WHO COUNTS?

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ role documenting members of the press killed in the Israel-Gaza war has made it a target.

Mourners carry the body of Abd Shaat, a Palestinian journalist killed in an Israeli strike. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana, File)

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

At 12:37pm EST on June 25, Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), announced that the organization was reexamining the names in its database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war. “CPJ condemns in no uncertain terms the misrepresentation of combatants as journalists or media workers—or the misuse of ‘Press’ insignia. Such actions endanger every single individual journalist legitimately trying to report,” she said in a statement. “We are conducting a full review of the names on our lists to confirm that no one who was actively engaged in combat is listed in our data.” Ginsberg also pointed out that “in-person verification by researchers from outside Gaza has been impossible” because, as Gerry Shih wrote for CJR’s recent Access Issue, since the war began, Israel has barred international correspondents and press advocates from reporting independently in the territory.

Four hours later, at 4:47pm, Jacob Weisberg—the chair of CPJ’s board of directors and a cofounder of Pushkin Industries—emailed the board with an update on a parallel but distinct plan to reconsider who counts as a member of the press. He wrote, according to emails I have reviewed, that he’d established a “special task force to reexamine the question of ‘Who is a Journalist?’” He told board members: “This inquiry is not limited to Gaza, and will address questions about our protection of journalists affiliated with the non-military wings of identified terrorist organizations as well as journalists engaged in official propaganda or disinformation.” He said that nine people had already agreed to work on the task force, and that they would share their recommendation with the board at the next scheduled meeting, in October. (In response to interview requests, Weisberg referred to public statements and said that he was “not going to comment on the board’s internal discussions or processes.”)

The pair of announcements, one public and the other intended to be private, quickly set off a widespread debate about whether one of the world’s most influential press advocacy groups was caving to political pressure. Since the Israel-Gaza war began, in October of 2023, CPJ—a nonprofit headquartered in New York that promotes global press freedom, provides safety support to reporters, and produces research about attacks on the press—has kept a well-sourced and widely cited count of journalists killed. CPJ says the database records people’s names only after its researchers, based around the world, have confirmed via “at least two independent sources of information, desk-based research, and in-person research where possible” that each person is a journalist who has been killed in relation to their work. (Supporting evidence can include information from “family, colleagues, media reports, civil society, and government or independent investigations,” according to CPJ’s methodology.) The tally, at present, documents two hundred and sixty-three journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen, the vast majority of them by the Israeli military, which routinely targets journalists and accuses them, without evidence, of being terrorists. CPJ’s research puts Israel’s war on Gaza down as the deadliest conflict for journalists on record. This has made the CPJ database, and the methodology behind it, a target for attacks by those seeking to discredit critics of the Benjamin Netanyahu administration.

These attacks have grown louder in recent weeks, in the wake of an article by Nicholas Kristof, published on May 11 in the New York Times’ opinion section, that reported on allegations of sexual violence perpetrated by the Israeli military, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” A right-wing news site called the Washington Free Beacon—which once ran a piece with the headline “January 6: An Anniversary Worth Celebrating”—has since published a string of articles seeking to discredit Kristof, his sources, his family members, and the organizations he cited, including CPJ. On May 23, the Free Beacon ran a story saying that CPJ had removed some names from its database of killed journalists. (The same Beacon article quoted a spokesman for Honest Reporting—an organization that Reporters Without Borders has said “constantly defames journalists and media outlets that take a critical view of Israel”—who made the absurd allegation that news organizations citing CPJ data were “amplifying Hamas propaganda.”) On May 27, the Free Beacon published another article, this one accusing CPJ of anti-Israel bias and attacking its board members for, among other things, describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Behind the scenes at CPJ, meanwhile, a related, though very different, conversation was taking shape. Throughout the spring, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries or statements claiming that a number of people in CPJ’s database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war were, in fact, active combatants. After further research, CPJ removed several names. That meant that, since October 7, 2023, a total of twenty people had been removed from the list once new information emerged indicating that they did not meet CPJ’s criteria—including eight people who were found to be active combatants. On May 27, CPJ updated its site to provide details on why the recent changes had been made. At the beginning of June, the organization quietly started “a comprehensive review” of its database, according to Sara Qudah, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director, who requested it. The goal was to check that everyone in the database fit the organization’s existing definition by verifying each individual’s status with at least two new independent sources; the undertaking also aims to uncover potential problems with the existing verification process. The review, which is ongoing, has been “led by a small team within the Middle East and North Africa program,” Qudah explained in an article for the New Arab, and is “entirely independent.”

