Journalists on News in 2020

Each year, the people at the NiemanLab ask journalists and individuals working in digital media for their predictions for the year. As I browsed the quotes from journalists, I noticed a lot of issues that I had not known of prior to reading. For instance, Tonya Mosley, co-host of NPR’s midday news show Here & Now, said “trust me — every person of color in your newsroom has a story about how a manager questioned either their news judgment, their diction, or whether they could be neutral or objective”. This intrigued as I did not understand why someone’s race would influence how managers judge their journalism. I read her prediction entitled “The neutrality vs. objectivity ends”. In her article, Mosley recounts a time when a boss questioned her ability to remain objective on the reporting of the shooting of a black man by police. I found it very interesting how Mosley makes the argument that neutrality does not equate to objectivity. Mosley writes, “This flawed way of thinking also assumes that white journalists have a neutral point of view. News as we know it was built on this idea — that cultural norms, ideas, and points of view, which have historically come from white journalists, are neutral. But we can see from history that news coverage can be explicitly biased, centering the white experience, and in many cases blatantly racist”. Mosley concluded her article by encouraging we get rid of the idea of “bothesideism” and false equivalency. I thought this was so fascinating to read about as I have never considered what some of these journalists have to face being of color. [1 image, 1 link, 2 quotations, 272 words]