News Fix #46: Towards a rights based framework for journalism

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I would love to hear from you.

I've been thinking through something for the last week and would like your thoughts. A commitment I made when I started writing here was that I would try to balance what I see as two healthy journalistic instincts. The first is to present work as worthy of your time. The second is humility. Time and attention alone are insufficient to create expertise or authority.

The ideas I'm most interested in here are very much in progress—offerings we can think about and craft together into more robust frameworks that can help our real-world work be more valuable and of better service. I do not have answers here yet, but I think we need to think seriously about journalism's dependency on a strong civil rights framework.

The civil rights laws that were foundational to our hope of living in a functional and pluralistic democracy have been targets of an organized dismantling effort since they became laws. The most recent Supreme Court decision on how and when the Voting Rights Act applies is a legal event of a different order. It could be a mortal wound.

Will journalism just reflect this weakened frame, or will it try to strengthen it? We have a decision to make.

If people can no longer depend on the courts to redress something as basic as a lack of equal representation at the ballot box, does that change our responsibility as journalists, a profession consistently protected by the Constitution?

I think it does. Journalism that only reflects power is no fourth estate.

What would information systems that value and seek to uphold representative democracy look like? The Documenters program is an example here. Documenters are trained on the legal framework that makes their presence at public meetings possible, and when they document those meetings to create a record for the public, they more fully realize those rights and make them into concrete and robust value for their communities. But this is an idea and a program that already exists, thankfully. What else could we or might we do?

Not everyone will think journalism that recognizes its dependency on a robust civil rights framework is desirable. Journalistic independence is a core value and closely held. It's my belief that representative democracy should be a value just as closely held. I used to own a two-volume anthology of civil rights reporting. These reporters did not have a robust set of civil rights laws to reflect. Their values had to stand in. But for this moment, I don't think stories will suffice. A right is a latent demand, not a latent narrative. I think more projects like Profits and Losses, a project that understands restitution, is more valuable as a template here.

I worked as a civil rights lawyer, briefly, before my career in news. Some of my work during law school and afterward was with a coalition called The National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights. Lawyers representing organizations from the ACLU to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund were already working hard, more than two decades ago, to protect the VRA and other foundational federal civic protections from an organized rollback effort. Even then, the vulnerability of the VRA was well understood.

I stumbled into journalism about six years later. All of a sudden, listening to an early Planet Money podcast about mortgage-backed securities, it occurred to me that journalism might be a more effective way for people to have their serious complaints and concerns, like being fleeced by investment bankers, heard. And then everyone getting that information could figure out how those concerns and complaints could be addressed. Journalism just seemed more democratic than the courts. It was where we all could open up a forum bigger than the court to start to decide what we wanted for ourselves and each other and make that possible.

I've been thinking about this for decades, and my thoughts are still unformed. I understand the difficulty of what I'm asking, but I'm asking anyway.

Do you have ideas of what this civil-rights-oriented journalism can look like? I know of examples out there, from Lookout Arizona or Connecta Arizona to Documented, but I also know there are many more. Is this a conversation worth having, a framework worth pursuing? What have you seen or ideas do you have?

Until next week, take care.