The program book for Friday’s conference Race, Ethnicity and Journalism Ethics is available for preview.
Inside you’ll find the day’s schedule, speaker biographies, and sponsor information.
Check out the program before you come to Union South or use it to follow along from home while you watch our live stream of the panels.
2016 cover
Journalists from two reporting teams who earned Pulitzer Prizes Monday will participate in the Center for Journalism Ethics conference April 29.
The conference – Race, Ethnicity and Journalism Ethics – will explore critical questions surrounding how journalists reflect and represent racial diversity through news coverage.
One important intersection between news and race involves coverage of education. Lisa Gartner of the Tampa Bay Times will discuss her team’s “Failure Factories” series, which earned a 2016 Pulitzer for Local Reporting. The series explored political decisions that resulted in degradation of a county’s schools, with disastrous consequences for black students.
An Associated Press team of journalists won the 2016 Pulitzer for Public Service for a deep investigation into slave labor in the international seafood trade. The team’s careful consideration of risk and ethical choices in reporting also earned them the Center’s Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics. Reporters Martha Mendoza and Robin McDowell will receive the award on behalf of the entire team and reflect on their reporting and decision-making during a luncheon session at the conference.
Online registration for the conference, which includes the luncheon, is open through Friday, April 22. Visit http://go.wisc.edu/ethics2016 to register.
In addition to these prize-winning journalists, 15 expert panelists are on board to address key questions through four panels.
The panelists will join Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will deliver the keynote address at 9 a.m. Hannah-Jones reports on racial injustice for the New York Times Magazine and recently won a George Polk Award for a “This American Life” series on school integration and resistance to it.
The conference is supported by generous donations from the Gannett Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, WPS Health Solutions, the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and the Wisconsin Newspaper Association.
This is the eighth annual conference of the Center of Journalism Ethics, housed in UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Founded in 2008, the Center’s mission is to foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.
For a full slate of panelists and registration information, visit http://go.wisc.edu/ethics2016.
Online conference registration is here.
Read more about the conference.
This post was updated April 20.
While diversifying the newsroom, or hiring more journalists of color, is a frequently suggested remedy and a positive first step to better coverage of race and ethnicity issues by mainstream journalists, Sue Robinson said it is not enough.
Robinson, a former journalist and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, studies media discourse around race and ethnicity, especially focusing on conversations about inequalities.
“We have to get more representation of all our communities in newsrooms so that all of our communities have a bigger voice in our mainstream dialogues,” she said. “That said, the danger with merely relying on hiring more people of color is that it absolves everybody else in the newsroom from doing the hard work of understanding their own implicit biases and privilege.”
Additionally, relying on newsroom diversification can create token race reporters, she said.
“They get pigeon-holed into writing about issues of race for a lot of different reasons, some of which are very logistical,” she said. “At the same time, those journalists might want to be an education reporter or they might want to do politics. It ends up almost being racist because you discount the full experience that those people might have.”
On April 29, the final panel at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics’ Conference on Race, Ethnicity and Journalism Ethics will begin to address next steps. What are some solutions? And how can they be implemented?
But even if diversifying the newsroom were a silver bullet solution, implementing such changes is not without challenges.
For Phil Brinkman, city editor at the Wisconsin State Journal, it starts in the hiring pool.
“We feel the real lack of diversity in our newsroom,” he said. “We live in a very white community, a very white state and we’re just not getting the candidate pools that we need.”
The State Journal has received only a handful of applications from journalists of color over the last couple of years, he said, noting that it will take a combined effort from both newsrooms and journalism schools.
“I would like to do whatever we can to increase our hiring of candidates of color, but j-schools need to make that a priority, too,” he said. “We need a better pipeline.”
Jordan Gaines, UW-Madison senior and editor of the Black Voice predicts that relatively non-diverse cities do not appeal to young journalists of color who are applying for jobs.
“I think the obvious considerations when applying are probably quality of city and then the presence of other people of color,” she said. “And it’s not that realistic for Madison.”
Fortunately, Gaines sees other areas where local outlets could enhance coverage.
“The big one that I think of is diversifying the people journalists contact,” she said. “A lot of times, we have these go-to folks, especially when we’re talking about marginalized communities. Because of that we don’t have intersectional people that we talk to who represent different types of identities.”
Journalists will need to do a better job of getting into communities to expand this contact list, she said.
