Abstract
Although hostility toward journalists is a pressing issue, research on how instructors are preparing students for hostility is lacking. Interviews with 30 journalism instructors from across the U.S. help illuminate how hostility is perceived and if/how hostility is talked about in journalism courses. Through the lens of professional socialization, this manuscript argues the majority of instructors normalize hostility in problematic ways, identifying a gap in journalism curriculum that needs filled.
In a recent interview about anti-press sentiment in the United States and its trickle-down effect on local journalism, John Nerone underscored the prevalence of hostility for today’s journalists: “Hostility is never pleasant, but journalists should recognize it as a feature, not a bug, of their current situation. It has structural drivers” (Kuhnhenn, 2020, para 18). Although hostility, defined as “unwanted abusive behaviors” (Miller, 2021a: 4), has long been a feature of journalism, with evidence of anti-media rhetoric being used by presidents and other influential political figures are early as the 1790s (Nerone, 1994), the extent and frequency with which anti-media rhetoric has been wielded since Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States has “open [ed.] up space for journalists to be threatened as never before” (Carlson et al., 2021: 738).
Despite recent upticks in hostility, early-career journalists have lamented a lack of preparedness for hostility they faced when entering the profession, with many indicating hostility was not mentioned in any of their journalism classes (Mesmer, 2023). Among the challenges they faced were anti-media rhetoric and harassment at events reporters were covering, physical threats, online attacks, and microaggressions from sources and community members. Likewise, Heckman et al. (2022) found student journalists who experienced hostility reporting both for class assignments and their campus newspapers wished their instructors had prepared them for the experience and offered more support. These students experienced harassment from university officials and staff as well as community members. These suggest journalism instructors are not teaching journalism students about the many ways they might experience hostility.
Although hostility is a growing and pressing issue in journalism, research on how journalism instructors are preparing students for such challenges is lacking. Through in-depth interviews with 30 journalism professors working at various colleges and universities across the United States, this study seeks to understand how journalism instructors perceive hostility in the field and how those perceptions relate to if and how they talk about hostility with students in their journalism courses. Through the lens of professional socialization, I argue many journalism instructors normalize hostility—often without recognizing they are doing so—in problematic ways. On the other hand, some professors were tackling hostility in novel, transformative ways, which illuminates an opportunity within journalism education. Ultimately, this work calls for instructors to make hostility a routine point of discussion in the classroom so students are better prepared for the hostility they will inevitably encounter if they pursue a career in journalism.
Establishing a need for hostility-focused content in journalism schools
Hostility is prevalent in the journalism field (Mesmer, 2022a; Miller, 2021a; Miller and Lewis, 2022; Posetti et al., 2021), but newsroom editors and senior management have been slow to respond to the challenge and support staff members dealing with hostility (Deavours et al., 2022; Holton et al., 2021). Although broadly defined, hostility toward the press includes a myriad of actions, ranging from verbal abuse and threats, physical assault, sexual harassment and sexual assault, and other behaviors perceived as threatening, dangerous, or making journalists feel uncomfortable (Miller, 2021a). This could also take the form of incivility and disruptive harassment, including a journalist having their appearance made fun of, having someone try to embarrass them or rudely interrupt an interview or stand-up; online harassment, including being sent graphic sexual photos or being doxed (Miller, 2021b). Additionally, Mesmer (2022a) looked specifically at hostility toward journalists from sources and found they experienced anti-media rhetoric and accusations of being biased; boundary crossing, in which sources would break professional norms; safety-violating hostility, including sexual harassment and assault, physical threats and assault; and microaggressions attacking aspects of the reporter’s identity.
Since journalists often must make themselves highly visible on social media platforms, a nearly universal job requirement in today’s digital age (Molyneux, 2015), they inadvertently open themselves up to new opportunities for online harassment. In a recent global study of women journalists, 73% of respondents experienced online harassment, which often translated to offline hostility as well (Posetti et al., 2021). And while it may seem hostility only affects those in hard news beats reporting on political or polarized topics, journalists have experienced hostility reporting on lifestyle and feature topics (Perreault and Miller, 2022) and while doing vox pop interviews at light-hearted community gatherings (Mesmer, 2022b), making the challenge ubiquitous.
