News Fix # 48: Making peace with interdependence

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

I'm continuing to work on ideas about a civil rights framework for news. I'm grateful for your questions and ideas about whether news and journalism should more directly shore up truly fundamental rights and how they might do this. Please keep sending them.

This work is taking significant reading and reporting, but I am getting there. I'm exploring if the recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that rejected core elements of the Voting Rights Act, may make it more difficult for journalism to create meaningful accountability in large swaths of the country.

What already seems clear is that the decision is likely to have profoundly negative effects on American democracy, even as this is not the record being created by daily national news coverage. It seems to be de-prioritizing the stakes or moving on, unfortunately. Local coverage from Memphis and Mississippi, however, is not shying away from fundamental questions about democracy.

I wrote, “What already seems clear…” in the graf above. That is a hedge, for sure.

I'm hedging because my reporting just isn't finished, and I'm not ready to draw a conclusion just yet. I'm out of practice at reading court opinions and legal analysis, and after being completely out of civil rights spaces for two decades, I need new sources, too. My hedging is not an attempt to distance myself from taking a position on whether I want the United States to be a well-functioning and robust pluralistic democracy because I'm a journalist. I do want this! Openly! Democracy and journalism are so closely tied they are co-dependent. But if I had to choose one to live without, it would not be democracy.

I've had a few conversations during this reporting that have made it clear there's still a fair amount of discomfort with talking more explicitly and specifically about the relationship between democracy and journalism. I don't think this is something to be shy about.

Reporting is most useful when it responds to needs and harm. At our best, journalists respond to information and accountability gaps that entrenched interests are incentivised to ignore—a set of concerns so vast it includes everything from the quality of education and housing to product safety to no-bid contracts to the price of electricity and on and on. A common, though often unarticulated, theory of change within journalism is that when reporters verify, investigate, and help to amplify issues, they can and will be acted upon in the real world by residents, government officials, or even advocates. That formula for impact is completely dependent on a well-functioning democracy to work at all.

Journalism is fundamental to democracy, a belief so pervasive in the news industry it is almost sacrosanct. But that democracy is often fundamental for news and journalism to have real-world impact is less acknowledged.

Stephanie Murray, the Director of the Center for Collaborative Media at Montclair State University, told me the center had trouble recruiting newsrooms to participate in the most recent Democracy Day, in part because newsrooms equated participation with unethical advocacy.

Journalistic independence is so fundamental it is definitional. If you can't be independent, you're not being a journalist. I believe this.

Democracy is not definitional to journalism. Journalists can and frequently must work in undemocratic environments. But what is the upside to trying to be independent from democracy? There isn't one. When journalists work in undemocratic environments, the potential for harm increases. The potential of intimidation, harassment, or even death exists for the journalists, and it extends to the people they're reporting about and for and to. If for no other reason, we should be invested in well-functioning and responsive democratic systems because our sources, their communities, and our colleagues are likely to be safer.

I'm at peace with journalism and democracy being interdependent. It's definitely not partisan, and I don't think it's unethical. It's just reality.

Take care until next week, when I plan to send a round-up of ideas I've come across recently that I've found both exciting and hopeful. If you have summer reading recommendations, especially fiction, will you please send them to me? Don't be shy.