Abstract
Based on interviews with journalists during the 2020 racial justice protests, this study uses field theory and doxa to explore to what extent journalists who cover social justice issues are redrawing the boundary between journalism and activism. I use #BlackoutTuesday and journalists’ discourse about posting black squares on Instagram in support of #BlackLivesMatter to examine social media’s role in evolving perceptions about objectivity and stance-taking. Journalists saw social media as creating an opening for objectivity to move from an orthodox value to a debatable heterodox one. I argue these journalists acted as change agents, reforming the journalist field from within.
It was dubbed the “summer of racial reckoning” (Chang et al., 2020). Following the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as many as 26 million people across the United States took to the streets to protest against police brutality and racial injustice, making these Black Lives Matter protests the largest movement in U.S. history (Buchanan et al., 2020). In response, major companies—including newsrooms—pledged to do more to fight racism and improve diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, Gannett, along with its flagship newspaper USA Today, published a house ad saying “Black lives matter” and that the company stood in solidarity with Black communities. Newspapers like The Kansas City Star apologized for previous racist coverage (Booker, 2020). Axios even gave its reporters the greenlight to participate in the historic protests (Lee & Smith, 2020).
The racial reckoning also occurred on social media, a space that has been lauded for offering an online Black public sphere (Richardson, 2017; Steele, 2018), and criticized for commodifying Blackness and contributing to digital racism (Noble, 2018; Sobande, 2021). In the month following Floyd’s murder, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was shared more than 100 million times on Twitter—by comparison, it was shared 400,000 times in the month prior (Kivvit, 2020). In June, the music industry announced a blackout, #TheShowMustBePaused, in solidarity with protesters (Coscarelli, 2020). As more musicians and celebrities began participating, the movement spread beyond the music industry and morphed into #BlackoutTuesday, with an estimated 28 million social media users posting black squares on Instagram in support of Black Lives Matter (Ho, 2020). Journalists also posted the black square, prompting a thread in at least one journalist Facebook group that questioned the ethics behind it. The original poster commented, “Is this considered showing some sort of bias? To me, making a statement showing you stand with the [B]lack community shouldn’t be seen as such.”
Journalists are increasingly debating the merits of objectivity and stance-taking, especially when it comes to racism (Lowery, 2020; Wallace, 2019). Social media have blurred the lines between the personal and the professional, and between activism and journalism, challenging the journalistic field and its accepted practices, norms, and values such as distance, neutrality, and detachment (Barnard, 2018; Papacharissi & Oliveira, 2012; Usher, 2017). Barnard (2016) suggested that social media might be shifting journalism’s doxa, or the taken-for-granted rules and values structuring the field, from the orthodoxic—not up for debate—to the heterodoxic—or outside the established norm. When journalists push for change, though, they are often accused of violating traditional journalistic norms of objectivity and derided for practicing activist or advocacy journalism (Ruigrok, 2010; Thomas, 2018).
The 2020 protest movement—both online and offline—and the supposed “reckoning” in newsrooms, highlight the urgency for understanding journalism’s and social media’s roles in racial justice. This study uses #BlackoutTuesday and the 2020 protests as the ideal case for exploring to what extent journalists who cover protests and social justice issues are redefining objectivity and redrawing the boundary between journalism and activism, potentially serving as change agents for the journalist field (Falck & Barnes, 1975; Russell, 2016). Using Bourdieu’s (1993, 1998) field theory and doxa as a theoretical lens, I add to the advocacy journalism and media activism bodies of scholarship (e.g., Bennett, 2017; Fisher, 2016; Thomas, 2018) by probing journalists’ perceptions of and participation in the so-called summer of racial reckoning to consider how the protests might represent a media “opening” for change, especially when it comes to the “regime of objectivity” (Hackett & Carroll, 2006, p. 33). Based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with U.S. journalists conducted in the months after Floyd was murdered, this research is important for developing a path toward new understandings of journalism’s shifting doxa in an age of social media and within the context of the news industry’s struggle to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Doxa are important for their impact on practice (Barnard, 2016), so evolving doxa could help shape new practices in racial justice reporting, thereby improving coverage of protests and giving social movements the media attention they need to legitimize their causes and mobilize supporters (Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993).
Literature Review
Objectivity
Objectivity, long an underlying principle of journalism, is the “enduring commitment to the supremacy of the observable and retrievable facts” (Glasser, 1984, p. 13), and the subjection to “established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community” (Schudson, 1978, p. 7). Hackett and Zhao (1998) suggested that U.S. journalism is characterized by a “regime of objectivity” comprising five dimensions: (a) a normative ideal (facts, accuracy, distance); (b) epistemology (beliefs about facts, truth, and the ability to separate out one’s values); (c) newsgathering and presentational practices (beats, sources); (d) institutional relations (professionals, autonomous from the states); and (e) contributions to public discourse (how to talk about the news using language like “bias” and “balance”). The regime of objectivity legitimizes established power hierarchies and the status quo, creating misleading representations of reality that can have polarizing effects (McCluskey & Kim, 2012). Russell (2013) argued that objectivity is at odds with journalists’ watchdog and public service roles—which raises the question of what place objectivity has in racial justice coverage.