Hostility and intersectionality
Journalists’ identity often feeds into the hostility they receive from sources, readers and other members of the public. Miller (2021b) underscored how journalists’ gender, race, age, (dis)ability and other immutable characteristics operate as sites of oppression, making hostility context based. This is compounded with journalists’ professional identity, which is often villainized. Likewise, in a study of hostility directed at journalists from their sources, Mesmer (2022a) found “The specific mix of a journalists’ perceived demographics, story topic and geographic region can often lead to hostility from news sources” (p. 2). While the trickle-down effect of anti-media rhetoric effects most journalists, straight White men often find the hostility to be frustrating but harmless, while younger White women and journalists of color experience more threatening and sometimes violent forms of hostility (Mesmer, 2022a). Women broadcast reporters are more vulnerable to both in-person and online harassment from the public, causing them to engage in more emotional labor on the job than men (Miller and Lewis, 2022). Women also experience different emotions when confronted with hostility than men. When asked about the hostility they face, men often internalize the hostility they face as “a badge of honor” or the mark of a job well done. Women, on the other hand, said they experienced fear and anxiety when confronted with hostility, and anger when it took the form of sexual harassment, a type of hostility men rarely experienced (Miller, 2023). This mirrors research on online abuse, sexual harassment and microaggressions, which has consistently found women journalists have more negative experiences than men (Ferrier, 2018; Posetti et al., 2020), and women journalists and journalists of color are subject to more online abuse and microaggressions than their White colleagues who are men (Chen et al., 2020). Such abuse has led to increased levels of burnout among women, LGBTQ+, and journalists of color (Bélair-Gagnon et al., 2022).
While much research has focused on the hostility experienced by journalists in the field, it is unclear how aware journalism professors are of this problem and its nuances regarding intersectionality. Thus, the first research question guiding this project is:
How do journalism instructors perceive hostility in the journalism field?
Professors’ role in journalists’ professional socialization
The journalism curriculum is not simply a means of teaching students how to effectively report and write news stories, but also a means of socialization into the broader journalism profession. Professional socialization is an ongoing communicative process of meaning-making about careers and work in particular occupations, and individuals constantly take in and interpret messages about the profession (Jablin, 2001). Professional socialization takes place as an individual develops understanding of the processes, traditions, and values of a profession (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979) which, for journalists, happens through passive interactions (consuming popular culture representations, Ehrlich, 2006) and by actively working in a newsroom (Russo, 1998). A primary contributor to professional socialization is the learning and habituation taking place during formal journalism education (Mellado, et al., 2013). However, the topic of hostility has not yet been a focus of journalism education research.
Ultimately, educators shape what students expect when they enter their first jobs, and, as Heckman et al. (2022) argue: “Journalism schools also need to examine the culture they’re creating for their students. The traditional notion that reporters need to have a thick skin can discourage students from disclosing when they are being harassed or struggling in other ways” (para. 22). By not talking about hostility or framing it as a routine challenge that needs to be pushed through to get a story, professors uphold masculine values within the journalism field that stifle emotion and vulnerability, making students feel weak if they can’t handle it and/or ask for help. Research has documented a similar problem regarding how journalism instructors fail to adequately talk about trauma in the classroom (Seely, 2019).
Since journalism professors play a key role in the professional socialization of journalists, the second research question guiding this study is:
How, if at all, do journalism instructors include hostility-focused content in their classes, and how does that content socialize students regarding hostility? Finally, given previous studies that found students and early-career journalists were unprepared for hostility (Heckman et al., 2022; Mesmer, 2023), we can assume at least some professors are struggling with this topic or failing to bring it into the classroom. Therefore, the final research question addressed in this study is:
What challenges, if any, or barriers exist for journalism instructors regarding talking about hostility in their classes?
