Video Showing Media Bias Around Bitcoin And Black Audiences Prompts Questions About Culture

A video suggesting that a local news producer omitted Bitcoin stories for black audiences raised questions about biases and Bitcoin culture.

A Twitter video presented by former FOX 26 reporter Ivory Hecker, who is working to expose what she sees as network corruption and bias, seems to show an assistant news director at the station explaining the intentional withholding of news coverage about Bitcoin from black audiences.

“I have passed on Bitcoin stories,” a woman identified in the video as Lee Meier, assistant news director at FOX 26, said.

“African-American audience at five, it’s probably not gonna play. That’s a choice I’m making, an editorial choice,” Meier continued, after a cut in the video.

Despite the statement including little context and appearing cut together and recorded as a video call on a smartphone, it has generated a meaningful conversation about media bias and a general failure to recognize that black people are and should be interested in Bitcoin.

This conversation was perpetuated on Twitter by Isaiah Jackson, a founder of Black Bitcoin Billionaire (BBB), an advocacy group focused on education and onboarding for Bitcoin in the black community.

“RT this post if you are Black and HODL #Bitcoin, these people don’t think we are out here,” Jackson wrote as he shared the clip.

“This rhetoric follows a long tradition of figures outside of our community who take the liberty to dictate what we should or should not be exposed to without any input from ourselves,” Ian Gaines, operations director at BBB, told Bitcoin Magazine. “Every time a voice outside of our culture tries to speak for us without first consulting, they have always been on the wrong side of history. This is just another drop in the proverbial ocean of blind arrogance.”

The apparent media bias revealed in the video demonstrated a larger assumption about Bitcoin that Black Bitcoin Billionaire is attempting to dissolve — that Bitcoin culture is only relevant or interesting to white males.

“No one group has a claim to Bitcoin culture, the system is decentralized and accessible to all, and in order for the protocol to truly succeed on a global scale, it must incorporate a global perspective,” Gaines added. “We combat by owning our narrative. This example with the editor is why we created BBB in the first place.”