Black Lives Should #Matter to Reporters – ShardsOfBlue

This post was first published on Medium.

A black and white photo of Black Lives Matter protestors, overlaid by yellow block text that says, “Black Lives Matter.”

As journalists, we’re taught to sublimate our political opinions. We should try not to have them, and if we do have them, we should never, ever show them.

There is reason for this. Conventional wisdom says people will not trust us to be fair and impartial if we admit to political bias. We must present an unbiased, neutral face to the world for the world to believe what we say is true.

It’s not just performative. If we tie our identities up with political causes and beliefs, how can we cover those issues without allowing our bias to seep through? It’s a conundrum, but it’s one I’m determined to wrestle with.

Three points of note.

First: The people in power decide what is political. Those are the people for whom the status quo is working; “political opinions” are those which challenge the status quo. Some examples:

Being queer is not political; it is simply a facet of a person’s being. But advocating for queer rights? That’s considered political, because their rights are not ensured by default. But choosing not to advocate for those rights is also a political statement, because it’s an acceptance of the status quo.

Likewise with advocating against police violence and brutality against Black people. Being Black isn’t a political statement. Advocating for your right to exist without being brutalized or killed? That is political. Why? Because the power structure makes that the non-default position. But choosing not to advocate is another political statement, no matter how much its status as the default makes it invisible to those in power.

Fish don’t see the water in which they swim, but the water is still there.

Second: People know reporters have bias. Pretending we don’t have it — even desperately trying not to have it — just looks like lying. Why should the general public trust us if we can’t even admit to our own humanity?

It is the structure of the work that accounts for and mitigates our bias. We have methodology that forces us to reach beyond our biases and listen to perspectives we might not otherwise. We train diligently for this. We also have editors — with their own biases, to be sure, but perhaps different, and perhaps coped with differently — whose job it is to strip bias from the work before publication and ensure we have considered every angle.

Third: Some causes, while political, are simply righteous. History is easier to see than the present. We can agree, even today, that those fighting for civil rights in the ’60s were righteous. We don’t look kindly on news publications that maintained the status quo of the time. But at the time, supporting Black rights was an extremely political position to take. The majority was not supportive of statements that were then revolutionary. Seventy-five percent of Americans disapproved of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the time of his death.

We have the benefit of many trustworthy news reports from the time, and I’m grateful for the reporters and editors who worked hard then, as now, to record that information clearly and without embellishment. But I’m ashamed at the sins of both omission and commission perpetrated by the industry then. And while our great papers of record aren’t spouting slurs these days, I nonetheless see in silence the continuation of a shameful legacy.

Since beginning my training as a journalist, I have chafed against the idea that journalists must conceal or refuse our true feelings to preserve the appearance of neutrality. Perhaps that means the profession isn’t for me. But I’d rather not think everyone with strong feelings of justice should be pushed out of the profession. A piece with a neutral voice can still be biased, and one written with passion can still speak truth.

Many of us get into the field precisely so we can expose injustice and give voice to people without platforms of their own. Their voices should be louder than ours, to be sure. We’re not the story. But to pretend we don’t actually care? We wouldn’t be there if we didn’t care. We shouldn’t be there if we don’t care.

I don’t have all the answers. We need news that is “just the facts.” We need reporters that aren’t tied up in causes to the point they cannot see and report on them clearly. We need the public’s trust.

But I am also ashamed to be a part of an industry afraid to speak up against injustice while simultaneously lauding itself for its brave moral impartiality.

We speak up when it’s us.

My personal Twitter is filled with creatives: artists, TTRPG players and LARPers, fiction writers, and voice actors. Queer people, disability activists, and autistic people. People of color, Black people, native people. People who I follow so I can see beautiful work and learn from often-overlooked voices. My feed is usually a diverse place of art, color, and thoughtful discourse on a variety of issues. I take care that it doesn’t become a monolith.