Method
Demographic information for participants.
Interviews were particularly well-suited for this project because they “provide opportunities for mutual discovery, understanding, reflection, and explanation via a path that is organic, adaptive, and oftentimes energizing” (Tracy, 2013: 132). It was important to use strategic interviewing techniques focused on opportunities to foster “flickers of transformation” among participants (Way et al., 2015), which can prompt reflexivity through a lens of curiosity, rather than accusation, as participants may have never thought about hostility as a topic in their teaching. Interviews were conducted on Zoom and lasted between 22 and 74 min (m = 38 min), for a total of 18 h and 56 min of interview data. Interviews were transcribed, anonymized, and participants were assigned generic labels (P1, P2, etc.) to protect their identity.
During the interview, participants were asked if they think hostility is a major challenge for journalists, if and how instructors teach students to cope with hostility in its various forms in their classes, and about challenges related to talking about hostility. Transcripts were read multiple times and analyzed line-by-line while engaging in a constant comparison method of data analysis (Memon et al., 2017). Categories and themes were then considered in relation to guiding theories and research questions before solidifying findings.
Findings
The first research question asked how journalism instructors perceive hostility in the journalism field. All participants believed hostility was a pressing problem often faced by journalists, also believing, as P12, a full professor, explained, the profession as a whole was experiencing a “very conscientious effort to delegitimize the media.” This has brought about increased levels of violence and force used against journalists. Many who had been working in the field for decades, or who had worked as a journalist years ago before becoming an instructor, talked about how most hostility they experienced in the past was minor, amounting to angry phone calls or letters after a story ran. For example, P9, an adjunct professor, said, “I’ve been around for a while in the industry and when I started teaching, I can see a significant difference in my earliest days in the industry and what we’ve gone through recently.” She went on to explain that although the sexual harassment she experienced as young woman in the field and the occasional criticism was frustrating, she had more scary experiences toward the end of her career and sees threats and violence becoming more common.
Social media was often perceived as a key driver of hostility because of the visibility of journalists online. Most believed hostility has always been a problem, but social media has made it more apparent. And while most participants talked about online hostility as a serious problem journalists had to grapple with, some trivialized the problem, believing hostility existed mostly in the comment sections of news stories and was therefore easy to brush off. P3, an adjunct broadcast instructor who also worked for a local news station, explained: I don’t think it’s anything that is really too surprising. Social media, I think, has certainly contributed a lot to it. We, even here at this station, get a lot of social media comments that are leaning far to the left or far to the right, and are pretty obnoxious and all of that. It’s just a part of it. As long as we get one from each side, every now and then, I think we’re in pretty good shape.
This perception of online hostility, specifically, ignores the emotional effect it can have on reporters, and assumes all hostility is coming from a partisan slant.
Socializing students by treating hostility as routine
The second research question asked how journalism instructors include hostility-focused content in their classes, and how content socializes students regarding hostility. Again, all of the participants thought of hostility as a routine part of the job, treating it as a normal problem students would have to deal with, but here three variations emerged. Some normalized hostility in problematic ways by either not talking about it in overt ways or only acknowledging hostility in regard to controversy between journalists and their sources or stakeholders because of the questions asked or content produced. Others believed hostility was a rising threat and thought of it from a safety perspective but missed some opportunities to prepare students for the full scope of hostility. Finally, some instructors were ahead of the curve and were making conversations about hostility and safety a routine part of class by weaving the topic into multiple lessons and even student story planning. In this way, almost all participants were directly (or indirectly) socializing students to expect hostility if they entered the journalism field. What differed was the tone with which instructors talked about hostility and whether it was framed as a “badge of honor” or something that can be resisted.
