Read on Twitter
This statement, while well-meaning, lays bare the ideological paradoxes of journalism that hamstring reporters/editors and confuse publics. (Thread) https://twitter.com/Cronkite_ASU/status/1274175857423077376
The fundamental contradiction is that journalists are expected here to be both antiracist – “confronting and challenging racism” – and also to be “impartial” fact gatherers. You can’t be both. https://www.ibramxkendi.com/how-to-be-an-antiracist-1
The most striking example of this paradox is the statement’s recognition that “our colleagues of color are … being asked to remain unflinchingly dispassionate while covering stories that could not be more excruciatingly personal to themselves and their loved ones.”
This acknowledgement – in the passive voice, no less – refuses to confront the moral impoverishment behind the field’s expectation that journalists of color remain dispassionate against challenges to their right to exist. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/business/media/new-york-times-washington-post-protests.html
A more subtle version of the paradox arises in the statement's seemingly innocuous assertion that some acts of aggression against journalists “came at the hands of police, others at the hands of protestors.”
That assertion is a good example of a factually accurate statement that obscures truths about power imbalances, systemic racism, and the complicity of news media in long-standing discriminatory regimes.
It appears to be a knee-jerk adherence to the “professional standards” journalism schools teach that hold “balance” and deference to “both sides” above values such as contextual truth and antiracism.
And look at the key incidents highlighted by the press freedom tracker cited in this statement. Suggesting equivalence between state violence and protester violence is tantamount to saying “all lives matter” https://pressfreedomtracker.us/george-floyd-protests/?endpage=2
David Mindich’s “Just the Facts” gets at the historic contradiction between antiracism and journalistic “balance” that leads to equivocating statements like this. Lewis Raven Wallace's book “The View From Somewhere” picks up where Mindich leaves off https://www.lewispants.com/the-view-from-somewhere
A final contradiction is the persistent assumption that “Time-honored methods of news gathering — from impartial fact-gathering and data analysis to investigative techniques and storytelling – can help reestablish trust in institutions – our own, and the ones we cover.”
Media trust has been at historic lows. That means either that journalism schools have failed in recent decades to teach “time-honored methods of news gathering,” or that such methods do not, in fact, produce trust on their own. https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx.
It might be better to recognize low trust in journalism as a product, first, of a sustained campaign to delegitimize the very “time-honored methods of news gathering” that journalists have been practicing, as Jay Rosen argues. https://pressthink.org/2019/04/hating-on-journalists-the-way-trump-and-his-core-supporters-do-is-not-an-act-of-press-criticism-its-a-way-of-doing-politics/
And, second, that facts alone do not build trust in either the facts themselves or the institutions that promulgate them. Emotion and feeling actually play a huge role in how people form judgments: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
That’s why insisting that journalists remain “dispassionate” amidst highly affective news events is a losing strategy. It’s not only dehumanizing, it also makes the journalism less trustworthy and less relevant. Here’s a study that gets at this: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15295038909366728?casa_token=cJRQZM9FsmoAAAAA:lpnJ52xsoB7b_rh_4qLlclL0v8DUBG6E6BpJlvaJmFJzQH6hwDvW1sW2PgWSFtJEFn_3CMJo2-U
And here’s one of my own recent efforts to address the problem of journalists’ moral withdrawal from moral issues. (/thread) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1464884919894778?casa_token=KSdBSKIYiYQAAAAA:2PZhmW2toiBIGBYlPb4p5YSnKR54j4oKjKng0LCrWp_JGqw7-FqRmOjcGStK-42bcNmQWsdM9Z4
