What the Fact? by Seema Yasmin

Author:Seema Yasmin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

You could say that Johnson’s perspective—that the press didn’t fairly cover the aftermath of a racist murder and emphasized the vandalism of anti-racism protesters when concert attendees did much the same damage—lived in the sphere of deviance, and that her bosses either didn’t like being called out for their editorial decisions or assumed that her perspective was so outside the sphere of legitimate controversy that she wasn’t able to do her job as an “objective” reporter. They figured that Johnson was way outside the doughnut.

But Lewis and other reporters say that what Johnson’s editors were pushing for is the traditional way of doing journalism, and that needs to change. The traditional way of reporting, what you might find in the New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, asks reporters to be neutral on issues that affect their survival and insists that they deny who they are and how the world treats them and their communities. Black journalists and editors make up 7 percent of newsroom staff in the US but 14 percent of the US population. Are Black newsroom staff held to a different standard from their White colleagues, who are overrepresented in the media? Would a White journalist be pulled from covering a story about the Ku Klux Klan for fear that they couldn’t “objectively” cover the issue of White supremacy? Are White reporters considered inherently neutral because they live in a society where Whiteness is considered the default?

In the blog post that cost him his job, Lewis wrote,

Neutrality isn’t real: Neutrality is impossible for me, and you should admit that it is for you, too. As a member of a marginalized community (I am transgender), I’ve never had the opportunity to pretend I can be ‘neutral.’ After years of silence/denial about our existence, the media has finally picked up trans stories, but the nature of the debate is over whether or not we should be allowed to live and participate in society, use public facilities and expect not to be harassed, fired or even killed. Obviously, I can’t be neutral or centrist in a debate over my own humanity. The idea that I don’t have a right to exist is not an opinion, it is a falsehood. On that note, can people of color be expected to give credence to ‘both sides’ of a dispute with a White supremacist, a person who holds unscientific and morally reprehensible views on the very nature of being human?

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