“If you think about all the cop shows and you think about the birthright tours and you think about all the friendship visits of U.S. officials to Israel, where it’s as if there’s no Palestine, and you think about Coffee With A Cop, these are all in the same school of actually deeply violent, militaristic propaganda that tries to soften something that only exists to control vulnerable people,” says journalist Lewis Raven Wallace. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Raven Wallace talks with host Kelly Hayes about the similarities between copaganda, which launders the image of U.S. policing, and the pro-Israel bias of corporate media outlets.
Music by Son Monarcas & Pulsed
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. This week, we are talking about journalism, the myth of objectivity, and the biases that shape our media landscape. These biases are especially noticeable when certain topics, like policing or Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, are discussed in the corporate press. For example, a report published in The Intercept found that major publications in the US have “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths” since October 7, and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians.” So, how should we navigate this sea of bias masquerading as objectivity, and how should journalism function amid so much injustice? Today, I will be speaking with author, journalist and Interrupting Criminalization fellow Lewis Raven Wallace. Lewis’ book, The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, and their podcast, which is also called The View from Somewhere are great resources for people who are trying to understand why the corporate press fails us so miserably, and how journalists can do better. This is a tough time to be a journalist, and it’s also a tough time to be a reader who is trying to make sense of the world. As an industry, journalism is in a state of collapse, with endless layoffs, ubiquitous misinformation, billionaires and the garbage speak of AI tearing apart an already troubled field. At its best, journalism can help us develop a shared understanding of our world, what we’re up against, and what we owe to each other. So, how can we make and find that kind of journalism in a world on fire? We’re going to get into that today.
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KH: Lewis Raven Wallace, welcome to the show.
Lewis Raven Wallace: Hi, Kelly. I’m so happy to be here.
KH: Thank you so much for joining us today.
LRW: Thank you for having me.
KH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your work?
LRW: Sure. My name is Lewis Raven Wallace. I live on Occaneechi and Eno Saponi land in what’s now known as Durham, North Carolina. I’m a writer and author. I wrote a book called The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and I’m also the abolition journalism fellow at Interrupting Criminalization.
KH: I have so much love for Interrupting Criminalization, and I’m excited to talk about the work you’ve been doing there. But let’s start with your book, because I think your arguments around the myth of journalistic objectivity offer a necessary framework for discussing what’s wrong with journalism today, and what we have the potential to get right. Like you, I don’t believe that journalistic objectivity exists. I believe that normalizing the status quo is a political position and a bad one. So as a jumping off point, why do you describe objectivity as a myth?
LRW: One of my primary collaborators on the book and the podcast, Ramona Martinez, she once said to me (actually the first time we met), “Objectivity is the ideology of the status quo.” And so I think your point, Kelly, kind of sums it up – that objectivity is in fact an ideological stance that represents how things have been is how things will be. And The View From Somewhere is a history of that and so it looks back to journalism before objectivity, before even the concept and framework of objectivity existed in the United States and finds that that journalism was heavily and openly partisan and then over time, that shifted away from a partisan, openly opinionated style towards a more performatively neutral style. And the main reason for that was marketing. Trying to sell more papers to more people and also trying to not anger advertisers. So it was really the shift to advertising-funded media that led to objectivity rather than the other way around.
Those ideas developed over many decades, this idea that journalists should appear to be unbiased, nonpartisan, and objective, and in concert with also this whole idea of the scientific method. And sometime around the 1920s, people started talking about journalism as almost like the science of news that you would go out and objectively study. And the problem with that was, is, always has been, that these assumptions about what is a neutral question? What is an unbiased approach? What two sides should be included in a both sides story? Those questions have always been inherently biased by the status quo. So normalizing the experience of white, straight, cisgender men and often excluding and ignoring the experiences, and importantly, I think, the ideas, of Indigenous people, Black people, queer people, gay and trans people. And as objectivity became a more central framework for journalism in the United States, it was almost immediately used to suppress organizing, silence voices of color and Black voices and gay and then later on trans voices.
