Abstract
This chapter turns to the voices of eight journalists working for six different news outlets across the three paradigms to ask about their values, work habits, influences, and understanding of how journalists cover racial issues. Anecdotes from in-depth interviews help contextualize the changes observed in the coverage. The journalists’ voices offer self-reflection and, in some cases, damning critique of field norms—in particular, objectivity. Traditional journalists describe their values and habits moving toward alignment with those of journalists working in the new paradigms. This chapter is enriched by journalists’ thoughtful, powerful insights about the work they do, their critiques of the field, the changes they have seen, and their opinions about what challenges remain.
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Notes
- 1.
Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2016).
- 2.
Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All. P. 13.
- 3.
Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content, 2nd edition (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996).
- 4.
In selecting interview participants, I looked over my data from Chap. 3 to see which reporters at each news organization had most often written about the racial issues I examined. I created a list of names of reporters whose bylines appeared most frequently in my research domain. Then, I searched each news organization’s website for beat descriptions of those reporters. Finally, I sent Human Subjects Division-approved interview requests to 24 reporters. I employed email, Twitter, telephone, and LinkedIn and followed up with phone calls to reporters for whom I could find phone numbers. I also contacted organization public relations staff with NPR and BuzzFeed and provided my list of questions at the request of the latter. One of the Interactive Race Beat participants was a senior writer for The Undefeated, which did not exist at the beginning of this study. If it had, I would have included it in the narrative analysis.
Prior to contacting the participants, I created, tested, and revised a semi-structured interview instrument designed to explore issues of career path, values, routines, participants’ views of contemporary coverage of racial issues, and ideologies. The instrument contained 16 primary questions and 9 subquestions. The script was designed for the interviews to take between 60 and 90 minutes. Each one fell within that time span. All participants were asked the same questions with time for follow-up questions where necessary and appropriate to extrapolate meaning. I recorded the interviews with the permission of the participants. After each interview, I made notes for in-process memos (Lindlof and Taylor 2012). I read through each transcript twice, making notes, before coding the full transcripts using a grounded theory approach (Denzin and Lincoln 1994) and in vivo coding (Lindlof and Taylor 2012), which allows themes to emerge from the texts. I then employed the Lindlof and Taylor (2012) method of identifying codes, then grouping those codes into categories represented by exemplar quotes. The categories established were career paths, values, routines, views about contemporary coverage of racial issues, and ideologies. Next, again following Lindlof and Taylor (2012), I interpreted the findings through the lenses of the Hierarchy of Influences Model (Shoemaker and Reese 2013).
- 5.
Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978).
- 6.
Pamela J. Shoemaker and Timothy Vos, Gatekeeping Theory (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2009).
- 7.
Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times, New Media World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).
- 8.
Eric Deggans, “Stop Segregating Stories,” Nieman Reports (blog), Spring 2015, http://1e9svy22oh333mryr83l4s02.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/NiemanReports-Spring2015.pdf; Tracie Powell, “In the Rise of Race Beats, Echoes of History,” Columbia Journalism Review, July 15, 2014, http://www.cjr.org/minority_reports/race_beats.php; Jamil Smith, “Working on the Race Beat,” The New Republic, March 1, 2015, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121170/new-york-times-and-future-medias-racial-coverage; Barry Yeoman, “Rethinking the Race Beat,” Columbia Journalism Review, August 7, 1999.
- 9.
Powell, “In the Rise of Race Beats, Echoes of History.”
- 10.
Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2013).
- 11.
John Eligon, “Racial Violence in Milwaukee Was Decades in the Making, Residents Say,” The New York Times, December 21, 2017, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/racial-violence-in-milwaukee-was-decades-in-the-making-residents-say.html
- 12.
Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message in the 21st Century.
- 13.
Shoemaker and Reese. P. 84.
- 14.
Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News, 2nd ed., Contemporary Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012).
- 15.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
- 16.
Lindsey Bever, “Prosecutors Will Not Call on Grand Jury in the Fatal Police Shooting of Jamar Clark,” The Washington Post, March 16, 2016, sec. Politics, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/03/16/prosecutors-will-not-call-on-grand-jury-in-the-fatal-police-shooting-of-jamar-clark/
- 17.
Sei-Hill Kim, John P. Carvalho, and Andrew G. Davis, “Talking About Poverty: News Framing of Who Is Responsible for Causing and Fixing the Problem,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 87, no. 3–4 (2010): 563–581; Jane B. Singer, “User-Generated Visibility: Secondary Gatekeeping in a Shared Media Space,” New Media & Society 16, no. 1 (2014): 55–73, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813477833; David H. Weaver, “Studying Journalists and Journalism Across Four Decades: A Sociology of Occupations Approach,” Mass Communication and Society 18, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 4–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2014.969843
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Nielsen, C. (2020). The Storytellers: Reporting on Race in a Digital Era. In: Reporting on Race in a Digital Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35221-9_4
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