Normalization as a detriment to student learning
Despite recognizing hostility was a growing and pressing challenge for journalists, some participants were unable to translate that understanding of hostility into helpful instruction. When shifting from talking about hostility as a macro-level problem to how they address hostility in the classroom, many slipped into patterns that equated “hostility” with harsh criticism or pushback on difficult questions. Consistent with prior literature in which hostility was described as a “badge of honor” (Miller, 2023), some participants talked about hostility as a natural byproduct of journalism done well. Sometimes participants defined “hostility” as simple story criticism from upset sources or audiences, and didn’t think about more insidious forms of true hostility. Although P23, an associate professor, talked at length about hostility being connected with anti-media rhetoric, fake news and the public’s lack of trust in journalism as an institution, her way of framing hostility shifted when talking about how she addresses it in her classes. She explained: I find that today’s students tend to be more compliant. If somebody says, “No, I won’t do an interview.” Or, “No, you can’t come into this meeting.” They’re like, “OK,” and go home. And then the next day it’s like, “I couldn’t get it because they wouldn’t let me in the meeting.” I was like, “What do you mean they wouldn’t let you in the meeting? What do you mean this official wouldn’t talk to you at this particular thing? Did you call back? Did you insist?”
In this excerpt, P23 indirectly accuses students of being pushovers, and equates “preparation for hostility” with simply “knowing your rights as a journalist” and standing up for them. Although this may be a valid challenge she faces with students, if it is the only way “hostility” is discussed in the course, it is actually not being discussed according to the working definition of hostility towards journalists at all. Instead, P23 equates hostility, for her students, with uncooperative sources, with the solution for this problem being to simply push harder. In another example, P8, a full-time lecturer, explained, “I’ve always talked about how you may have difficult situations where people aren’t happy with you and how to handle that.” When hostility is discussed in these ways, students absorb unspoken norms about working in the journalism profession. They learn “hostility” is something to take pride in when it takes place after a hard-hitting story or manifests during a particularly difficult interview, and/or they learn that hostility is something to be ashamed of, when it comes in the form of roadblocks from sources who refuse to cooperate with them, preventing them from getting a story.
A handful of participants only thought about hostility in relation to specific types of reporting events, such as protests, election rallies, or highly partisan topics. P28, an assistant professor, only talked about safety risks associated with carrying a camera in protest settings, and believed most other forms of hostility students might encounter fell under the umbrella of “relationship conflict” that needed to be worked through. P30, an adjunct professor, believed his students could avoid hostility if he simply didn’t assign them to report on elections or polarized topics. This belief that hostility can be easily circumvented by avoiding specific situations ignores personally attacking forms of hostility, which are often more related to the reporter’s identity and the perpetrators’ biased belief systems, than the actual reporting location or topic.
Missed opportunities to explore nuances
A second group of participants recognized a shift in anti-press sentiments causing more physical violence toward and danger for journalists necessitating more attention in the journalism classroom. As P12, a full professor, stated, “journalism professors would be doing our students a grave disservice to not let them know what the landscape is.” Instructors like P12, who taught advanced reporting classes in which students were tasked with reporting off campus, regularly interacting with community members, found it especially important to prepare their students for increased levels of media distrust and hate when they were out talking to people in urban neighborhoods. While efforts such as this are commendable, P12 only focused on face-to-face hostility and other physical safety aspects, while not addressing online hostility or teaching students how to emotionally process and cope with hostility after they have experienced it.
P12 was not alone in this. For example, P25, a full-time lecturer who ran a summer broadcast reporting program in a large urban area, said she prepares her students for safety issues and hostility they might encounter on the ground, but again does not focus on online hostility or mental health with her students unless one of them has a specific situation they bring to her attention. How to cope with hostility and prioritize mental health was most often left out of class conversations about hostility. Some participants said they had never considered that facet of the topic and were unsure of how to talk about it. For example, P3, an adjunct instructor, said: I guess being old school, I don’t worry about that. I don’t think about it. But I know the younger staff, I know as teaching right now, we have an entire department in our human resources that handles students who have [pause] anxiety issues, let me put it that way. And I have several in my class like that. So I wonder how they would handle some of the things that journalists go through, if they would continue on this path. For some reason, I don’t know, I guess it was just the way I was brought up. I’ve never had those issues.
