Even alternative media reporting on the housing crisis are using mainstream ways of talking about the problem. While you’d expect publications like BE, The Root, and Colorlines to be more radical (alternatives to, say, Forbes), instead they stick with “neoliberal” and “postracial” themes. That is, these publications believe housing problems are individual problems and have little to do with race, even when banks have admitted in court that race was part of their mortgage decision process. In Catherine Squires’ new study on the disproportionate impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on African Americans, she shows how mainstream rhetoric is rearticulated by even alternative media.

In her content analysis, Squires reveals that both BE and The Root presented stories in which responsibility for the mortgage crisis was shifted from the banks and lenders to the individual borrower. Colorlines was the only publication to address the unequal access of whites and people of color to the American Dream and home ownership, demonstrating greater resistance to the specious appeal of neoliberal rhetoric by placing greater onus on the government and the beneficiaries of its bailout (that is, the banks).

The expectation instilled in alternative media to present a different perspective endures. However, when even the stories they publish look like recycled versions of the mainstream, readers’ trust is sure to wane.