Weekly roundup February 17, 2023

A few interesting things I’ve seen, heard, read, or thought about this week.

Best reads 📚

• There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America by Jamelle Bouie, one NYT columnist who does actually get it right when it comes to understanding the dangerous attacks on trans people. “Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.” I was proud to add my name to this open letter to the NYT’s standards editor condemning the ongoing unethical anti-trans bias in its coverage of trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

“Demanding rigor in sourcing and being aware of how bad framing can mislead is not activism; it’s something we teach in journalism school every day.” — Elizabeth Spires, contributing writer, NYT Opinion.

• “This report sees journalistic “bias” less as partisanship and more as relying on too-comfortable habits.” by Joshua Benton. I was thinking about this January piece when I read reporting this week on the new Congressional Budget Office forecasts on our rising national debt. “Reporters bring unspoken assumptions about what fiscal choices are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Those assumptions can make choices seem like mandates.” We often focus on potential left/right political biases in news, but so many other, sometimes unconscious biases or gaps in our understanding shape the news in powerful and unexamined ways.
• 2023: The year equitable journalism goes mainstream by Lindsay Green-Barber. I’ve long used Lindsay’s 2018 definition of engaged journalism in my course and talks. In this piece, she distinguishes engaged journalism from “equitable journalism.” I am sometimes frustrated by the sheer number of terms floating around in our corner of the journalism universe and the lack of consensus on what they mean, and I am not sure if we need a new term or if equitable journalism is it. That said, this taxonomy is useful, clear, and helps to add some nuance.

Photo 📸

Joy is hiking with Fred.

Thoughts 🤓

“In high conflict, we tend to pick the wrong fights with the wrong people,” Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict, wrote on Twitter. “It’s an understandable urge to blame the target that is nearest. But it distracts us from the right fight, the one we really need to have.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It does often feel like a tremendous amount of energy in the spaces I frequent get consumed with fighting with people with whom we largely agree on the most important things, like basic human rights and dignity. Meanwhile, deeply alarming threats to basic bodily autonomy and freedom are exploding all around us.

🚨Yikes

• News out of Florida continues to be disturbing on many issues. Here’s another one. DeSantis, Aiming at a Favorite Foil, Wants to Roll Back Press Freedom “Essentially what they’re saying is that they want to crack down on American journalism,” he said.
• I had a great conversation this week with Crystal Good, the founder of Black By God, a community-led news organization based in West Virginia that aims to provide a more nuanced portrayal of the Black Experience in the Appalachian region. Her work is vitally important for many reasons, but the status of West Virginia media in general is very alarming, as evidenced by this piece, among several others: Reporter’s dismissal exposes political pressures on West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Engagement Journalism News

• This week, the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY hosted the Black Twitter Summit. I was thrilled to be able to attend the event as an observer along with one of my students, Zakiyyah Woods. My friend Meredith Clark, an associate professor at Northeastern University, helped bring together an incredible group of scholars, long-time Black Twitter participants, activists and technologists to talk about the state and future of Black Twitter and more broadly, how we can learn from it to build more equitable, participatory, safer spaces for conversation and connection on the Internet. I’m still digesting what I learned, but I was struck by how participants described the joy, creativity, and organizing that Twitter enabled but also the severe levels of dangerous, real world abuse and vitriol that particularly Black women experience there. While it’s certainly not news that social platforms can bring both negative and positive outcomes, the range of different experiences described helped to elevate the complexity of social networks, how Black Twitter and other online communities are far from a monolith, and more. I also was glad to have leading developers who helped build some of the major platforms in the room listening, because they have the skills, power, and connections to help build and hone the tools we need.