Again, this perspective normalizes hostility as something students are expected to overcome and not dwell on.
Hostility was often a class topic regarding online harassment and hostility, but was sometimes discussed in an overly generalized way, ignoring intersectionality. For example, P30, an adjunct professor, has his students cover elections and post their stories online. Although he said, “I have gotten better at trying to front load where hostility might arise, and also look for different examples for students to learn off” so they are not surprised when they get negative feedback and nasty comments online, he defined the hostility students receive as “a digital misunderstanding or misrepresentation of their work by more generalized hostility.” Although some instructors recognized women and/or journalists of color received more hostility than White, male journalists, most only broached the subject as an aside to larger conversations or dealt with the subject when students ran into problems and asked them for help/feedback after the fact.
Intentional additions of hostility and safety-related content into courses
A handful of participants were able to point to a class unit focused on hostility and/or reporter safety on their syllabi. This is significant because such structured lessons signal to students the subject is important and worthy of dedicated class time. P9, an adjunct instructor, said “we did a whole unit on reporter safety. And so we talked about the resources that were available online and we talked about practices and we talked about how to handle situations and even possible situations that might arise.” She went on to explain this was a decision she made after working in the field and experiencing hostility, having never had formal training on how to handle it while she was going through journalism school. P9 said by providing this content, she saw herself as bucking traditional journalistic norms: We rarely talked about it when I was going through journalism school. It was like, “Get the story or you’re going to get fired.” That’s it. It’s the story. And I taught my students it’s not the story, you’re more important than the story. Everything that you do is more important…. And that’s very different than what I learned.
Given the prevalence of online hostility toward journalists, many included units on digital security in their classes. P4, a professor teaching an investigative reporting class, said “We had a guest speaker talk about digital security and online security, how to secure your accounts. That’s an ongoing discussion that we have and that’s become more and more kind of integrated into talking about reporting.” He emphasized that social media use and digital security went hand-in-hand, so lessons about how journalists are expected to have an online presence to share their work and engage with their audience are followed up with best practices to keep students safe while doing that work.
For a small but passionate group of participants, hostility was a challenge instructors taught students to be constantly thinking about, no matter the type of story they were working on. This was not done to scare students, but to set them up for success and teach them prevention strategies. P6, an assistant professor teaching photojournalism, has students consider risks they might encounter for every assignment she gives them, making it part of the story planning process. She explained: [T]he conversations I’m having with my students are becoming a lot more dynamic because we’re talking about, when I’m giving them a photo assignment, how to do this work in a trauma informed way, how to be very conscious of their identity and how that shows up in these spaces, and how to create risk assessments and have some form of risk mitigations in order to cover the story and keep themselves safe at the same time.
This strategy helps students avoid unsafe spaces and prepare for hostility they could encounter, factoring in things like the story topic, their own identity and the identity of those they'll be photographing or interviewing, and the place they’ll be working in. It is also in line with prior research because it recognizes that hostility is context-based (Miller, 2021b) and that intersectionality plays a role in if and how hostility manifests (Mesmer, 2022a).
Challenges related to talking about hostility in the classroom
The final research question (RQ3) focused on the challenges and barriers for journalism professors in regard to talking about hostility in their classes. Those challenges ranged from not feeling prepared, or as though they had the tools and expertise to talk about hostility with students, to not having the time in already jam-packed classes to fit in more content. When asked if they felt they had the experience and tools needed to have a full class discussion or lesson focused on hostility in their journalism classes, about a third of participants said they did not. Many of those individuals, however, said they would look to resources from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Columbia’s Dart Center, or similar organizations to put together a lesson if they had to, indicating that although they didn’t have the knowledge on hand, they did know it was available. For example, P10, an assistant professor, recently had a situation arise in one of her classes in which a student experienced verbal threats while reporting and came close to experiencing physical violence. Since then, P10 has made it a priority to include a unit on hostility and safety in her reporting classes and has been scouring related research and resources from nonprofit media organizations to cover the topic appropriately. However, she and others felt as though they were so removed from the journalism profession that although they believed hostility was a macro-level problem, they could not speak to the way hostility has changed in form and frequency at the micro-level since they left the field, and therefore would need to rely on guest speakers who had experienced hostility more recently. A handful of participants said they were afraid of scaring students out of the journalism major or deterring them from pursuing it as a career, but most said the benefits of addressing hostility outweighed potential cons.
