Are you feeling any different about advocacy lately?

Welcome to all our newcomers! I'm glad you're here. Please share your questions and thoughts along the way. Just hit reply or email me at sarah@understated.com

Thanks for your grace as I've been getting back to a regular schedule. A quick announcement about the News Futures working group I'm leading with Harry Backlund and Jennifer Brandel to develop a sound theory for meeting information needs to put into practice. We're keeping sign-ups open until we start meeting formally in May. More than 40 people are committed already for what I can promise will be some nerdy, necessary fun. The plan is to adapt our old hierarchy of information needs into a framework that contemplates informing people across differences, with multiple and overlapping needs and abundant sources of low-value information. I'm excited already.

Because I'm holding myself back from thinking too much about information needs outside of that group, I've been grappling instead with journalists’ fraught relationship with advocacy.

We are living through a moment when harm at the hands of the federal government is intentional, widespread, and strategic. Abrupt firings, targeted deportations, and defunding services for the most vulnerable are examples. I've heard reporters and editors voice concern about these things privately. I'm not sure, however, that this private concern is translating into coverage of the Trump administration with any consistent moral clarity. Instead, it seems the current pace and tone of political coverage is normalizing brutality. It reminds me of the dehumanization we've become accustomed to in local crime coverage, to our detriment.

I see this particular lack of voice and clarity as being about two things. But before I keep going down this path, I want to hear your thoughts.

First, it seems traditional news leaders structure news offerings in a way that conflates values with opinion. I don't know how much of this is a principled decision, and how much of it is about positioning or economics.

Second, and more importantly, too many reporters and editors seem to conflate values and advocacy, and perhaps are wary of overstepping as they craft coverage.

During the first Trump administration, we had open and rigorous debate about objectivity. It was this early 2017 post by Lewis Wallace about objectivity that brought the debate to the forefront after it got him fired (!) from Marketplace. The post holds up remarkably well, as does this one about the aftermath of that firing. Moral clarity, indeed.

What I didn't remember with any clarity was that Wallace's bosses at Marketplace conflated his unapologetically transgender identity with advocacy, and that's actually what got him fired. I had remembered the false dichotomy being about identity on one side and accuracy on the other.

But here's an edited excerpt from Wallace's piece detailing his dismissal, “The VP said she believed I’d shown what kind of journalism I want to do — I think the assumption was that I want to do advocacy journalism — and that it is not the kind of journalism Marketplace does."

"She said that we cannot be both activists and journalists at the same (time).” 

In 2016, the Trump administration couched their contempt of the press behind questions about our ability to be truthful and trusted. The straw man was accuracy. The current Trump administration, in contrast, is openly questioning the humanity of an exceptionally broad range of people, many reporters included. I highly recommend spending 15 minutes with the most recent episode of the Memory Palace podcast for a lesson on how this happens and offers a journalistic antidote.

In light of these stakes, I want to have this objectivity discussion again. This time, I'd like to more squarely confront when we feel we can or must make distinctions between values, advocacy, and journalism, and when we can't. We had these discussions to some extent during the Black Lives Matter movement. Does it feel like those principles have stuck around, or are they in retreat?

Tell me what you're grappling with when it comes to the intersection of values and advocacy and journalism. Where does the ground feel solid under your feet? What are you less certain of? Are you ready to have this conversation (perhaps again), and why, or why not? I'm asking for feedback and discussion, not quotes, so don't feel like you need to have all your thoughts lined up. If you've seen examples of reporters, content creators, or news organizations handling this well send them my way.

Take care of yourself, and somebody else, until next time.