Important for the purposes of this study, how journalists conceive of and practice objectivity is evolving (Fahy, 2018; Wallace, 2019), with some scholars viewing it more as a process than a product (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014), and as requiring journalists’ interpretation (Ward, 2015)—what Robinson and Culver (2019) referred to as “active” objectivity. Ryan (2001) argued that objectivity is not merely about presenting both sides of an issue or being a “moral spectator,” but rather revealing the “superior side” of an issue and providing the verified information necessary that “a community needs to make sound decisions” (p. 7). When it comes to covering race, traditional notions of objectivity have resulted in the prioritizing of “powerful and White perspectives and a devaluing of any ‘other’” (Robinson & Culver, 2019, p. 14). Recognizing this, Durham (1998) called for journalists to adopt “strong objectivity,” grounded in feminist standpoint theory, and abandon neutral, value-free reporting in favor of journalists acknowledging their biases and experiences so as to report from the perspective of underrepresented groups and thus counterbalance the weight of mainstream discourse.
Adhering to the rules of objectivity is how journalists achieve the values of neutrality and distance. However, in part because of social media, opinion and the personal increasingly are becoming part of the news (Barnard, 2018; Papacharissi & Oliveira, 2012). In her study comparing mainstream news coverage of climate change with activists’ media coverage, Russell (2013) identified “an increasing tension between the objectivity imperative, which demands the separation of fact and values, and the moral imperative, which in essence demands the opposite, that affective news flows be incorporated into coverage” (p. 917). She concluded that journalist and activist values and practices increasingly overlap when it comes to the public good. Environmental journalists in particular have been studied for the way in which they struggle to balance this tension between objectivity and advocacy (Tandoc & Takahashi, 2014). Considering the different ways objectivity has been conceived and put into practice, then, the first research question this study poses is:
Advocacy, Activism, and Journalism
Shultziner and Shoshan (2018) defined “journalistic activism” as “professional actions, on duty and off duty, taken by journalists for the purpose of helping a movement reach its goals” (p. 58). They found that Israel’s Social Justice Protest movement in 2011 was favorably covered, in part because of the blurred line between journalists and activists created by moral shock, empathy, or positive emotions toward victims: journalists personally identified with the movement, produced stories with activists’ help, and even advised the movement’s leadership.
While less common in the United States, where journalism culture is dominated by the detached observer role (Hanitzsch, 2011), activist or advocacy journalism—what Bell (1998) deemed a “journalism of attachment” that “will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor” (p. 16)—is well documented around the world, especially during times of crisis. For example, during the Gezi protests in Turkey, a crisis of a lack of press freedom meant journalists in effect acted as activists on Twitter, even though they claimed to see activism and journalism as incompatible (Sözeri, 2016). Budivska and Orlova (2017) studied Ukrainian journalists’ ethical perceptions of the Euromaidan protests and found many journalists, wanting to help their country through a crisis, used their work to promote activists’ efforts. They saw their activism as necessary because of the situation, yet they still wanted to maintain a division between their professional responsibilities and their activist engagement.
Advocacy journalism, or “journalism that takes a view” (Thomas, 2018, p. 293), requires journalists to take a stand to try to rectify power imbalances in society by speaking on behalf of marginalized groups and acting as reformers (Janowitz, 1975). Advocacy journalism adheres to varying levels of objectivity, as well as different degrees of both overt and subtle displays of advocacy (Fisher, 2016). Beyond covering social justice issues and societal inequities in-depth (Nelson & Lewis, 2015), advocacy journalism serves as a political intervention (Thomas, 2018) to advocate for solutions and promote change (Fisher, 2016). In the United States, the Black press has traditionally been conceptualized as advocacy journalism (Pride & Wilson, 1997), and has been credited with contributing to abolition and civil rights (Washburn, 2006; Wilson, 2014). The Black press was “built on the premise of challenging the purported objectivity of dominant media institutions” (Cohen, 1999, pp. 199–200), allowing journalists to freely advocate for racial equality (Williams Fayne, 2019).
In the United States, advocacy journalism is often criticized as propaganda, marginalized by the rise of objectivity and professionalism (Thomas, 2018; Waisbord, 2009). However, the dismissal of advocacy journalism and a misconception of objectivity as the “crux of journalistic identity” constrain the field’s ability to adapt and change (Thomas, 2018, p. 408). Steinke and Belair-Gagnon’s (2020) study of journalists who covered social justice issues showed journalists balanced their desire to amplify marginalized voices and provoke social change with their commitment to being detached observers and information providers. In other words, these social justice journalists still prioritized traditional journalistic norms like objectivity. Thus, the next research question this study poses is:
Media Activism
Media activism refers to the way activists employ media and communication tools and strategies to achieve their causes, and can include the movement to reform media policies, structures, and norms surrounding access, diversity of voices, privacy, security, and ownership (Bennett, 2017; Waisbord, 2010). Scholars argue that a movement to reform the media system is necessary because the media have “failed to actualize such democratic values as participation, equality, representative diversity, civic engagement, and genuine choice” (Hackett & Carroll, 2006, p. 2). Freedman (2017) questioned whether media reform is enough, suggesting that perhaps revolution—implementing new structures and understandings rather than merely revising the existing system—is what media activism should seek.
This present study considers the actions of journalists on social media as a type of media movement, trying to achieve reform from within the system. Mohamed (2020) argued that unlike activists who work outside the system for change, journalists can follow an ethics of activism to push for change from within, similar to the way the Black press has long used journalism to pursue activist aims (Carroll, 2017; Wolseley, 1990). “Activist journalism ethics,” in the case of The New York Times in 1960, involved coverage that supported civil rights; highlighted activists’ actions and contributions; deviated from objectivity, neutrality, detachment, and balance; and pushed for social justice (Mohamed, 2020). “Morally loaded issues” (Mohamed, 2020, p. 14)—arguably like racism—demand journalists employ activist ethics and “drop their age-old reservations about advocacy” (Ward, 2015, p. 115).
Field Theory and Doxa
Scholars have studied journalism as its own autonomous field shaped by political, economic, and technological forces (Broersma & Singer, 2021; Usher, 2017). Bourdieu (1993) posited the concept of “fields,” where a field is a “social universe with its own laws of functioning” (p. 14). Within fields, social actors, or agents, exchange and leverage capital, whether social, cultural, symbolic, or economic (Bourdieu, 1993). Fields are structured by a habitas, or the “expectations, conceptions, and ideals of the community” (Song, 2010, p. 264). Notably, fields are always in flux, with the “newcomer” struggling against the “dominant agent,” “aimed either at conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 30). Field theory thus allows for the exploration of the tension between professional norms (in this case, objectivity) and forces contesting the status quo.
Fields have their own doxa, or the taken-for-granted accepted norms, values, and rules that structure the actions and relations of the agents within the field. Doxa are the “rules of the game” (Deer, 2008). Agents must subscribe to these tacit principles to be considered legitimate actors. Comparative research points to certain universal doxa within the journalist field around the globe (Hanitzsch et al., 2019; Weaver & Willnat, 2012), such as objectivity, accuracy, and the importance of analyzing issues and events.
However, doxa are not fixed: they can be altered by newcomers to the field, or change agents, who “impose new modes of thought and expression, out of key with the prevailing modes of thought and with the doxa” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 59). Falck and Barnes (1975) identified three ways change agents can evolve in their field: (a) through normative behavior, where they adapt to existing norms and any new ideas merely support the dominant structure; (b) through deviant behavior, where they overturn the dominant norms and replace them with something different; and (c) through non-normative behavior, where they neither adopt nor reject prevailing norms but offer new ideas. While the first behavior results in little change and the second is typically dismissed, the third can bring about structural change in the field.
Crises can help set the stage for doxa to be questioned and broken, as can new technologies and economic changes (Bourdieu, 1988, 1998). Recent crises in journalism, such as challenges from social media, declining advertising revenue, and low public trust (Lewis, 2012; Siles & Boczkowski, 2012), offer fertile ground for change agents to disrupt the taken-for-granted assumptions that comprise journalism’s doxa. Research is mixed, though, on the extent to which this is happening.
For example, describing change agents as “pioneers,” Hepp and Loosen (2021) noted the way U.S. and European news organizations and journalists are using technology and innovations to “incorporate new organizational forms and experimental practice in pursuit of redefining the field and its structural foundations” (p. 578). Similarly, Nordqvist and colleagues (2010) found U.S. and global newspaper association executives functioned as change agents, leading the industry to adapt to changes brought on by the digitization of news. In Mexico, publishers, editors, and reporters in the civic journalism movement served as change agents, pushing new journalistic norms, values, identities, and practices to create a more democratic, autonomous, citizen-oriented journalism (Hughes, 2003). Independent podcasters in Australia were likewise found to function as change agents, transforming the broader journalistic field by rejecting doxa focused on revenue in favor of cultural capital (Jorgensen, 2021).
In contrast, in their study of Dutch and U.K. journalism students’ perceptions of entrepreneurship and digital tools, Broersma and Singer (2021) found students didn’t really see themselves as change agents, but rather they valued traditional norms and practices, suggesting they “have been ingrained in the journalistic doxa” (p. 13). They saw changes to the field as coming from outside pressures (like technology), rather than from within or as a result of their own disruptive behaviors (Broersma & Singer, 2021). Usher’s (2017) study of digital entrepreneurial news startups similarly found traditional journalism doxa were upheld, even as the field itself expanded as journalists, in part reacting to the potential of new technologies, challenged assumptions about what was news, who produced it, and how.
Increasingly, though, studies suggest technology plays a role in shaping journalistic practices and values, or doxa (Belair-Gagnon, 2013; Kosterich, 2021; Lischka et al., 2021). For example, Barnard (2018) compared journalists’ and activists’ use of Twitter during the Ferguson protests and found the activist and journalist fields converged in some instances, such as when journalists tweeted to show solidarity with protesters over their shared experiences of police threats, attacks, or arrests. Their meta-discourse about the importance of social media for their work, as well as their networked communities of retweets, replies, and links, also overlapped. This present study starts from Barnard’s (2018) suggestion that Twitter might create openings for changes in doxa, even though the traditional divides between the fields of journalism and activism remain.