Indirectly passing the challenge to others
Many participants believed while students weren’t learning about hostility in their classes, they would be getting that content somewhere else. P2, an associate professor, said: [A]nother reason that I don’t feel like I really have to is because our curriculum includes a full three hour ethics course and a separate full three hour law course and a separate required full three hour critical media course. So I’m like, they’re going to get a lot of awareness about what’s wrong with media and how media relate to society in those nine hours. … So I’m assuming they can get it [lessons about hostility] there.
Other instructors teaching writing and reporting classes echoed this sentiment. However, when talking about the critical media theory course he taught in the past, P2 realized: I’m sure I discussed that this is a thing. The rise of fascism and online hate and all that stuff. But it would’ve been in the broader, contextual, again, not like a full week about it, because it’s not a journalism class. … [T]he idea of threats or just attacks on journalists would’ve been couched in a broader discussion of rising extremism and how the entire media industry is trying to deal with it.
Although instructors are assuming students are getting information about hostility somewhere, then, it is not clear if that is actually happening, nor is it clear how the topic is being covered. Focusing on hostility as a byproduct of hate and rising extremism is much different than teaching students how to de-escalate hostile interviews, practice situational awareness and strengthen their online security measures. Indeed, P2 went on to say: [Y]ou’re making me think. I mean, you’re really making me think now about, like, what’s the point of teaching people that there are threats out there if we’re not talking about how they might manage or how they might deal with it?
Likewise, participants in intro-level journalism reporting, writing, broadcast and photography courses said they didn’t think their students were ready for that type of content. P3, an adjunct broadcast journalism instructor, said the MMJs he works with at the local TV news station often have safety concerns when reporting alone and his newsroom has circulated SPJ resources related to safety, but went on to say he didn’t give his students tips for dealing with hostility and safety because “No, they’re sophomores. They’re not there right now.” This mentality that freshman and sophomore students were “not ready” for content related to hostility in the field was shared by many, who didn’t think it had a place in their courses. The assumption, again, was that students would learn about hostility eventually, in another class, although none of those participants could identify if and where it was happening in their respective journalism or communication departments for sure.
Discussion
Through interviews with 30 journalism instructors at all levels across the United States, this study sought to understand if and how hostility-related content is being taught in journalism courses. Although all participants agreed hostility was a key challenge journalists face today, and despite talking about hostility at the macro-level in similar ways, some failed to carry that understanding and importance of the topic into their class content. While inspiration was found in how a select few participants were making hostility an intentional, on-going concern and conversation point in their classes, overall there was a lack of attention given to the topic and many participants incorporated hostility into classroom discussions in superficial ways. Too often, participants conflated hostility with routine reporting challenges students just needed to toughen up to deal with. This normalization of hostility socializes journalism students into thinking they must accept hostility as a regular occurrence without pushing back, trying to overcome it, or seeking help from others. Instead, I echo Ivask and Lon’s call: Instead of encouraging future journalists to admit that receiving hostility is part of the job and they should get used to it, we hope to encourage discussions on recognizing how unnecessary hostility reaches them and what are the possible prevention or coping measures. (2023, p.12)
There was also a lack of attention to the mental health of students and journalists in general who are subject to hostility. While practical tips for managing hostility in the moment and preventative online measures are certainly crucial, we cannot pretend the emotional toll of hostility stops after the discrete encounter ends. Instructors should be addressing the full spectrum of hostility in their classes—from prevention and preparation, to mitigation strategies and situational awareness, to emotional coping and mental wellbeing. To that end, the majority of this section is dedicated to sharing suggestions and best practices for instructors who want to take more purposeful steps to prepare students for hostility, inspired by participants, from prior research, and from the author’s experiences teaching the subject.
