Impartiality for You, Racism for Us: Double Standards in Journalism
Journalists don’t just list off facts. They tell stories.
Journalists choose the most important and interesting details of an event based on evidence they research, observe, or are told about. Then, they create a narrative around what happened.
If a journalist makes content for a news company, that person must conform to the company’s “voice”, writing style, brand and political perspective (FOX vs. MSNBC, for example).
Then the editor has their own vision about how the journalist should tell the story.
And don’t forget the journalist has an audience to please. This includes billionaire donors and advertisers who fund the organization.
With all of these factors at play, it’s ridiculous to claim that objective impartial stories exist. They do not. It’s a lie. And I don’t trust publications that claim not to have a perspective or goal.
In my short life, I have seen how “impartial” newspapers savage the lives of black and brown people in the U.S. and in other countries.
For example, most of the New York press showed brazen racism and a lack of impartiality in dealing with the Central Park Jogger incident. The 1989 case is now back in the national conversation because of Ava Duvernay’s film series, When They See Us.
Now, let’s pull up the receipts:
- At the time of the assault, outlets like The New York Times, the New York Post and many others repeated the police narrative. The official storyline turned out to be a bawl-headed LIE. The media helped convict innocent black children in the court of public opinion, then state prosecutors threw them in cages.
- In 2019, the New York Times ran several articles calling out Donald Trump because he didn’t apologize for his role in the Central Park jogger case. But the publication never apologized for or owned up to its own role in whipping up national hysteria.
How sway…
Of course, New York’s black press and journalists weren’t so quick to swallow NYPD’s frame up and lies. But the protests of black people rarely are heard by legacy media, TV, or the courts.
And when black and colonized people ask for evidence and due process, we are painted as dumb, reverse racists who revel in violence. Dawad Wayne Philip from New Amsterdam News speaks on his experience as a black journalist during this case:
If for no other reason than the presumption of innocence, Black media held the responsibility to give voice to activist attorneys, Alton Maddox, C. Vernon Mason, Michael Warren, Louis Clayton Jones, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and others, who at the onset raised flags to a rotten conspiracy in the making. For that act, alone, the city’s Black newspapers, The City Sun, Amsterdam News and chiefly, The Daily Challenge, the city’s only Black daily (where I had been editor), were profiled as rogues and ghetto rags protecting the rights of the five “savage” youths.
Welp. So much for objectivity.
The journalism industry has laid waste to our communities and continues to criminalize us today. Look further than the Bronx 120 case to see an updated version of media-lynching.
Yet society continues to look to the same institutions and sources of information that frame black people and beat the drum for war.
Why?
Because the lives of the people they have ruined and dehumanized don’t matter in this society and probably never will. Not in the face of blinding prestige and persistent myths that white American is good and black brown and “foreign” is bad.
The industry will never have my trust until it accepts responsibility for its past and makes substantive change. But in a white-dominated industry funded largely by billionaires, I’m not holding my breath.
Indeed, journalism’s history has, very often, been to rubber-stamp official narratives, crush poor black people, and discredit the political left. And thus far, its greatest change in terms of diversity has been to include a lot more white women in newsrooms — and leave everyone else behind.
Yes, the industry clutches on to impartiality because it’s so useful a tool — too useful to give up. Not only can journalists and editors feel good about themselves, they can punish others too. Punish those who dare question their orthodoxy in public. And punish outspoken black and brown people, queer people and the poor — many of whom question the very foundations of society itself.
No, the media shouldn’t be asking where has impartiality gone. It should just admit it never had it in the first place.
