimination, and it’s a very, very small minority of people doing this discrimination.” Columnist Murphy, a 73-year-old white man known for his conservative views, was blunter: “We are in fact not a racist country.” I couldn’t help linking Murphy’s myopic denial to what U.S. President Donald Trump said this week. He flatly denied that systemic problems exist in American police departments, declaring that 99.9 percent of the nation’s officers are “great, great people” Recent polls indicate that Trump is out of step with many Americans on the protests. A Monmouth University poll released last week found that 76 per cent of Americans— including 71 per cent of white people — called racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States. According to the New York Times, “Never before in the history of modern polling has the country expressed such widespread agreement on racism’s pervasiveness in policing, and in society at large.” Polls done recently show that anti-Black racism is very real in Canada, too. According to Michael Adams of the Environics Institute for Survey Research, “Black youth in Canada’s largest city are growing up being observed, questioned, dismissed and belittled by their fellow citizens because of their race, and are violently harassed by the very public institution we should turn to for protection.” In his poll, 80 per cent of young Black males in the Greater Toronto Area said they have been stopped in a public place by police. The fact that pollsters are telling us this, and not the news media, is proof of a long overlooked problem. There is plenty of evidence that reporters, editors and producers working for mainstream newspapers and broadcasting outlets in this country are institutionally incapable of covering race and racism in our society. Yes, there have been notable individual investigative journalism projects focusing on race, including the Toronto Star on police carding that singles out Blacks, the Globe and Mail’s series on murdered Aboriginal women, and documentation of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group’s recruiting methods by the Winnipeg Free Press. But everyday news coverage tells a different story. Why is that important? “As a major institution in society, the media play a critical role,” says an article on the website of the Canadian Anti-Racism Network, a non-profit agency that keeps track of discrimination.