A framework taken for granted

The Voting Rights Act made it easier for people to use journalists work to hold officials accountable. Now that it's gone, how will news adapt?

We can’t help but tend toward myth. In families, churches, industries, and countries it’s always the case. People have a natural tendency to alchemize symbolism and fact to create something simpler and more likely to endure, a better story for ourselves.

The news should not be in the business of myths, tasked instead with reporting the facts. Of course, we are not immune, we are (as yet!) an industry of humans. One of the most closely held myths in journalism is that we are essential to democracy without being dependent on it. We don’t representative democracy is essential to our reporting being able to have impact in the real world. 

Journalism in the United States, local journalism in particular, largely ignores what a debt it owes to the civil rights framework of the country, a framework strengthened and reinforced by federal law. The crown jewel of that framework was the Voting Rights Act, functionally overturned by the United States Supreme Court in their April decision in a case called Callais v. Louisiana. 

The Voting Rights Act functioned largely in the background of civic life. It kept discriminatory voting rules from ever going on the books by requiring 9 states (and districts in 7 additional ones) to have federal government sign off before making all voting rule changes. That provision was defanged by the Supreme Court in 2013. 

Until April people could still sue under the Voting Rights Act to push back against voting rules that would disproportionally affect minority voters. Those barriers can be anything from changing ID requirements to polling place rules or district boundaries. 

Without this law local institutions in 16 states can now create structures and frameworks designed to limit resident’s ability to hold them accountable. The court held that protecting incumbents and partisan gerrymandering are permissible reasons for local governments to intentionally dilute the power of minority votes.

Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee responded to the decision by changing district lines to eliminate districts containing majorities of Black voters. By doing so they proved it was the existence of the Voting Rights Act that had kept them from doing so before. 

A fateful news break                                       

Civil rights movement leaders were adept at gaining coverage of their movement, even from national newsrooms that in the 1960s still rarely hired Black reporters. This journalism proved instrumental to the passage of the Voting Rights Act largely because of conditions present only one time, on Sunday, March 7, 1965

One quarter of the United States is estimated to have been tuned into ABC on Sunday, March 7, 1965 to watch a Hollywood movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, about holding Nazi judges and prosecutors accountable for their part in the Holocaust.

The network made a decision that night to break into the movie with a 15-minute news break. The coverage documented in vivid detail the state violence unleashed earlier that day on Black Americans marching peacefully for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way out of Selma, Alabama.  

For millions of people watching those images, the juxtaposition of the images from Selma and the images from Nazi Germany were overwhelming. Solidarity marches sprang up across the country. So many people flew into Selma the next day to show their support for the marchers all the local airports ran out of rental cars. 

Within 8 days President Johnson presented draft legislation to Congress. Five months later a supermajority of both the House and the Senate passed the Voting Rights Act into law.

We have a historical record of the changes in American democracy that law made possible. In 1947 only 1% of Black Alabama residents of voting age (it was 21 then) were registered to vote. One year after the Voting Rights Act was passed it was 51%. Florida went from 15% to 60%, South Carolina from 13% to 51%, Texas from 19% to 62%. 

We have less understanding of how the law made it easier for journalism to be effective. How more guarantees of representative democracy made it easier for people, armed with reported information, to act on that information at the ballot box. How a law that watchdogged the changing of voting and election rules kept elected officials were more accountable to voters than to incumbents or political parties.  

To be fair, journalism was a strong business that had little trouble capturing and keeping the attention of large audiences for most of the time the Voting Rights Law was the law of the land. It would have been easy to believe that journalism didn’t need help holding power to account. 

That is no longer the case. 

Unresponsive structures 

Adrienne Johnson Martin is the co-executive director of MLK50, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis is one of the largest Black cities in the United States, and it is where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated three years after the Voting Rights Act became law. MLK50 has a history of hard-hitting investigations on everything from debt collection to toxic waste. Their tagline, “Justice Through Journalism,” is a testament to the belief that journalism is a catalyst for change.  

But Martin says that people living in Memphis have a hard time getting local officials to be responsive to them, “I would not give them a great record.” she said, citing an example of Memphis’ Mayor welcoming Elon Musk’s xAI data center in town, over the objections of residents.  

Responsive local officials can also find their laws pre-empted by state officials. Memphis residents demanded accountability after Tyré Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was beaten to death by five Black Memphis police officers after a routine traffic stop a few years ago. Memphis City Council responded to the outcry in part by banning pretextual traffic stops within the Memphis city limits. State senator Brent Taylor then sponsored legislation, that passed, keeping that ban from taking effect. “Brent Taylor’s not at all responsive to the majority of people in Memphis.” 

After the Supreme Court’s recent Voting Rights Act decision Tennessee redrew the lines of its congressional districts. District 9 is the only one in the state where a majority of the voters are Black. It is also the only district to have a Democrat representing them in Congress. Tennessee redrew the 9th District to split the Black population amongst three majority white districts. Brent Taylor has announced he is running to represent the redrawn 9th District in Congress. 

Johnson is not losing faith in the power of her newsroom despite these events. The newsroom has a clear framework to make decisions about what to cover, and the newsroom continues to publish investigations on everything from housing to air quality to transportation. But she knows it may become more difficult for people in Memphis to use reporting to create accountability. 

“I think that the accountability maybe shifts into a longer view,” reflected Johnson. “We are modeled on Dr. King's vision. His last speech in Memphis was about the mountaintop.”

“We think about a lot about our archive and, and getting things on the record,” she said. “Making sure things are documented so when people look back, they know what happened.” 

The erosion of civil rights laws has implications far beyond the south and even for groups of people not originally contemplated by Congress in 1965. 