In nuancing the ways doxa can shift, Bourdieu offered the concepts of heterodoxy—values up for debate that differ from the accepted norm—and orthodoxy, or values that are firmly established and not questioned. Barnard (2016) found that journalists’ meta-discourse about Twitter points to “heterodox debates” about the journalistic value of using social media, but their discourse also affirmed the orthodox norms of objectivity and accuracy, suggesting that “Twitter usage is steadily moving from journalistic heterodoxy to orthodoxy, and may become a doxic norm in due time” (p. 203). While not talking about doxa or change agents per se, Russell (2016) introduced the idea of a “news-media vanguard” comprising activists and journalists innovating reporting and its responsibility toward the public interest. Beyond knowing how to leverage digital tools and data, this vanguard also pushes the boundaries of journalism’s values and practices by empowering publics and upholding commitments to the public good and accountability while discarding objectivity in favor of “advocacy on behalf of the facts” (p. 138). Thus, the final research question this study posits is:
Method
This study investigating shifting understandings of journalism and activism in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests relied on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 28 journalists who had reported on social justice/protests or edited social justice/protest coverage. Interviewed journalists worked at local, regional, and national newspapers, TV, and digital outlets from across the United States. Efforts were made to include not just a diversity of scope of media outlets, but also gender, race, ethnicity, and age of journalists (see Table 1). Interview participants comprised 13 males and 15 females between the ages of 21 and 56 (M = 34). Journalists’ racial and ethnic groups were broken down as follows: 39% White, 32% Black, 18% Latinx/Hispanic, and 11% AAPI. Identifiers (e.g., P1) are used to refer to participants.
Interview Participants’ Characteristics.
Note. BLM = Black Lives Matter; AAPI = Asian American and Pacific Islander.
Journalists were identified via snowball sampling. After seeing a post on Facebook asking journalists whether they posted the black square for #BlackoutTuesday, I contacted 22 journalists who had responded to that post. I also contacted another 10 journalists who I knew covered social justice issues. Those 32 journalists then put me in touch with another 11 journalists whom I contacted to participate in the study. Interviews lasted from 40 to 90 min, and took place via Zoom from June to July, 2020. Interviews were conducted until saturation was achieved, meaning no new themes were revealed in participants’ discourse (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Interviews were recorded and transcribed.
Journalists were asked how they conceived their roles and responsibilities as journalists and the norms and values they should follow; how they distinguished between their work and that of activists; their thought process for why they chose to participate or not in #BlackoutTuesday, and their perceptions about news organizations’ anti-racist and diversity efforts amid the ongoing protests. The questions were posed so as to allow participants to “tell stories,” revealing their perspectives, experiences, and expertise (Tracy, 2012, p. 140).
After immersing myself in the data through iterative reading and re-readings of the transcripts (Hall, 1975), transcripts were analyzed thematically using a three-step open, axial, and theoretical (or selective) coding strategy (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to identify underlying patterns and find meaning (McKee, 2001).
Findings
Objectivity as Racist
The first research question explored journalists’ perceptions of objectivity, especially as related to the 2020 racial justice protests. Analysis showed a lack of consensus when it came to defining objectivity, as well as the continued importance of objectivity in journalism. Across the board, journalists agreed that the definition of objectivity was changing, but they disagreed on whether that was good or bad for the field. Notably, participants’ perceptions of objectivity revealed divides between journalists of color and White journalists, as well as between older and younger journalists.
Black, AAPI, and Latinx journalists saw objectivity as a “tool of racism” or a “faulty system of fairness.” P15 commented,
Objectivity in the face of oppression is just oppression . . . Why should I be giving equitable space to the villains? . . . The idea of fairness is hilarious to me. Like, this country has never been fair. It’s an unequitable country. And speaking the truth is perceived as biased and unfair. And that’s what’s part of the problem with systemic oppression.
These participants defined objectivity not as about getting both sides of the story or giving equal weight to the different sides of a story—what they called “false equivalency” and “faux objectivity”—but rather as about being empathetic, close to the communities they cover, and acknowledging their biases in order to most fairly and accurately tell the full story. “I believe in objectivity in the sense of trying to approach everything with an open mind and to have empathy . . . but we all come from our own experiences and bring our own subjectivities to the table,” P17 said. P4 said,
This is my life. This is my cousin’s life. This is my friend’s life. It’s my PaPaw’s life. My uncle’s life. Like, it’s, you know, it’s my life. I can’t just sit on the sidelines. I don’t feel like I’m being biased saying, hey, Black lives matter. I don’t see how that, you know, compromises me as a reporter.
Similarly, P18 said, “I’m a person before I’m a journalist.” P3 said, “It’s not bias if it’s the truth,” adding that objectivity is perceived differently for journalists depending on whether they’re Black or White. As P20 explained,
American journalists have told themselves for years that we’re not biased, and that is the stupidest thing that I have ever heard. We all have innate biases, and so our job as journalists is to let that perspective help us. We have this problem where we see the White perspective as the nonbiased perspective, and that is not a nonbiased perspective, it’s just that American society has decided that.