But this week, it has become a flood of support for Black people and the people protesting police violence against them. They share resources for protestor safety, experiences at the protests they attend, news articles covering the events (sometimes for information purposes, but just as often with criticism for milquetoast wording or poor framing). Videos and imagery from protests. Art created in support of the movement. Screenshots of donations to respected organizations doing good work, including community bail funds and research-based projects to reduce police violence. Books and articles to read to learn about our country’s history of racism, to inspect personal bias, to grow and support Black folks in their centuries’ long struggle for justice.

Then I switch to my professional feed, where I follow primarily reporters, data folks, news outlets, and industry professionals. You know what I see there? Mostly, business as usual. A few shares of protest news or research showing facts that support the protestors’ frustration. Reporters covering the protests are sharing their work, but those who aren’t are largely sticking to tweets about their own work, elections, and COVID-19. The silence is deafening.

Then reporters are attacked. Suddenly, my feed explodes with shares. Photos of the wounded journalists. Think pieces about the threat to free speech and the free press. Horror at the erosion of norms that protect the press’ right to report.

I don’t dispute that blatant attacks against the press represent a unique threat and a new kind of escalation. The industry’s collective horror was justified.

But why are we not “allowed” to feel that same outrage for the brutalization of Black people? We have spent years reporting on this. We know it is a fact, not an opinion, that racism is alive and well in the U.S., both individual and structural. So why do we all sit quietly, silently, dutifully reporting but offering no support for the movement seeking to make changes against this fact?

Because the industry was built by white people in a structure that views the white experience as the default. The industry sees violence against Black people as something that happens to “those other people.” We need to cover it; it’s important. But it’s violence against Them. Never mind that Black reporters exist. We, as an industry, don’t see it as a personal attack; we see it as an injustice against Them that we must bring to light. And we fear if we take a side, our words will no longer be trusted.

Sit with that for a moment. We don’t see the Black community as part of our own. We worry that if we stand against senseless killings of Black people, which we have shown to be true by our own reporting, our words won’t be trusted. If that doesn’t speak to the hold of whiteness in our industry, I don’t know what will.

Well to hell with that. When I look back at this moment, I’m not going to be glad I stayed silent so no one could accuse me of bias. I’m going to be ashamed I feared for my job and reputation more than I stood for human life.

A couple of news organization decisions have shaken reporters enough to get them talking.

The publication of an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton was widely criticized as incendiary and endangering Black lives. When Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose work on “The 1619 Project” won a pulitzer, tweeted publicly against the Times’ choice to publish the piece, she prefaced it with, “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but…”

And when the Philadelphia Enquirer published a story with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” 44 staff members signed an open letter of complaint, and nearly 30 called in “sick and tired of not being heard.” But I found it telling that the letter was signed from “journalists of color.” Presumably, the white reporters were either oblivious or simply more concerned with their reputations of impartiality than with their Black coworkers’ concerns.

And even these issues are basically intra-industry. They’re public-facing, but there’s a world of difference between complaining about a headline or an op-ed publication and speaking actively in support of the value of Black lives.

I’m privileged enough that even without work, I will be just fine. I have other income sources, and I’m not the primary breadwinner in my household anyway. So I’m choosing to use that privilege to confront the industry idea that is keeping my less privileged colleagues from feeling able to speak out. My Black colleagues who can’t speak up for their siblings because they fear for their jobs. My white colleagues who look on with anguish at the calls for white people to stand in solidarity with Black people, but worry they will damage their jobs or their ability to cover the movement itself if they speak up.

We have been trained into timid silence, but we know that silence — neutrality, in fact — always benefits the oppressor.

Where are the public statements and staff editorials from the biggest news outlets? Where are the think pieces from journalists talking about the injustices we’ve been reporting on for decades? Where are the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter posts from white journalists?

Hannah-Jones’ full tweet reads, “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral.”

From my perspective, the silence of our industry is deafening.

Three points of note.

We speak up when it’s us.

Further Reading: