2
Out of Balance

The other crisis

As with other venerable and vulnerable liberal institutions, mainstream journalism largely doesn’t see race. Even, or especially, when reproducing it. When made strange, and viewed from outside of journalism’s rarefied, normative aspirations, this conceit is breathtaking. The world of nation states has been configured racially through colonialism, capitalism, nationalism and migration. The ‘problem populations’ marked out historically for extermination and exploitation continue, by and large, to be vulnerable to forms of state violence, socio-economic marginalisation and spectacular scapegoating, including through how they are represented in the media. In this view from everywhere, journalism’s studied incapacity to treat racism systemically could be regarded as active misrecognition – surely, in a world forged in these ways, the watchdog thing to do is to assume that racism is present, until proven otherwise?

Instead, current affairs media has largely reproduced post-racialism’s excitable constrictions. The individualised understanding of racism is not only dominant, but hypermediated. Spectacular coverage of racist incidents and utterances proliferates, inviting insta-punditry to adjudicate as to what is really racist, and what is not racist at all, the systemic circulation of media noise seeking the status of a fleeting morality play. As this content flows, ceaselessly and lucratively through channels of comment and reaction, what Arun Kundnani (2023) terms ‘the racisms of our age’ – ‘routine sets of practices, bound up with global structures of power, often articulated in terms of liberal values’ – grind on and grind down, largely outside the frame. This should be rendered strange, also. For the racialised citizens and denizens of often reluctantly multicultural states, this misrepresents the reality of societies in which they cannot hope to mirror this studied idealism and, well, simply define the racism of the border, the security apparatus, capitalist predation and nationalist animus out of their lives.

The reasons for this myopia are involved, certainly. A pronounced liberal and positivist orientation regards discourse on racism, beyond verifiable acts and utterances – preferably captured on smartphones – as straying into ‘ideology’, and thus ‘activism’. It is also hard to see structures when the dominant field orientation places the institution of journalism outside of them. This ‘exercise in unreflective quarantine from the world’, our colleagues in the Journalism Manifesto (Zelizer et al. 2021) write, means that ‘invoking widely used practices, oft-proclaimed values and publicly heralded standards has helped to produce and sustain a uniform and isolationist view of how journalism works’. These values and practices, of ‘objectivity’, balance and detached impartiality, seek to guarantee professional journalism’s democratic role and claim to the truth. In practice they prevent it, or absolve it, from a full accounting of how collective democratic life is distorted by racialised structures and racialising politics. By reifying the erasure of race as professional neutrality, while orienting towards audiences resiliently imagined as white, they work to reproduce the political whiteness of professional journalism (which as an employment sector anyway remains predominantly white and middle class).

Much of the current discussion of mainstream journalism’s inadequacy on race is conducted through criticism of these professional norms, norms which are more widely held to be ‘in crisis’ because of significant shifts in communications technology, political economy, informational politics and democratic legitimation. Indeed, current affairs media are produced in an industry and profession where narratives of crisis are now so widespread that they provide a curious form of stability. Increased corporate consolidation and the often oligarchic concentration of media power have increased professional precarity, which acutely impacts already marginalised social groups. The digital disruption of financial models, and assumed and expected audiences, exacerbates the tension between commercial imperatives and acting in the public interest. The algorithmic personalisation of news flows flattens source hierarchies and blurs the boundaries between news journalism and other genres of content.

There has been a marked erosion of journalistic status in a digital media ecology, allied to a longer-term multivalent decline in confidence in the press, also as an element of the wider crisis of expertise and institutional authority in hollowed-out, neoliberal democracies. What Mark Andrejevic terms ‘an era of informational overload’ endlessly multiplies accounts of reality and drags journalism into the ‘clutter blender’, empowering a ‘post-sceptical’ politics that works to ‘cast doubt on any narrative’s attempt to claim dominance: all so-called experts are biased, any account partial, all conclusions the result of an arbitrary and premature closure of the debate’ (2013). As a key element of this, social media platforms have driven a partial and ambivalent redistribution of public discourse. This has exposed journalism to important forms of critical scrutiny, and also to sustained reactionary attack aimed at eroding the very possibility of meaningful news (and the death-through-rebranding of Twitter has had consequences for the media work of minority background journalists, depriving them of a once-functional platform for broadcast and verification, and flooding their communicative space with hostile actors and content).

Journalism’s racism problem – which rarely features in this kind of crisis checklist – is exacerbated by these developments, not caused by them. The problem of race in the news is historically established; what has changed is that this short period of ‘racial reckoning’ has irrevocably manifested it. Current affairs media’s misrecognition and misrepresentation of racism as a structuring force has, as the post-racial cracks open, produced a crisis with at least three dimensions.

There is a public dimension. A 2023 Pew Research Center study of Black Americans’ experiences with news found consistent patterns of disaffection with news coverage, regardless of age, gender or political affiliation (the study did not factor in socio-economic class). As well as concerns with negative and stereotypical portrayal, a majority of respondents criticised a tendency towards coverage that only ‘covers certain segments of Black communities or is often missing important information’. Most strikingly, ‘just 14% of Black Americans are highly confident that Black people will be covered fairly in their lifetimes’. This study stands in for the multiple ways in which traditionally marginalised, under-represented and stereotyped groups contest the default whiteness of imagined news audiences; demand a reconstruction of newsworthiness through a meaningful pluralism of issues, perspectives and experiences; and seek a renewed, ethical connection of journalism to a world where the abject generation of racisms is again a central feature of powerful political mobilisations.

There is, as this chapter examines, a clear professional dimension, as media workers of colour and from minoritised backgrounds more and more openly confront journalism’s evasiveness, refuse to amplify or normalise racist discourse, and insist on racial justice as a legitimate goal for media work. Finally, there is a partisan dimension. In media systems across the ‘West’, a renewed and confident far-right demands ‘balanced’ engagement with its racist discourse and politics from the public service media (PSM) and liberal titles they simultaneously undermine as decadent, elite luxuries. In many contexts, new forms of far-right-inclined platform media have combined with the established reactionary press to forge altered media ecologies that reproduce racism as both ideological commitment and business model. These media actors will never mention structural racism, other than to scoff at wokeness, but they know and enjoy their roles in it. This ongoing realignment shift raises questions for media suspended between democratic commitment and post-racial conviction. As racism circulates as clickable content and affective invitation, that is, as an increasingly systemic property, concerted anti-racist commitment is required.

Be objective

In a widely shared 2020 opinion piece, ‘A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists’, Wesley Lowery points to the gap between journalism’s aspirational values and the reality of newsrooms, where ‘conversations about objectivity, rather than happening in a virtuous vacuum, habitually focus on predicting whether a given sentence, opening paragraph or entire article will appear objective to a theoretical reader, who is invariably assumed to be white’. Writing less than a month after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Lowery honed in on objectivity as a key driver of professional journalism’s lack of ‘moral clarity’ on racism in the United States.

As protestors occupied the streets and braved incessant police violence, Black journalists were...