The problem, these journalists of color noted, is that the “White” concept of objectivity makes it harder for them to do their jobs and earn credibility. P8 said, “This is the color of my skin. This is who I am. That doesn’t make me biased,” but it often does make readers and editors biased and assume he can’t report fairly, he said. P7 said newsrooms need to stop assuming journalists of color are “too close” to the story to objectively cover issues that are important to their communities and instead start “trusting your Black and Brown reporters to be able to do their job because they’re bringing in new voices, new experts.”
Among White journalists, those in their 20s and early-mid 30s saw objectivity differently than did their older counterparts. All the White journalists talked about objectivity in terms of being neutral and nonbiased to maintain credibility and preserve their audiences’ trust, but the younger White journalists drew the line at human rights issues. They saw a difference between being anti-racist and expressing opinions about policies. “Racism is not something to treat with both sides,” said P14. He compared it with a hurricane, noting that no journalist tries to see the hurricane’s perspective or hesitates to express an opinion about the hurricane’s destructiveness. P27 noted, “The struggle for me, I was taught as a journalist, it’s not about me and personal opinion should be kept out, but as a human, racism is not a political issue.”
The older White journalists, including one Latinx journalist, however, clung to the traditional conceptions of objectivity as being about impartiality and telling both sides of the story, regardless of what the story is. “This new thinking on journalism, of including your emotions, I’m not quite there. If you start taking stands, you start being blind to the other side,” P13 said. These journalists said the loss of traditional objectivity hurts the profession. P23 summed up this perspective: “Journalists are supposed to provide objective information, and if you post a blue line or black square, people will see you as a protester, busting windows. It doesn’t matter your intent; the perception is you’re biased and that’s dangerous for journalists.”
All journalists noted that not just the definition but the importance of objectivity in journalism was shifting, in part because of social media, the Trump era, and the pandemic. Participants said objectivity was “dead,” “tired,” and “meaningless.” P24 said that social media is making journalists re-evaluate objectivity:
There is a pendulum swing that’s happening because we were wrong so much about our objectivity. The gatekeepers of media said, we have a marketplace of ideas and just come in and we can debate all the ideas. But what they weren’t doing was letting in women and minorities and Black people’s voices. And when they didn’t let in those voices, they didn’t let in lots of views that those voices would have brought them. And so the democratizing effort of the Internet has allowed a lot of those voices to rise.
P25 said journalists have been “emboldened” to speak up on social media after having to defend themselves against Trump’s attacks, and take a stance on wearing masks and social distancing: “We have to say something because it’s personal.”
A Slippery Slope?
The second research question examined where journalists drew the line between activism and journalism. Analysis revealed participants saw physical action (like protest) as activism, but most saw taking a stance in their work or on social media not as activism, but rather as essential to a journalist’s responsibility toward society. In this view, stance-taking was acceptable as long as it was “apolitical.” Most journalists (20 out of 28) agreed that journalists should not be allowed to protest, and they expressed surprise and consternation at Axios’s decision to allow journalists to attend the racial justice protests. Many commented that their work showed their stances, and they said they could do more for a cause by reporting than protesting. For example, P21 said protesting feels “unethical,” adding, “Journalists have a role of not participating, but recording. I think you can do a better service reporting it and showing what’s going on than participating.” Journalists might want to protest, but they shouldn’t, P8 said: “I’ve been angered, I’ve had all the feels. You can’t watch these videos and not feel some emotion. I’ve felt the gamut of everything. But I can’t be writing about something and then protesting.” P13 likewise said, “If it’s against cops, then I go talk to a cop the next day, they don’t trust me.” P23 noted that no journalist or news company would say it’s okay for them to participate in anti-mask protests, so “does that mean we pick and choose which ones are the right ones? It’s a slippery slope.”
For those eight journalists who suggested it was acceptable to protest, most added the caveat that they shouldn’t be allowed to protest and cover protests, and they should be prepared to be accused of bias, lose credibility, and potentially lose their jobs. For example, P17 said,
There’ll be a different calculus for everyone, obviously, depending upon who they are. You know, if you’re a Black reporter, which I’m not, you probably face different stereotypes and views about you when you’re out there reporting just because of your race. How much is that going to change if your protest? . . . Trust in the media is already low. We’re already perceived as being biased and leftist. I don’t think a few people out there protesting is going to really change that needle one way or the other.
In contrast to their opposition to protesting, 24 of the 28 interview participants said not only was it fine for journalists to take stances in certain situations, such as when it comes to defending press freedom, but that journalists had an obligation to take a stance, especially when it comes to “saying racism is wrong and that it exists,” as P16 said. “I don’t know why Black Lives Matter isn’t something we’d stand for as journalists. We need to change our mindset about this—it should be our job,” P27 said. P8 said, “At a certain point, you can’t help but take a stance . . . As journalists, we have to call these things out in our newsrooms, that’s the only way we’re not hypocrites.”
