Pulitzer-winning reporter Wesley Lowery breaks down the myth of objectivity.
America is at a breaking point. How can journalists properly cover it? Citizens have flooded the streets in cities large, and small, in protest of racism, police violence and other forms of systemic oppression. But media institutions have been shaped by, and contributed to, those same systems.
The same rage that drives Black folks into the streets is carried around by Black journalists, who have lived through decades of retrograde newsroom policy and are beginning to hold the media’s gatekeepers to account for it.
That frustration was the crux of a sweeping discussion between Wesley Lowery, a journalist at CBS News, and me. This edition of Conversations, a limited live series for Slate, felt slightly more personal than others. For a young Black journalist who has been told to be wary of “pigeonholing” myself while writing about racism, having this conversation with Lowery felt cathartic in a way. Above you can watch our chat—produced by Britt Pullie and Faith Smith—and below is a transcript of the discussion.
Hey, y’all. I’m Julia Craven, and today I’m chatting with Wesley Lowery, a correspondent with CBS News and 60 in 6. I’m so happy that you could be here, and we’re going to talk about objectivity and how sometimes, that just means a little something different when white editors start talking to Black journalists about it. Thanks for being here.
Of course. Happy to be here, Julia.
Great. Last week you wrote a piece for the New York Times where you discuss this in depth. What prompted you to write that story?
Sure. I think we’re in a moment. People keep using this word, reckoning, and it is played out. We’ve heard it a million times, but we’re certainly in a moment in the weeks since George Floyd’s death, where a lot of people have been speaking out about their own experiences, particularly in the workplace. A lot of Black people have been speaking out about their experiences in the workplace and within newsrooms, specifically. One thing that comes up very often is this question of, “Why mainstream newsrooms cannot retain Black journalists,” right? It’s been 50, 60 years, since newsrooms initially began integrating and they only did that, by the way, because of a round of riots and they didn’t have anyone who could go into the cities to cover them.
And so, a few of us got jobs and now a few generations in, what we see is newsrooms that are still having real issues elevating Black journalists into newsrooms as management and retaining the Black journalists they have. And one of the reasons is because of the way this conversation about objectivity exists.
Now to be clear, the ideal of objectivity is really good, right? The idea is that on any given story, you try your hardest to be fair and get all the information, right? I think we all agree with that. We all want that. But what we know that’s not actually how objectivity is applied in too many cases.
And so, what we end up seeing is newsrooms that take the lived experiences of Black journalists and the perspectives of Black journalists, and because they are different than the majority and the white majority of the newsroom, they say, “Oh, well, that’s outside. It’s beyond the pale. That’s activist. That’s advocacy.” And so suddenly, the lived experiences are being devalued…and the journalists themselves are getting gaslit. We see this increasingly also with what I think of as the appearance of objectivity. It’s not even about, “Is your work fair?” It’s, “Did you ever do or say anything that someone could say, says you are biased? Right?
Right.
And so, did you accidentally walk past a Black Lives Matter march? And so, now theoretically, someone could say, “You’re one of the activists, not a journalist,” right? It’s not about, “Was the journalist there?” It’s not about, “Did you interview everyone and did you get the story?” It’s about theoretically, could someone say you’re not fair? And I think that way too much of our conversation ends up being about that, about tweets, about dumb stuff like that, and not enough about journalism, journalism.
Right. And so many Black journalists have gotten those, “Your tweet,” emails, where it’s just like, “Oh, you tweeted this thing. You said something factual, like Black people shouldn’t be gunned down by the police,” and it becomes an entire conversation between you and a manager. And so, why do you think that white editors and white managers, why do you think that they feel as though Black people, Black journalists rather, can’t be objective when it comes to our lived experiences?
Well, look, I think some of this is that, and then we know this, there’s polling and studies that suggest that Black Americans have many more white friends than white Americans do Black friends, right? It’s like, “We are all 15 white people with Black friends and we all know 15 white people.” And so, it’s a difference there. And so, because of that, what we know in human nature, is that we all, at times, have a skepticism of things that we don’t understand, that we’re not close to and there could be a discomfort at times being challenged by people, cultures, backgrounds that we don’t get. We all have that. That’s not a Black-white thing. Every human is most comfortable with things that are most like them and then it takes time to learn and adjust, right?
And so, sometimes, I mean, in my own experiences, I might voice something as a reporter that is a very mainstream Black belief and white people are like, “What? What are you talking about? That’s crazy.” And you’re like, “Okay,” because again, we forget that we live in different worlds. We live still in a very segregated world. We live in a world where skin color does determine a lot of, or plays a role in outcomes for a lot of Americans in a lot of different ways. And so, because of that, if you have newsrooms that are constructed around primarily one type of person, they are going to recoil, or they have the potential to recoil, from things that challenged their normative view. And what we know is, the normative view in most American newsrooms is white, middle class, upper class.
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