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In 2016, when the various intersecting issues and challenges of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy are in sharp and necessary focus, there is great and difficult work for those of us whose job it is to frame and narrate these events.
Often, media outlets speak of and frame the events of the country as if they are happening in a world out there – a world from which the media space is separate. And so we have been taught to believe and have taught our consumers that the media does not have the same modulations and contestations as the rest of the country “because we are objective” and a “mirror of society”.
However, the profession of news gathering and storytelling is not an inanimate reflective surface. And even if it were, it matters what is chosen to be reflected in the mirror, and how it is placed in front of that mirror, because, again, this is not an objective process.
Furthermore, despite what the archaic but still pervasive idea of “perfect objectivity” will have newsrooms and editorial meetings believe, news gathering is an exercise of great power between dominant discourses and narratives, and is at all times contested.
Media outlets have done themselves and the people who consume them a great disservice in saying that this process wasn’t always a deeply subjective process of power, even when we mean well. Our ethic codes do not account for how we can be both ethical but also still perpetuate existing dominant narratives, and so even the most ethical and “good” among us are able to produce work that is problematic, subjective and/or dangerous.
The best among us can completely misunderstand why institutional racism matters in 2016, and then go and present this as fact, and not only as fact, but as being generalised to many people, because we are in media and have the power of a platform.
More critically, media is created and recreated by humans who bring to their work subtle and overt prejudices, nuances, language, world views and politics, whether or not they intend to, which are at play at all times, which means that whatever contestations are happening “out there” are happening in newsrooms at the same time.
The same issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and classism are at play in these spaces, and the continued rhetoric about a resolved and objective media is of no use to anyone, especially if we are to improve how we do our work.