KH: I really appreciate the way you distill that history in your work, and I think it’s a fascinating example of how market-driven concepts sort of solidify into pseudo-sacred truths under capitalism. In the case of journalistic objectivity, failing to couch our work in “neutrality” is often treated as an ethical failing, which couldn’t be more ridiculous. Here at Truthout, for example, we are open about the fact that our reporting and analysis are grounded in a recognition that the world needs to change. Given that we are all on an annihilatory path toward our own destruction, and potentially, the destruction of most life on Earth, via climate collapse, acknowledging that things are fucked and that we need transformative change should be a baseline expectation. This should not even be a question. The systems that govern our lives and our relationship to the planet are blowing it, and the price is being paid in real time. We all know this. And yet, this very basic recognition that transformative change is necessary is seen as this radical departure from the ethics of journalism.
LRW: Right. And you have to wonder, and I did wonder and wrote a book about it, whose interest does that protect, this idea that journalism shouldn’t really be about anything or it’s not credible? That it shouldn’t be for or against anything or it’s not credible? In an era of climate change. I mean, in the era of slavery. That’s an example that I think makes it really stark for people of like, you can have a both sides conversation for sure about whether or not slavery is okay, and that in fact is what people did in these purportedly neutral, white-run papers in that era.
And then later, papers like The New York Times would have these kind of debates about very basic ideas of racial equality and whether or not Jim Crow laws and whether or not lynching. And those are conversations that, sure, you can have if you pretend that there’s a neutral ground to stand on, but the idea that anyone should be outside of those fundamental life-and-death kind of conversations, that we shouldn’t have a bias towards Black lives mattering or towards stopping climate catastrophe, that idea excludes so many people from the conversation and denies, I think, the potential for what journalism can be.
KH: Absolutely. And, as you lay out in your work, the myth of neutrality does not avoid media bias, it simply replicates the most normalized biases that govern our lives. In your work as the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, you take on one of the most insidious biases in US media known as copaganda. Can you tell us a bit about that work?
LRW: I feel so lucky that I get to work there, first of all. It’s an amazing organization that works, as you know, to end the criminalization of women and girls and gender-nonconforming Black and Brown people and through a lot of different means. And so one of the things that Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, who are the leaders of the organization, have always recognized is just how important journalism and media are. And in fact, Mariame Kaba is one of the reasons that I originally became a journalist, which is a whole other story, but she kind of sent me off to go learn to do journalism. I did that. I would say in many ways I participated in quite a bit of copaganda. I was never a quote unquote “crime reporter,” but there was an era, in fact in 2014, the time of the uprisings in Ferguson and then around the country, when I was covering a police killing, the police murder of John Crawford III inside of a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio.
And I not just witnessed, but I would say participated in that kind of reflexive repeating of police press releases that journalists do when police kill someone. And so I aired a broadcast the day after John Crawford III was murdered by a police officer inside the Walmart that said a bunch of things that the cops had said about what happened. All of those things turned out to be lies. John Crawford was carrying a gun, he was pointing it at people, he this, that, and the other. None of that was true, and we don’t need to get into the details here, but it was a classic but egregious example of police just simply covering their asses by totally lying and then reporters repeating it. I was one of those reporters.
In retrospect, I obviously have a lot of regret and anger about my own participation in that and I’m very interested in and committed to how can we create conditions where journalists are never ever participating in criminalizing Black and Brown people as a form of pro-police propaganda. And journalists do so much of that on the job, especially in local news and especially in crime coverage, but I would say also in coverage of police killings. Repeating verbatim the lies of the cops, airing things about these positive things that cops are doing. Associating the concept of public safety with the cops, that’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, that there’s been people talking about campus safety and campus public safety and putting funds toward campus safety, and that actually means police in that context. And so this idea that police and safety are equivalent, which is just a straight-up lie. But I think that’s the result of a lot of very successful propaganda on the part of police and police organizations over, now, many decades.
And so all that is to say what I do at Interrupting Criminalization is help journalists cut through the propaganda and pro-police messaging that can be blatant or can be subtle and figure out different ways to tell stories or different stories to tell. What we focus on also matters a lot.
KH: It’s so interesting to me that Mariame is one of the reasons that you became a journalist, because she’s also one of the reasons that I became a journalist.
LRW: That’s cool. She just put us up to it.........