Many journalists of color—particularly women—noted, though, that it’s easier for White journalists to take a stance than for them to do so. P26 noted that whether or not she tweets “Black Lives Matter,” she’s still going to get racist emails and replies to her tweets. “It doesn’t matter what I’m saying, still there is going to be someone who finds fault in it and finds my race at fault for it.” As such, she’s “hesitant” about what she posts on social media because it’s “100 percent a form of self-protection.” Likewise, P18 explained that anything she posts can be used against her to accuse her of being the stereotypical “angry Black woman,” which she said could prevent her from being hired or promoted in the future. She said, “I know that I don’t have the same privileges of just saying whatever I want. Not only as a journalist, but as a as a Black woman.” P28 agreed,
I’m sort-of fighting this very implicit but very real idea that because I’m Brown, I’m biased on certain issues or because I’m gay, I’m biased on certain issues. And so I just was always cognizant of that in my career . . . But as I’ve gained more experience and as I’ve gained more confidence in myself as a journalist, I’m just like now I have a duty to, like, reach back and use my experience to speak out on this s***.
It is worth highlighting, though, that four journalists—three of whom were White and all were around 40 or older—said journalists should not take a public stance, even when it came to supporting racial justice, because it was a “slippery slope,” as most of them referred to it. Journalists “should advocate through their reporting,” P6 said. Similarly, P13 said, “You have to separate your views on Twitter . . . We report on it and show it’s wrong. It’s a fine line. Should we be anti-racist? Yeah, but does that put on some kind of tunnel vision?” P21 explained,
Yes, of course Black lives matter. But if we take that stance today, what about tomorrow when it’s gun control or something else that may maybe isn’t as cut and dried in the eyes of the majority of the public. It’s a slippery slope. I feel like we’re already probably headed down that slope. Is that right or wrong? I don’t know.
#BlackoutTuesday
Part of understanding how social media might be moving the line between activism and journalism requires looking into journalists’ decisions to participate or not in #BlackoutTuesday. Even though most journalists said it was acceptable to take stances and that social media facilitated that, only seven interview participants said they posted the black square. The ones who chose to post the square were adamant that doing so was not activism, in part because it’s “just social media.” P12 said it’s about human rights, not a political issue, so posting the square for her was different than supporting other political causes on social media: “I wanted to acknowledge what they’re going through, and for me that wasn’t about bias. It was just basically acknowledging that I’m here and I’m here to tell your story.” P18 noted that posting the square was a matter of standing up for her own existence, and saying Black Lives Matter is not a “sides thing,” because as she noted, she is Black before she’s a journalist: “So, yes, am I saying that Black lives matter? 100 percent. Because I think that my life should matter . . . . How does that change my coverage?” Several noted that they made their decision because of what it would mean if they opted not to participate. P20 said,
Society has shifted and therefore journalism has shifted and we’re starting to see this is not an issue that should be controversial. A lot of stations now send their talent out to be part of Pride parades. They allow their people to wear Pride pins. And now you’ve got Black journalists who are saying ‘well, if I can do that for Pride, why not for Black Lives Matter?
P21 summed up most participants’ reasoning: “I did stop to think about the ethics, is this right? But I thought it was wrong not to [post the square].”
Of those who didn’t post the square, most said it was because they saw #BlackoutTuesday as performative, or they were worried about clogging social media feeds so that valuable information about the Black Lives Matter protests would get buried. “There’s no real action behind it,” said P25, who said she instead posted about helping Black-owned businesses. Of importance is that even if they didn’t post the square, most participants supported journalists’ decision to do so. For example, P7 said,
I don’t think it undermines their credibility to say Black lives matter, here’s why we think that’s true, and here’s what we need to do to make that the case legally, societally. But their credibility is under attack anyway. So it’s like, why are you scared to tell the truth when the president can call you fake anyway? They’re being attacked anyway. So you want to be able to tell the truth and not feel like we have to walk a tightrope so that people respect us, because that’s not going to gain you any more respect.
Lasting Change
The final research question considered to what extent journalists saw themselves as media reformers—change agents—during the protests. Participants suggested that changing values and practices were driven by young journalists and journalists of color using social media to push their newsrooms to take account. P28 said, “Social media really does reduce the risks for journalists. Like, I don’t know that I’ve felt as emboldened to be so bold, direct, about race. I hope we keep this momentum.” Still, he said, journalists are “activists for the truth,” and if journalists of color don’t occupy these spaces and take risks, speaking truths about racism and the whiteness of newsrooms, then “how the f*** will we get our industry as a whole to move towards a direction in which the truth reflects poorly on news organizations themselves?” P11 said,
I hope we get to a point where I can freely say, “hey, guess what? Black lives matter.” And cop lives do not exist because that is a job. I thought we’d be farther along when it comes to race conversations. We have a very White newsroom, but we are trying to figure out and have these conversations of like, OK, what can we do better? As a journalist, I feel like we are in this very exciting time of reworking journalism.
P22 said the industry is changing because young journalists are “rejecting this idea that we’re stenographers,” but it’s a slow change and it’s “wild” that change is happening at all, considering the industry’s “poverty of imagination as to what we’re willing to entertain as respectable, proper journalism.” Several participants noted that “whitewashed” newsrooms need to carry on the work their journalists of color have started, and they can’t limit themselves to “hollow” actions. P15 said,
I think one of the most beautiful things that’s happening right now is watching Black journalists, journalists of color, like marginalized voices in journalism, speak out on Twitter about all of the various inequities they’ve dealt with in this industry and like, say, look, this thing happens. I mean, this is happening to me . . . This is another chapter of the revolution . . . We keep breaking off pieces of a system that was designed to be oppressive.
