It’s time for a new approach to journalism
Journalism is a necessity to navigate our increasingly complex social world and, for some, it’s a matter of life and death.
The way media represents events tells us a lot about who and what counts in terms of the contemporary social order — whose interests are on top and whose aren’t, whose life and voice matters and whose doesn’t.
We are confronted with journalism’s role in social ordering each time there is a new event that demands a departure from long histories of racist coverage. We also see it in the media coverage of COVID-19 that has failed to shed light on systemic inequities related to health and well-being.
As former journalists and current journalism professors, we know that reporting entails telling stories about the present, finding out and sharing ‘what happened’ in a specific cultural and historical moment. Yet, anyone in relationships and communities knows how hard it is to come up with a shared understanding amidst conflict, different histories, power relations and multiple truths.
Journalists are trained to ask who, what, where, why, when and how. At the root of this approach is a question however that doesn’t often make it into the news but should: How do we want to live together?
The story journalists have told themselves about how well their profession has been able to make sense of the present leans heavily on ideals and successes, overlooking powerful counternarratives and ongoing harms. This focus on journalism’s movie moments has served to both normalize and entrench a status quo where racism, colonialism and gender discrimination persist within the profession and elsewhere.
Consider that objectivity emerged as a core practice of modern journalism in the 1920s — and yet, at that time, the right to vote was not a right for all adults in either Canada or the United States, nor were newsrooms reflective of anything we might consider diverse. Most mainstream newsrooms remain predominantly white and are resistant to understanding and addressing how equity, social justice and professional norms impact their ability to report on events. This, despite powerful critique and contributions from journalists such as Desmond Cole, who argues in his recent book that “the false promise of objectivity in journalism reinforces white supremacy.”
The predictability of an enemy and ally template, and the deeply structural role that modern journalism has been fulfilling was first termed ritualistic almost 50 years ago.
We see this template play out in media coverage through language choices with terms like riot, protester, land defender, looting and uprising used to identify who is deemed violent and who is granted legitimacy.
In our new book, “Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities,” we examine journalism’s role in amplifying dominant narratives and preserving a status quo that does not serve or reflect the struggles of its diverse audiences. And the voices of those who march in the streets of both Canada and the United
States (now and previously) are saying that the status quo is unjust, deadly and destructive — and has been so for a very long time.
There is no question that journalism has suffered as a result of economic and technological changes in the industry. But the current moment should drive home the fact that good journalism matters, as does the work of Black and Indigenous journalists, scholars and activists.
Instead of business as usual, journalists need to set aside their long love affair with objectivity and learn to locate themselves in terms of their social histories, relations and obligations. Journalists need to recognize that what they think happened is deeply related to who they are and where they’re coming from in broad and specific senses.
Further, journalists need to employ what we term systems journalism that covers events and issues not as one-offs, but as intersections of societal systems and structures that have histories. And this means investigating histories many weren’t taught and don’t know.
This is the kind of work journalists have long leaned on activists and scholars to do, and it’s time for journalists to recognize that they share the work of narrating a present and future we all want to live in.