Joseph Jaafari, the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of LOOKOUT, a nonprofit newsroom in Arizona delivering statewide news and investigations to and for the LGBTQ+ community.

The impact of Jaafari’s reporting relies upon the civil rights frameworks of the civil rights era, particularly the civil rights act of 1964, a law banning discrimination based on race and gender in employment. 

Federal courts have interpreted the civil rights laws of the 1960s to provide protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity across the country, including Arizona. The Trump administration is attempting to repeal these laws through executive orders and firing staff at the department of labor responsible for investigating claims of workplace discrimination. This leaves it up to the states to define the rights and protections of its LGBTQ+ residents.

Jaafari is a true believer that journalistic impact can come from the right combination of witness, truth, fact-checking and storytelling. He does not consider himself an advocate and does not want to be one. “We can't be advocates. We just can't,” he said. 

But Jaafari is finding it increasingly difficult to create impact at this moment of fractured attention, escalating crises, and consolidating power. 

“Where there is not already political will and there are no systems for affected people to change conditions,” he says, “What happens?” 

Jaafari hasn’t always had these doubts, “I come from a place where every single story that I did, there was impact,” he said. As an investigative reporter with bylines in the New York Times, Vice, Rolling Stone, and many others he could pick and choose his stories. The audience he could reach was sufficient to usually shake things up enough where he felt his reporting was creating accountability. 

“The same impacts don’t happen anymore,” he said. “Whenever we have had any kind of accountability impacts, it's usually from the piece being picked up and gone viral nationally or internationally.” he says. “If it was just viral locally, then nothing happens.”

It is not just that it is difficult to get people to pay attention. Arizona has no statewide laws prohibiting discrimination against of LGBTQ+ people in housing, public accommodation or education. The state legislature habitually introduces legislation attempting to restrict trans people’s ability change their gender on their drivers licenses and use public restrooms that align with their gender identity. 

The newsroom can still create impact. Earlier this year LOOKOUT was the only local news organization to report on the detention of Karla Saenz, a transgender immigrant rights advocate and Venezuelan asylum seeker. Saenz was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement when she showed up for a routine appointment about her asylum case and held in a men’s detention unit. Two public defenders read about the detention in LOOKOUT and took on Saenz’ case. The judge in that case found Saenz’s detention violated her rights to due process, and she was released. 

“If you think about the conditions of that,” Jaafari reflects. “The immigration judicial system hasn't been completely dismantled in the same way that the circuit courts have or the Supreme Court have. It could have a bit of sunlight shown on it to get some accountability.”

But he is finding that sunlight is often not enough and is wondering what else the newsroom should be doing. “When journalism does its job, which is to get people civically engaged,” he says, “But the people that should be listening to people who are engaged don't do anything, at what point did we fail in our jobs?” he asks. “When you have these power structures that are not going to budge, what is the point?” 

“I feel like we're just kind of throwing shit into the ether, and then we're reporting for the people on the bottom rungs, who have no power.” 

Nicole Lewis disagrees. “Not true,” she says. “They just don't have structural power. They have plenty of power in other ways.”

Democratic functions

Lewis is the deputy editor of engagement at ProPublica. Before that she spent eight years at the Marshall Project, reporting on felon disenfranchisement and developing the organization's engagement strategy to reach people in the criminal justice system. She is also friends with Jaafari, something I didn’t know before I spoke to her. They went to graduate school together, and she is a huge fan of his work. She understands his frustration.  

“All of this work that we've done to try to create and engender trust, to figure out audience need just feels deeply unimportant if people are so shut out of a system.”

Lewis believes journalism can have a role to play in getting people back into the system. “Civic power building, community building, the notion of bringing people together to see your issues are represented” are roles Lewis wants to see newsrooms embrace as core to their journalistic mission, particularly in the absence of civil rights frameworks. 

She sees the LOOKOUT newsroom doing all of those things and is more hopeful than Jaafari about them creating the conditions for accountability. “It isn’t preserving a record for the future when conditions change,” she says, “I think it’s moving towards a vision of what local news coverage could look like in this moment.” 

She wants news organizations to contend directly with what conversations need to happen in order to make systems more responsive to more people

“We've been so hamstrung by that idea of activism,” she said. “The media is a democratic institution. It's an institution that should be and needs to be on the side of democratic functions like free speech, the right to assemble and upholding the rule of law.”

“We have to be thinking about how our news coverage works towards that end of upholding our democracy,” says Lewis. “That is not advocacy, that's fulfilling the mission of the industry we're working within.”  

Lewis is a proponent of news organizations having clear theories of change, and being transparent about the conditions they hope their work is trying to bring about. 

“We have to ask ourselves, am I thinking about the people and the power that they have, or am I thinking about elected politicians and keeping them happy by giving them a free platform for their agendas?” 

Sherrilyn Ifill is a former civil rights litigator who ran until recently the Legal Defense Fund, responsible for arguing so many landmark civil rights cases before the Supreme Court. Ifill spoke a few weeks ago about a lesson from legendary litigator Lani Guinier on a panel about the rollback of the Voting Rights Act organized by the New York Review of Books.

 “She wrote something that I always remember and have kept with me,” she said. “Which is that Black people wanted to be able to participate in voting, not just for the ceremonial citizenship-ness of it, or for the dignity interest that being able to vote certainly speaks to. But because they believed that having political power would allow them to change the material conditions of their lives and their communities.”

For journalism to help change the material conditions of the world may not require outsized or powerful audiences. It may however, require that there be a civil rights framework that allows ordinary people, acting on reported and verified information, to hold officials accountable.