In addition to diversifying the workforce and sourcing, Robinson said the responsibility rests on individual awareness.
“Most newsrooms do a diversity training – and that’s good. That’s all really good,” she said. “But I also think that we need privilege training beyond that. We need the personal understanding of one’s own role in the complicitness of reinforcing white supremacy within structures that are in place today.”
But it can’t stop after the workshop name tags are tossed. The training and discussion must be built into newsroom practice and culture more permanently, she said.
“It has to be ongoing, so that it’s not just a yearly workshop, but an ongoing conversation that happens in the newsroom,” she said. “Just like how many sources you need, how many inches you have and what the deadline is. It has to be part of that structure.”
The way people sound when they speak, chatter, and laugh may lead to discrimination, police investigation.
Jennifer Stoever, a media and literature scholar at Binghamton University, called this phenomenon “sonic color-line” in a recent book. That is, people in color are often stereotyped and mistreated in turn by their vocal or audio traits.
Stoever said sound-based discrimination is particularly problematic for crime reporting, as such attitude has its deep root in the source most relied on in crime reporting — the police.
African-Americans are often accused of being loud in public spaces for example, she said. A loud car stereo was once used as an excuse for the police to stop the drivers and investigate other crimes, Stoever found in her study.
On the other hand, after interviewing many people of color, Stoever found that the “authoritative voice” the police are trained to use when they are talking to people in high-crime rate communities actually sounds aggressive. The police tone and posture sometimes can escalate the situation, she said.
If adopted by journalists in their reporting, such authoritative voice, together with the stereotype image of less disciplined people in color, can circulate fears, said newly elected Dane County Circuit Court Judge Everett Mitchell.
Mitchell, also a pastor, is concerned about creating a healthy relation between the offenders and victims after a crime. People who committed a crime should be given a second chance and be able to be accepted back in their communities after the rehabilitation, he said.
The disparity in criminal justice system has been existing for generations in Dane County, with more prosecutions in certain communities, Mitchell said. Those communities are particularly hurt if the restoration of crimes is not going well.
Also, even crime rates sometimes do not give the full picture, said Leland Pan, Dane County District 5 Supervisor. Some communities may have a “suppressed crime rate” because of their reputation for safety.
According to Pan, District 5 has a large student population, which is overwhelmingly white and consists of people from wealthier families.
“Crimes by white males are under-discussed,” Pan said. White students feel more liberty in grey areas as their misconducts are less likely to get reactions from both the victims and the supervisory forces on campus.
Even though on-campus crimes tend to get a lot of media attention, rarely is that coverage about white aggression toward people of color, Pan said. Students of racial minorities sometimes are unwilling to report hostility to them because they are prone to be associated with offenders instead of victims.
As the newsroom demography gets less racially diverse and more socially privileged, journalists’ source network clings more tightly around the established power center, Hemant Shah, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a talk.
The mainstream news media also hold the prejudice toward alternative media promoting ethnic or racial voices, excluding them from professional journalism, Shah said.
For example, The Capital Times published an opinion article by Paul Fanlund, executive editor, in February about how the mainstream news media in Madison had been greatly contributing to the conversation about racial issues in the past few years.
A few days later, Madison365, a progressive non-profit media, aired a radio program criticizing the Cap Times article for its condescending tone and mainstream limitation.
“There have been only certain groups of people that are able to talk about these issues when it comes to the mainstream,” one of the hosts said, pointing out that the increasing coverage mentioned by Fanlund in his column was predominantly about the advocacy groups the mainstream media found worth reporting.
The mainstream media always have a patronizing gesture as if they “discover” those long-existing racial inequality problems, even though we have been covering the same issues for ages, said the hosts, who are also from communities of color.
This border between professional journalism and progressive journalism needs to be eliminated to include more minority voices in mainstream media, Shah said. He also encourages NGOs and other public agencies to coordinate between minority media and advertisers to form a more sustainable financial model for minority media.
Shah will moderate a panel for race and crime reporting during a journalism ethics conference held by the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 29. Register for the conference here.
Patty Loew, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, said discussion about how journalism can better represent communities of color often leaves out those who are already using media forms to self-represent.
“Mainstream media doesn’t always stop to ask how communities of color are self-representing,” she said. “Many are making space to create their own representations.”
Loew is a professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication and affiliated with American Indian Studies.
When journalists try to address misrepresentation and misguided reporting on communities of color, this discussion is often geared toward how the professional industry, predominantly white, can do a better job of reporting, she said.
