Media ethics & blindspots: a reading list
Just compiling some bookmarks here:
26 Feb 2025: Washington Post opinion editor departs as Bezos pushes to promote ‘personal liberties and free markets’ — for the record. (This comes shortly after the paper changed its motto from 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' to 'Riveting Storytelling for All of America'.)
“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.
“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.” —The Guardian
24 Oct 2024: Why do broadcast journalists look and talk the way they do? Look to the imagined audience.
Journalists I interviewed understood the need to avoid ill-fitting attire, intricate patterns, flashy accessories, filler words, excessive gesturing, and anything else that audiences, regardless of their identity, would find distracting. Yet journalists from historically marginalized groups felt the term “distracting” was often used euphemistically, masking critiques of their social identity. Women and journalists of color were particularly prone to hearing concerns about how their accent, pitch, pronunciation, hairstyle, wardrobe, and even their names could become a distraction.
Determining what’s distracting can be a subjective evaluation. The question is: distracting to whom? —Elia Powers, Nieman Lab
9 Jan 2024: Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows
Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. —Adam Johnson, The Intercept
5 Dec 2023: Reuters, New York Times Top List of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Favorite Media Partners — nothing new, but feels more problematic than ever in our present time.
All of the media companies reviewed — Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and The Washington Post — consistently top lists of “most-trusted” news outlets. They also all have internal brand studios that create advertising content for major oil and gas companies, furnishing the industry with an air of legitimacy as it pushes misleading climate claims to trusting readers. In addition to podcasts, newsletters, and videos, some of these outlets allow fossil fuel companies to sponsor their events. Reuters goes even further; its events staff creates custom summits for the industry explicitly designed to remove the “pain points” holding back faster production of oil and gas. —Drilled Media
13 Jan 2022: Can U.S. journalism truly serve global audiences? Not if it treats them like an afterthought
The problem is that we internationals mostly read the big U.S. papers for their different, outsider perspective on “us,” the others. And, of course, we read them because there is fantastic journalism, often produced by newsrooms way bigger and better resourced than the ones in our home countries. We don’t read them because we feel like the true target audience or even like part of a community.
Why is there no real feeling of belonging? Because a true feeling of community would require us to not lose in translation our cultural and historical beliefs and underlying assumptions. It would require true representation, diversity of perspective and authentic international voices and not just American voices commenting on foreign issues. —Anita Zielina, Nieman Lab
28 May 2021: Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo
The idea that all bias is some deviation from an unbiased center is itself a bias that prevents pundits, journalists, politicians and plenty of others from recognizing some of the most ugly and impactful prejudices and assumptions of our times. I think of this bias, which insists the center is not biased, not afflicted with agendas, prejudices and destructive misperceptions, as status-quo bias. Underlying it is the belief that things are pretty OK now, that the people in charge should be trusted because power confers legitimacy, that those who want sweeping change are too loud or demanding or unreasonable, and that we should just all get along without looking at the skeletons in the closet and the stuff swept under the rug. It’s mostly a prejudice of people for whom the system is working, against those for whom it’s not. —Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian