“Big, structural change” and reinventing journalism
Part I:
I want to start out with a confession: I’m biased. I come to journalism with a life of preconceived notions about the way that the world is and how it should be. It affects my judgment, my attention, and the way I treat other people. But shouldn’t it be plainly obvious that people are biased? Why are journalists, and the entire field of journalism, held to this unachievable standard of objectivity in order for their work to have value?
Jay Rosen first wrote about “the view from nowhere” in 2003, pointing out the absurdity in pretending that news producers are totally viewless. As if you could only get an accurate picture of events from someone without a point of view, American media has fallen into an orthodoxy that attempts to “secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view.”
I agree with Rosen that if you know how to dig, report, verify, master a beat, and — I’ll add one more excluded from his 2010 post — engage, then inevitably you will develop a point of view if you don’t have one already, and it will in turn make your work as a journalist even stronger. It’s a good thing to have a point of view to advocate for, especially if its on behalf of and in partnership with a community. That’s a hill that I’m choosing to die on.
Part II:
The above Part I is an effort to give a basis to what I’m about to say in Part II, which is a taboo in journalism to ever admit.
I like Elizabeth Warren. To be fair, I’ve always liked her, ever since I learned about her first Senate campaign during my sophomore year of high school. But now that I’m a member of the media, in order to do my job effectively, the view from nowhere says that I should hide all of my political beliefs and biases, and only let them out at the ballot box.
I attended Senator Warren’s rally last night in Washington Square Park, where she talked about her signature campaign promise of “big, structural change.” Warren spoke about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that occurred just a block away from the park, and how reforms during the progressive era and the New Deal only emerged from the concentrated efforts of millions of people coming together to make them a reality.
“The tragic story of the Triangle factory fire is a story about power,” she said. “A story of what happens when the rich and the powerful take control of government and use it to increase their own profits while they stick it to working people. But what happened in the aftermath of the fire is a different story about power — a story about our power, a story about what’s possible when we fight together as one.” — Elizabeth Warren
As I stood in the crowd, I thought about journalism and what I’m doing at the Newmark School. From how I understand it, the way that we talk about Social Journalism is not all that different from the way that Senator Warren talks about “big, structural change.” Fundamentally, both grassroots progressive movements like the Warren 2020 campaign, and the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism seek to challenge existing structures of power to create a more sustainable future. Just as Senator Warren recognizes the harms of anti-worker efforts both historically and contemporarily, we recognize the harms of shutting out and mischaracterizing marginalized voices from the media landscape both historically and contemporarily. Famously, she’s got a plan for that. But what exactly are we doing to redistribute power and reinvent journalism?
I’ve always said that our mission has to start outside of journalism itself. Yes, our goal should ultimately be that everyone working in media catches the #SocialJ wave. That wave says that we should first begin by listening to communities, and that our audiences are more than just consumers; they have knowledge that we can use when we work together on a level playing field. But this requires an intense amount of work outside of newsroom trainings, bringing in new management, and modifying our reporting methods. Heather Chaplin refers to our fundamental problem working through a broken journalism as a “wicked problem,” i.e., a problem that cannot be solved.
“It’s a tangled knot that is changing and creating new knots all the time. Massive technical disruption, fraying trust, collapsed business models, fractured audiences, rising propaganda machines, a White House bent on discrediting the whole enterprise. And of course, all these factors blur into other wicked problems, like changes in information technology, crumbling institutions, political polarization, shifting demographics, and so on.” — Heather Chaplin
Essentially, if journalism has turned into a wicked problem, Chaplin suggests that we modify our thinking about it. Invoking a metaphor of journalism as a garden, she argues that we’ll make greater progress if we stop trying to name and fix each individual part of this wicked problem, and instead treat our field and our craft as a delicate ecosystem in constant need of tending.
Chaplin asks what our goal is: to kill all the snails? Or keep the garden alive? This brings me back to Elizabeth Warren. Warren sets forward a comprehensive vision to keep the garden of America alive through “big, structural change.” Journalists ought to invoke plans and cross-industry alliances that will work toward reforming the culture and ecosystem in which our news is born and distributed. We need our own set of plans for a redistribution of power through engagement, listening, and collaboration, and we need to do away with the idea that we can’t engage with politics because we may come across as biased. Power is political, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can get to work.
And yes, I did stick around to get a selfie.