But, the Native youth she works with through the Tribal Youth Media Initiative produce their own work. Loew and the initiative coordinate with Don Stanley, Life Sciences Communication faculty associate.
“Tribal Youth Media gives youth the chance to represent themselves through digital storytelling,” Loew said. “It’s a really powerful thing to be apart of.”
The initiative brings together a team of graduate students who work with Native American teens to produce video stories about their tribes and communities during the summer. The project runs annually and involves week-long instruction on digital media production.
Ahpahnae Thomas, a junior at Mellen (Wis.) High School participated in the program several times.
“We go out and sort of have a lot of adventures in the wild around the Bad River Reservation,” he said. “Then we make short videos about things we experience.”
Participants like Ahpahnae not only shape content, but they also have the opportunity to interact with media forms they are passionate about.
“With the video production, we had to add music to it, and we created our own music,” Ahpahnae said. “That’s what I like to do. That’s my thing.”
Ahpahnae Thomas composes music while Shania Jackson films. Photo courtesy Patty Loew
Since its inception, the Tribal Youth Initiative and its participants have produced award-winning films which feature community-generated representations of Native communities.
Ahpahnae’s mother, Jean Hahn-Thomas, had the opportunity to chaperone one film festival invitation. She accompanied members of the Tribal Youth Media Initiative in 2013 to Arizona where the participated in the Human Rights Film Festival at Arizona State University, as well as other local showings.
The film featured the natural wildlife that would be affected by the construction of a proposed four and a half mile open pit iron ore mine in Northern Wisconsin, located directly over the Bad River Watershed.
The question and answer session following a showing at a local Arizona school stuck with Hahn-Thomas, in particular.
“Because in Arizona there is a lack of water, the students in the audience were interested in what they could do help to stop the mine from going up which would have polluted the water and dried up the artesian wells,” she said. “It was really good for the kids – both those in the audience and those from Wisconsin.”
The mine project was put on hold in spring of 2015.
“This project shows the kids that you can, with simple things, produce something that people will care about, and it just gives them a completely different perspective on what they can do,” Hahn-Thomas said. “And no matter what the outcome of their short video is, it’s theirs. It’s what they put into it.”
The Tribal Youth Media Initiative is just one of many organizations that are amplifying the self-representation of communities of color.
Simpson Street Free Press on Madison’s South Side is a neighborhood-based nonprofit that trains young students, often from diverse backgrounds, in journalism. Young writers have the opportunity to write from their own experiences and interests.
Similarly, Lussier Community Education Center is working with University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students to development and launch a low-power, community FM radio station at 95.5 and online, which will in part highlight the experiences and interests of communities of color on Madison’s west side.
Among others, these organizations are participating in recent conversations on representation of race in the media – not necessarily through letters to the editor, but through the creation of their own media content. And while this does not address all of the work that must be done in media industries to better represent communities of color, it is one step that should be recognized.
“It was nice to be able to share what we learned and have other people see things from our perspective – a different view from our situation,” Thomas said. “And I know was it was really fun to do.”
Loew will appear on a panel addressing media representations of race and ethnicity during a journalism ethics conference held by University of Wisconsin-Madison. Henry Sanders of Madison 365 and will also speak on the panel, moderated by University of Wisconsin-Madison Assistant Professor Lindsay Palmer. USA Today writer Alan Gomez will also join the panel.
When a report from a state nonprofit revealed a racial disparity in Dane County schools, journalists adopted the term “achievement gap” to describe the problem.
But Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, a scholar in education policy, doesn’t think the widely used term accurately describes the problem. Although intended to label the phenomena, it potentially puts wrong blames on black youths, suggesting that they fail to “achieve” as much as their white peers, she said.
It is the education system that fails young African-Americans, in turn creating the gap, Winkle-Wagner said. Even after the racial segregation in public schools officially ended in 1950s, the negative stereotype of black students has long been perpetuated in the education system, she further explained.
“Teachers have lower expectations for black students,” Winkle-Wagner said. And when the students do turn out to achieve less, discriminatory treatments are not reflected on, but rationalized instead, she said.
Nearly half of black high school students in Madison, Wisconsin, did not graduate on time for the 2010-11 school year, according to the Race to Equity Report from the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, which focused on racial disparity issues in Dane County.
White students were three times as likely as black students to graduate on time, the report also revealed. Additionally, in 2011, African-American children were four times more likely to be not reading-proficient in their third grade, six times more likely to be arrested in their teenage, and five times more likely to be unemployed later.
But as a substitute for describing the problem as “achievement gap” when reporting on it, Gloria Ladson-Billings, a fellow scholar of Winkle-Wagner, proposed the term “education debt.”
The way racial disparity is framed in the news matters because it affects where funding goes and how the public evaluates the current policies, Winkle-Wagner said.
“Journalists decide how people start to talk about the problem,” she said.
However, most news stories are told from the perspective of white establishment, said Jennifer Stoever, a Binghamton University professor with expertise in race representation in literature and media.
“People in color are presented as outsiders,” Stoever said. Journalists tend to have predisposed ideas of what to hear from racial minorities even when they actively seek for their voices, she said.
When covering education issues, white journalists often adopt a simple “good-versus-bad” binary and use few prominent activists of color to represent the whole minority community, said Sue Robinson, former journalist and current professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Robinson studies media discourse of racial disparities.
Also, news media rely very much on the school institution itself for story ideas and narrative frames, Robinson said in an email. This professional norm further strengthens the voice of the school boards and officials.
These privileged voices have their own bias in Stoever’s opinion. School teachers and supervisors are predominantly white, and, with the stereotype of “louder black students” in their minds, they have double standards for what constitutes misbehaviors, Stoever said.
In 13 southern states, nearly half of suspended or expelled K-12 students were African-American in 2011-2012 academic year, while African-Americans only constituted 24 percent of the enrolled students, according to a report by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania.
A police officer was suspended for violently slamming a 16-year-old black girl onto the floor and dragging her across the classroom after the videos of his conduct went viral online in 2015. The police officer was called to arrest the student for refusing to leave the classroom while keeping using her cellphone.
Robinson said journalists should challenge themselves to find sources of color, as racial minorities in difficult situations may not be willing to speak on record.
As a result, current news coverage about racial issues in education focuses more on individual issues rather than the systematic reasons behind racial disparities, she said.
Journalists need to include voices from a wider range of backgrounds and demographics, and to locate current problems within historical context, Robinson suggested.
Robinson will appear on a panel for race and education reporting during a journalism ethics conference April 29. Winkle-Wagner will moderate the panel, which will also include New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Award-winning New York Times Magazine journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will deliver the keynote address to open the 2016 Center for Journalism Ethics conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 29.
This year’s conference focuses on “Race, Ethnicity and Journalism Ethics.” The event runs from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Union South on the UW-Madison campus. The keynote will begin at 9 a.m. Registration is now open at the center’s website. The cost for early bird registrants is $20, including a buffet lunch, but increases to $25 April 9. Registration is free for all students and UW-Madison faculty and staff.
Hannah-Jones has reported on the history of racism and inequality and its legacy in modern policies that have maintained racial injustice. She has written personal reports on the black experience in America to offer a case for greater equality.
Earlier this spring, she earned a George Polk Award for radio reporting for “The Problem We All Live With,” broadcast on “This American Life.” For that story, she investigated the Normandy School District in Missouri, from which Michael Brown had graduated just before he was killed in nearby Ferguson. The two-part series examines school integration and the impact of resistance by largely white communities.
Building on the keynote, four panels will address the ethical challenges journalists face when dealing directly and indirectly with issues of race and ethnicity. Session topics will include:
“We’re looking forward to a challenging, stimulating and productive day of candid discussion,” Professor Robert Drechsel, director of the center, says. “Whether the context is politics, criminal justice, education, sports, the economy or national security, journalism inherently plays a critical role in framing issues and images of race and ethnicity for the public. The question is not whether journalism does this, but how and with what impact.”
Also during the conference, the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics will be presented to the Associated Press for its handling of ethical issues encountered in the reporting of a series of stories revealing the use of slave labor by the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The stories resulted in the freeing of 2,000 slave laborers. Two of the reporters who did the stories will participate in a panel discussion of the ethical issues they faced and how they resolved them.
This is the eighth annual conference of the Center of Journalism Ethics, housed in UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Founded in 2008, the center’s mission is to foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism, and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.
The Associated Press has won the 2016 Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics for reporting that resulted in the freeing of 2,000 slave laborers used by the fishing industry in Southeast Asia.
The award will be presented at the annual conference of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics on April 29 in Madison by Nada Shadid, Anthony Shadid’s widow.
The center bestows the award annually in honor of Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning UW-Madison journalism alumnus and foreign reporter for the Washington Post and The New York Times. He died in 2012 from health complications while reporting in Syria.
While investigating an Asian “slave island” that provides fish for the American market, AP reporters Martha Mendoza, Margie Mason, Robin McDowell and Esther Htusan realized that any slave who talked with them faced possible execution. The reporters and their editors decided to rescue their sources from the island before publishing the explosive story.
After accepting the award, Mendoza and McDowell will participate in a panel discussion focusing on how they wrestled with the ethical problems they confronted.
“There is nothing unusual about journalists protecting their sources from discovery,” Jack Mitchell, chair of the judging committee, said. “But journalists usually minimize involvement beyond that. The AP defied convention by taking responsibility for the welfare and safety of the slaves, who were willing to face death to tell their stories. The journalists got the men to safety before publishing the stories.”
The AP team was chosen for the award over four other finalists who also demonstrated exceptional commitment to ethical journalism last year. They were:
The Center for Journalism Ethics will honor the AP team at its conference, which focuses on “Race, Ethnicity and Journalism Ethics” this year. The day-long event will begin at 8:30 a.m. at Union South on the UW-Madison campus. It will include panels devoted to ethical issues in representations of race, covering education and criminal justice, and a discussion of how journalism can improve such coverage. Award-winning New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones will deliver the keynote address.
Online registration is now open for the ethics conference
Online registration for the conference is now closed. But, we will accept registration at the door. The registration desk will be near the doors of the Varsity Rooms of Union South’s second floor.
The conference runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 29 in Union South, Madison, Wisconsin.
The cost is $25, and includes lunch.
The full program booklet is available.
Registration for all students and UW-Madison faculty/staff is free. Email questions to the Center at ethics@journalism.wisc.edu.
| 8:30 | Breakfast and registration | ||||
| 8:50 | Opening remarks | ||||
| 9 | Keynote address | Nikole Hannah-Jones | New York Times Magazine | ||
| 10 | Panel — Representing Race: Language, Imagery, Sources and Issues for Journalists | Sue Robinson, moderator | UW-Madison SJMC | ||
| Henry Sanders | Madison365 | ||||
| Patty Loew | UW-Madison Life Sciences Communication | ||||
| Alan Gomez | USA Today | ||||
| 11:15 | Panel — Education Matters: Covering Racial Dynamics and Examining Journalism’s Role | Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, moderator | UW-Madison Education Leadership and Policy Analysis | ||
| Sue Robinson | UW-Madison SJMC | ||||
| Nikole Hannah-Jones | New York Times Magazine | ||||
| Lisa Gartner | Tampa Bay Times | ||||
| 12:15 | Lunch | ||||
| 12:45 | Shadid award presentation | Jack Mitchell, Shadid committee chair | UW-Madison SJMC | ||
| Nada Shadid, award presenter | |||||
| Robin McDowell | Associated Press | ||||
| Martha Mendoza | Associated Press | ||||
| 1:45 | Panel — Questions of Justice: Crime, Inequality and News Media | Hemant Shah, moderator | UW-Madison SJMC | ||
| Katy Culver | UW-Madison SJMC | ||||
| Mike Koval | Madison Police Department | ||||
| Matt Braunginn | Young, Gifted and Black | ||||
| Jaweed Kaleem | Los Angeles Times | ||||
| 3:15 | Plenary Session — Tomorrow’s Work: Moving Forward on Race and Journalism | Keith Woods, moderator | NPR | ||
| Maria Len-Rios | University of Georgia | ||||
| Brent Jones | USA Today | ||||
| 4:30 | Closing remarks |
The UW-Madison community is still recovering from the shock of UW alum Anna Therese Day’s recent arrest in Bahrain. Day and her crew were in Bahrain over the weekend, covering the anniversary of the Gulf nation’s Shia-led uprising in 2011. The four American journalists were detained Sunday on allegations that they had participated in attacks against police officers and falsely claimed to be tourists. As more information filtered out, international media also reported that Bahrain authorities accused the journalists of participating in the new rash of protests that they had been covering.
On Tuesday morning, NBC quoted the journalists’ lawyer as saying that Day and her crew had been formally charged, but then released without travel restrictions. CNN also said the journalists were on their way to the airport. International news organizations continued to cover the incident as it unfolded.