Justification and strategies for adding purposeful class content on hostility
Many participants made it clear that although it may come up informally, talking about hostility in the field was not a topic on their course syllabi. However, teaching students to anticipate some level of hostility, as well as teaching them strategies to work through hostility in the moment and process it afterward, are essential skills that should be taught alongside how to find sources and build rapport with audiences. Recent calls have been made for a stronger focus on resilience in journalism education (Ogunyemi and Price, 2023). Just like reporting on traumatic events can have negative effects on journalists’ mental health, hostility can also cause stress and trauma, especially for women and journalists of color who experience increased levels of hostility (Mesmer, 2022a). Research has found that purposeful trauma literacy training increased students’ resilience and feelings of preparedness for covering traumatic events, highlighting the need for such specialized and purposeful course content if we are to empower students to enter the profession and have lengthy journalism careers (Markovikj and Serafimovska, 2023). It stands to reason such purposeful course content surrounding hostility would also increase students’ resilience and preparedness for those challenges.
It is also journalism instructors’ responsibility, as the first people socializing students into the profession, to provide an accurate and complete view of what to expect if they enter the industry. This includes dealing with hostility. Rather than perpetuating the status quo, in which hostility is viewed as a normal part of the job—and even a sign of a job well done—not deserving much thought, instructors can build students’ resilience by teaching them proactive strategies to mitigate hostility. This can take a variety of forms, as hostility exists on a spectrum of low-level hostility to threatening and safety-violating hostility (Mesmer, 2022a), meaning the strategies for dealing with it should also exist on a spectrum. Instructors can learn from the models used by participants in this study who not only include purposeful units related to hostility in their courses, but also wove the topic and safety-related content into their classes, making it a constant consideration as students pitched and reported on stories.
Teaching recommendations
Although most were not yet teaching it, upon further reflection most, if not all, participants came to realize there wasn’t a journalism course completely disconnected from the topic of hostility. Participants saw possibilities in intro-level and advanced reporting, photography and broadcast, theory courses and media ethics and law.
For intro-level reporting students, the topic of hostility could be introduced in relation to generalized hostility toward the press, connected to a lecture about media (dis)trust. In these early lessons, students can be taught to communicate news literacy aspects with people who mimic anti-media rhetoric or otherwise express distrust in news media (Mesmer, 2022b). Like many participants pointed out in this study, hostility should also be discussed in any class in which students are asked to publish their content online and maintain a digital presence, since online harassment is rampant against journalists, especially for women (Posetti et al., 2021). Although some participants in this study didn’t think freshmen and sophomores were “there yet” and didn’t need this content, research has shown student journalists, reporting on class assignments and working for campus news outlets, are experiencing hostility (Arrey and Reynolds, 2023; Heckman et al., 2022), but might not report it to faculty or advisors.
For more advanced reporting classes and in photography, broadcast and other production classes in which students are reporting with large equipment, instructors can include a unit on situational awareness to help keep students safe while reporting. As P6 pointed out, consistent with previous literature (Miller and Lewis, 2022), equipment makes journalists more visible and vulnerable, as it can be hard to escape in threatening or violent situations when carrying heavy gear. Instructors sending students, especially in production classes, to report off campus should pair students in teams. Likewise, instructors can stress the importance of team reporting and help students develop their own protocols and boundaries regarding safety so they can articulate those needs and boundaries with future editors and supervisors. In this way, instructors could buck the age-old notion that journalists need to “pay their dues” in their first jobs and not complain, a mentality that helps normalize hostility and related safety threats, and instead embrace a more supportive and care-based approach to teaching (Arrey and Reynolds, 2023). This caring mentality should extend beyond teaching students to prepare for hostility and include instruction on how to process and cope with hostility after experiencing it. Breathing techniques, disconnection strategies, community support networks and therapy can all be suggested as some of the ways students can prioritize mental health. Overtly talking about mental health issues stemming from hostility can make the topic less taboo, pushing back on the narrative that journalists need to grow a “thick skin” to be in the business.