Discussion and Conclusion
Based on interviews with U.S. journalists in the months after Floyd was killed, this study makes several important contributions to advocacy journalism and media activism research, as well as to the body of scholarship examining social media’s impact on the journalist field and its doxa (e.g., Barnard, 2016, 2018). First, interviews revealed that these journalists perceived objectivity as moving from an accepted, orthodox value of journalism to a debatable, heterodox one, at least when it came to racial justice reporting. Such a shift in doxa potentially points to widening gaps between journalists along racial and age fault lines. Most journalists interviewed—especially journalists of color and younger journalists—expressed a need for new understandings and applications of objectivity that would allow journalists to have a standpoint and express empathy, particularly as related to racial justice. This finding builds on a substantial body of scholarship that shows how Black press journalists have long rejected objectivity as being a tool of White supremacy, and advocated for social justice and defended the rights of Black people (e.g., Carroll, 2017). Furthermore, this finding strengthens Russell’s (2013) conclusion that journalists increasingly include affect in their reporting and that journalist and activist values and practices increasingly overlap when it comes to the public interest.
For the most part—with the exception of a few older, White journalists—interview participants didn’t see the use of the phrase “Black lives matter” as a subjective or political statement, and they didn’t see expressions of support as activism. Rather, they championed journalists’ right—and responsibility—to objectively say that Black lives matter, and they used social media as a way to do this. Like the Ukrainian journalists in Budivska and Orlova’s (2017) study, most of the journalists I interviewed saw stance-taking as necessary because of the situation, but unlike the Ukrainian journalists, they did not perceive it as an ethical dilemma. Echoing those in the Black press (Carroll, 2017), these Black, Latinx and AAPI journalists seemed to advocate for strong objectivity (Durham, 1998): they argued that because of the color of their skin, audiences already made presumptions about their bias, so they might as well be transparent about their standpoint. Some Black women journalists, though, suggested strong objectivity would work against them; future research should explore this further. While not fully backing an overhaul of the regime of objectivity (Hackett & Carroll, 2006), interview participants negotiated between their concerns over losing credibility and their “gut feeling,” as one journalist phrased it, that supporting human rights outweighed any trust they might lose from audience members—trust they said they didn’t want anyway, if it came from people who didn’t believe Black lives matter. For these journalists, it wasn’t necessarily about eliminating objective journalism but correcting it—making journalism fairer and more accurate so that “other” voices marginalized by objectivity are no longer excluded.
Findings also revealed that journalists saw social media as providing them with the “opening” (Hackett & Carroll, 2006) they needed to push for change in the journalist field. While only a quarter of interviewed journalists said they posted a black square on #BlackoutTuesday in support of Black Lives Matter, most saw the action as within the realm of journalism because it was about raising awareness. Unlike protesting in the streets—which most said crossed the line into activism and therefore was unethical for journalists—they didn’t see participating in #BlackoutTuesday as activism. Although many critiqued it for being performative without real action behind it, in line with complaints about “slacktivism” that arose alongside online activism (Glenn, 2015), they didn’t denounce the journalists they knew who posted the square or question their bias or credibility. Rather, they perceived social media as the place where they could, and should, take a stance. Many of those who didn’t post the square still said they posted with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, or posted content that indicated their support for the movement. The way they discussed their decisions to post the square or not suggested they saw social media participation as a gesture—performative or not—aimed at critiquing the objectivity norm and journalism’s pretense of neutrality in the face of injustice. In this way, posting the square can be viewed as a form of media activism, with journalists using social media as a way to push for change in the field’s doxa. They didn’t see posting the square as advocacy journalism or a political intervention (Thomas, 2018), so much as a media intervention. The change they promoted was geared toward their industry. This finding builds on the Black press’ advocacy journalism and “activist journalism ethics” (Mohamed, 2020) as seen during the 1960s, showing these journalists conceived of today’s modern civil rights movement as similarly deserving of empathetic and supportive reporting, and they saw social media as the starting place for that reform.
Thus, another important contribution of this study is seeing these journalists as part of the media vanguard (Russell, 2016), or change agents (Falck & Barnes, 1975). As change agents trying to reform the media, these participants’ discourse about journalism and activism ran the gamut between normative, deviant, and non-normative behaviors (Falck & Barnes, 1975). Participants exhibited normative behaviors, such as in their knee-jerk reactions that journalists should not protest, thus not leading to any change in doxa. However, their rejection of objectivity for reporting on racial justice represented deviant behavior—replacing the prevailing norm with something different: in this case, stance-taking. Such deviant behaviors typically result in little change, as the hegemonic powers-that-be reject such radical changes. This can be seen in the discourse of older journalists, especially older White editors, who saw stance-taking as at odds with journalism’s mission to inform. Finally, participants also exhibited non-normative behaviors, where they neither adopted nor rejected prevailing norms, but instead proposed something new. In this case, most journalists saw social media as offering a new approach to support a movement—they wouldn’t protest in the streets, but they would participate on social media by posting black squares or using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to indicate support. Such non-normative behaviors are more likely to spark structural changes in a field (Falck & Barnes, 1975). This study thus offers evidence for Barnard’s (2018) contention that social media might create an opening for changes in doxa, as traditional journalistic values are replaced with activist ones, and the line between the journalist and activist fields is redrawn.