Family says UW-Madison alumna @ATDLive and three fellow journalists are free and out of Bahrain after arrest https://t.co/rjTNp8zJZ2
— Nico Savidge (@NSavidge) February 16, 2016
A graduate of the political science department at UW-Madison, Day has made a name for herself as a respected freelance journalist. She has worked with major news outlets like CNN, Al Jazeera English, and The New York Times. She is also a co-founder of the Frontline Freelance Register, an organization that fights for the safety of freelance journalists around the world.
The arrest of Day and her crewmembers, who have not been publicly named, provides an important opportunity to examine the dangers that journalists face when they cover stories in politically tense regions. As the Committee to Protect Journalists reports, officials in Bahrain have often conflated the journalistic act of covering local uprisings with the political act of participating in these protests. Reporters without Borders also says that media freedom is constantly under attack in the Gulf nation, with photographers, correspondents and online journalists constantly being arrested and even tortured for their work.
Day’s experience has the potential to shine some light on these issues. Yet, her incident also has the potential to illuminate something a bit messier, something that journalists and scholars need to address more often. The sad fact is that most of the journalists who have been persecuted in Bahrain over the past few years are not westerners like Day. Instead, they tend to be local to Bahrain or the Middle Eastern region, and thus more vulnerable to oppression.
Take, for example, the case of Ahmed al-Fardan, a photojournalist who is currently serving a three-month prison sentence in Bahrain for taking pictures of a protest. Like Day and her crew, al-Fardan was accused of participating in the protests he was trying to cover. Unlike Day and her crew, al-Fardan is still in prison.
Or what about Ahmed Radhi, a freelance journalist arrested for criticizing Bahrain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia? He’s been in prison for several months now, on terrorism charges. What’s more, he’s told the Bahrain Human Rights Center that security forces tortured him in order to get him to confess to the heavy “anti-state” charges brought against him.
Why aren’t the CNN’s and the BBC’s and the Al Jazeera’s of the world telling us more about these local journalists, who suffer just as much (if not more) than foreign correspondents? Put another way, what responsibility do Western news outlets have when it comes to informing the world about the plight of journalists who aren’t necessarily from the “West?”
The tendency in mainstream, Western news organizations is to give exposure to communities with whom Western news audiences can more easily “relate.” In the context of international reporting, this “relatability” is often subtly racialized and regionalized. We saw this in the overwhelming coverage of the Paris attacks in late 2015, for example, as well as in the notable silence when similar attacks occurred in Beirut and Nairobi right around the same time. We’re seeing it again in the coverage of Day’s arrest and subsequent release.
Though there is an understandable comfort in familiarity, one media ethicist asserts that in a globalized world, the media can do much more than feed us familiar images of ourselves. In his 2013 contribution to Stephen J.A. Ward’s book on global media ethics, scholar Nick Couldry argues that global media do not resolve or reduce the disagreements and diversity that define the current age. Instead, global media can bring these differences into view, inspiring a more important set of questions. As Couldry puts it, how do we “live sustainably together through media,” despite our differences?
Protesters in Bahrain show solidarity with Egypt. File photo dated Feb. 4, 2011 from Mahmood al-Yousif.
If Western news outlets were to approach their coverage of Day’s arrest from this perspective, they would necessarily show more interest in the ongoing persecution of local journalists in Bahrain. On one level, these journalists’ detention serves to expose Bahrain officials’ refusal to live sustainably with differences in their own nation. Since the 2011 uprisings, Bahrain officials have cracked down on dissenters with oppositional perspectives, refusing to create a space in which multiple viewpoints can coexist.
On another level, the continued detention of local reporters in Bahrain shows that there are huge disparities among the world’s journalists, disparities that need to be better understood. Visiting correspondents may have different agendas than local journalists, for example. On top of that, local journalists must deal with working conditions that are inherently riskier than those of Western reporters. In an increasingly interconnected world, these distinctions should be of interest to Western news organizations and their audiences. And it’s the news outlets’ job to bring these issues into the light.
There is more to the story of this recent arrest than the figure of the young American freelancer who made it home. Courageous and brilliant, Day’s own work has repeatedly pointed to the nuances of foreign reporting as well, encouraging more dialogue on the dangers that journalists face. News organizations and journalism scholars need to treat Day’s experience as a larger opportunity to talk about the people who haven’t yet been released — the people who may never be released at all.