Limitations and directions for future research
This study is limited in some key ways. First, the study only focused on instructors in the United States. Future research should seek out a more diverse sample of participants on a global scale. It is plausible that instructors in more volatile countries, where journalists are often arrested, attacked or killed, make more strategic and concerted efforts to prepare students for the dangerous nature of the job. This study, because of its qualitative nature, was not able to measure relationships between participants’ demographics and their treatment of hostility within the classroom. It is also notable that only women instructors talked about sexual harassment when discussing hostility. However, some women instructors, such as P23, who talked about hostility in relation to uncooperative sources, upheld traditionally masculine viewpoints, normalizing hostility in problematic ways (Miller, 2023). Future studies should look for relationships based on gender, race, age and other variables.
Furthermore, only instructors at ACEJMC-accredited schools could be added to the recruitment list for this study in a systematic way. This strategy likely left out many instructors who are doing a great job preparing journalism students for hostility, but who work at smaller, unaccredited schools. Participants also needed to see the value of talking about hostility in their specific courses to self-select into the study. Many potential participants responded to the author’s recruitment email claiming to not teach classes in which the topic was relevant. Classes referenced in these emails included media ethics, media law, feature writing, arts and culture reporting, and upper-division theory courses. However, these are areas where hostility could be discussed if the instructors considered the pervasiveness of the issue. It also speaks to the belief that hostility is only a problem in news and political journalism, despite research showing that is not true (Perreault and Miller, 2022). Furthermore, journalism instructors are not the only ones responsible for helping journalists navigate and cope with hostility. That onus is on newsroom leadership as well, and research has repeatedly found that support and guidance lacking (Holton et al., 2022; Mesmer, 2023). Much of that research is from the reporter’s perspective, and as such, future research should explore the perceptions newsroom management have about hostility and explore how they discuss the subject with their newsroom staff.
One unanticipated outcome was that many participants expressed humility and gratitude for having been a part of the study, realizing they could and needed to do more to prepare students for hostility. For example, P26, an adjunct instructor, said: I will touch on it if something happens where a journalist is, if there’s hostility and it’s a public event, I’ll touch on that. We’ll talk about it and they’ll tell me what they think. … So, we’ll discuss it, but there’s no training for dealing with that. I don’t train them to deal with it. Maybe I should. This has made me think.
She later asked the author to point her to additional readings she could use to inform a lesson about the topic. Likewise, P1 shared: It wasn’t until now that I actually conscientiously thought about, how often do I talk about this? Let alone, am I making enough time to talk about this? Should I be carving out more space? And it seems like up until this point, I’ve been just very reactive to it, and talking about it when something goes wrong. As opposed to being proactive, and explaining that these things could happen and what to do.
This prompts the need for similar follow-up studies over the next several years, to track if progress is being made and if more instructors are in fact adding hostility-related content to their syllabi in a purposeful and strategic way. Future research could survey journalism instructors and analyze syllabi for relevant material. Additionally, some participants identified a need for teaching materials related to hostility to supplement the many guides available from SPJ, the Dart Center and related organizations. Case studies, much like the ones used in media ethics courses, were often desired. To that end, scholars working on this topic could write such case studies inspired by their research and create a supplemental textbook or online repository of those materials to aid instructors as they teach students how to work through and process hostility.
Ultimately, this project underscores the fact that hostility is a pressing, growing problem in the field showing no signs of dissipating soon. Hostility has structural drivers, making is an inevitable and ubiquitous challenge in the field. As such, participants who intentionally included hostility-related content into their classes took a holistic approach to inserting hostility as a topic into the curriculum, making is a constant consideration when students engaged online and reported stories, and they did this across a variety of types of classes. Hopefully, more instructors will model this approach and open up space to talk about and confront hostility head-on in their journalism classrooms. By doing this, we can build students’ resilience and help the next generation of journalists thrive.
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) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