Overall, this study points to a potential shift in objectivity from an orthodoxic status to a heterodoxic status, where its underlying taken-for-granted acceptance is called into question. While advocacy journalism, including the Black press, has long rejected objectivity, this potential shift in doxa represents a potentially significant change for mainstream journalism. Just as Barnard (2016) found journalists’ practices and values evolving because of Twitter, my study showed most interviewed journalists no longer accepted the notion that journalism should be detached and value-free, at least not when it came to racism. Unlike Steinke and Belair-Gagnon (2020), finding that social justice journalists still prioritized traditional journalistic norms and values, my study found most interviewed journalists saw a need for new norms and values that should be applied to covering racial justice and human rights issues. By moving beyond objectivity as the “crux of journalistic identity” (Thomas, 2018, p. 408), the journalists in this present study were able to identify an opening in the field for change. By posting on social media and holding discussions with editors and fellow journalists about their social media expressions, they participated in their own form of media activism, working to change the field from within by replacing objectivity with stance-taking for racial justice. While previous research considering change agents within the journalism field has found changes coming mostly from outside forces (e.g., Broersma & Singer, 2021), this study indicates that crisis—in the form of systemic racism and the largest protest movement in U.S. history—and technological shifts (Bourdieu, 1988, 1998) collided in just the way needed to create an opening for a vanguard of Black, Latinx, AAPI, and young journalists to disrupt the field. This finding has important practical implications for journalists covering racial justice protests, as reporting practices could shift in response to changing doxa. Shultziner and Shoshan (2018) suggested that moral shock, empathy, or positive emotions could improve journalists’ perceptions of protest, and this study bears that out, at least in terms of journalists’ discourse. Future research should content analyze news stories to determine whether their discursive support carries over into their actual practices and content produced, especially since previous work has found a gap between how journalists cover protests and how they say they cover protests (Harlow & Kilgo, 2020).
Importantly, this study does not suggest that the line between journalism and activism has been erased entirely. Just as previous studies show that despite some overlaps in doxa, activism and journalism remain in separate fields (Barnard, 2018), this study showed most journalists still drew the line at physical protest participation, even as stance-taking in their reporting and on social media was deemed acceptable. Furthermore, the “old guard,” as one journalist put it, still clings to the tenets of objectivity, and news companies, concerned about advertisers, still want to please an (imagined) White audience. It’s also important to highlight that several journalists of color noted that it’s easier for their White counterparts to serve as change agents, since they aren’t already dismissed as biased just because of the color of their skin. This finding underscores the practical importance of newsrooms hiring and promoting more journalists of color, not just as reporters but as editors and decision-makers, especially.
This study is limited due to its small number of participants and lack of generalizability; future research might use survey data to answer some of the questions raised herein. While efforts were made to include journalists from across genders, races, ethnicities, and ages, the sample included only three participants who identified as AAPI, and only six who were aged 40 or older. Furthermore, only a limited number of editors were interviewed. Future research might compare age groups and job positions to further explore how demographics influence journalists’ perceptions of changing doxa and the line between journalism and activism. Future studies also should revisit the topic to see whether the changes identified in this study are lasting or merely related to the momentum associated with 2020’s unique circumstances of a protest movement amid a pandemic. Studying journalists’ perceptions about objectivity, journalism, and activism as related to LGBTQ+ issues or certain causes, like gun control, could also provide insight into whether evolving doxa related to stance-taking are limited to racial justice and human rights, which could help further delineate the boundaries between the journalist and activist fields.
Ultimately, this study contributes to advocacy journalism and media activism research, arguing that these journalists of color and young journalists are acting as change agents trying to achieve media reform from within, pushing the journalist field closer to that of activism, even as they dismiss any understanding of what they’re doing as activism. Unlike journalists in the advocacy or Black press, though, these journalists in the vanguard of the news media don’t consider what they’re doing to be activist journalism. Rather, this study showed they see standing up for racial justice as a core responsibility of journalism, full stop. Emboldened by the pandemic and Trump’s attacks on the press, they were taking advantage of social media to start to transform the field’s orthodox and heterodox values, perhaps even displacing traditional journalistic doxa like objectivity with activist doxa like stance-taking, perceiving stance-taking as worthier of orthodox status than neutrality or “both-sidesism.” This study is thus important for offering a framework to understand the evolution of the U.S. journalistic field in response to a media vanguard, technological changes, and crises like racial injustice. This study also illuminates the growing disconnect among journalists based on their age and race, with potential implications for newsroom cultures. Future studies should consider whether these findings about journalists’ willingness to challenge doxa are maintained post-Trump, when the media are not under constant attack. Future research also should continue exploring social media’s evolving influence on the degrees of separation between journalism and activism, and consider how a new digital, activist-like doxa for journalism might shape a new way of covering racial justice.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Dr. Paula M. Poindexter Research Grant from the Minorities and Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