Around the same time, a separate process got underway, under the auspices of CPJ’s board, which comprises almost thirty senior journalists, media executives, and leaders from related professions. (The board is not involved in the day-to-day running of the organization.) At a board meeting in early June, members discussed the recent Free Beacon coverage, and one member, Jonathan Klein, the former chief executive of Getty Images, told me that he proposed revisiting how CPJ defines a journalist. That proposal was taken up by Weisberg. “We are working on a process for the board to engage in that will allow us to consider the current definition and to assess what changes we might make,” he told the board on June 9, according to emails I have reviewed, promising “more details in the coming weeks.”

But when Weisberg sent his “Who is a Journalist?” email, on June 25, it came as a surprise to Nika Soon-Shiong, the publisher of Drop Site News and a CPJ board member since June of 2021. Though she was aware of Weisberg’s interest in the question, there had been no vote or discussion of whether to act on the proposal to reevaluate CPJ’s definition. “This was an effort led by a handful of board members to narrow the definition of who is a journalist and exclude Palestinian and Lebanese colleagues,” Soon-Shiong told me in a statement. On June 28, she sent an email to Weisberg and the rest of the board—which she later posted on X—voicing concerns. “I request that the Board vote on whether to proceed with this effort, given the absence of a clear objective, defined scope of work, or assessment of the potential institutional risks,” she wrote. Reevaluating the criteria for who counts as a journalist in a way that might exclude Palestinian and Lebanese reporters at state-backed outlets would cause “permanent reputational damage” to CPJ and would represent bowing to “political pressure,” she wrote. (Soon-Shiong also told me that, following her email, she was informed that her term on the board had expired; the set terms last five years. Weisberg declined to comment.)

The same day, Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer and poet who serves as the Palestine correspondent at The Nation, claimed on X that CPJ’s board of directors “will formally change its definition of who qualifies as a journalist, to broadly exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese journalists who worked for government-funded media outlets.” The move, he wrote, “makes a mockery of the purported mission of the organization.” The post sparked an immediate backlash on social media, including accusations that CPJ was acquiescing to political pressure—not entirely unheard of among media and tech organizations that have, for instance, been seen bending the knee to the Trump administration as it attacks the press.

On Wednesday, July 1, as controversy and confusion mounted over the operational review and the board’s plans, CPJ’s board held an emergency meeting and voted to affirm its existing definition of a journalist. The vote was seventeen to one, according to the Free Beacon, with “Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote,” thereby halting the chair’s proposal. (The Beacon seemed to be referring to Katherine Meeks, the general counsel of Fox News Media, who did not respond to my request for an interview.) “It is not true that CPJ planned to change our definition of who is a journalist to exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese press killed in the Israel-Gaza war,” Weisberg said in a statement after the vote, calling reports to the contrary “unsubstantiated allegations” that “undermine” CPJ’s work and “endanger” Palestinian and Lebanese journalists.

Some media coverage confused two discrete processes—the ongoing CPJ review of its data, on the one hand, and an unsuccessful push to reevaluate the broader definition of a journalist, on the other. The board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) requested an urgent meeting with Ginsberg, held on June 30. They came away reassured. As they wrote afterward to members, Ginsberg told them, “There has been no board decision to change the definition. And if they change the definition to exclude Palestinian journalists, they can take my resignation with it.” One person in the meeting, Aymann Ismail—the AMEJA board president and a senior writer at Slate, who spoke to me in a personal capacity—said Ginsberg made a clear distinction “between the daily operations of CPJ, and the board.” According to Ismail, Ginsberg told AMEJA that CPJ’s database review was “something that they would have been doing regardless of what the board was discussing, because they care very deeply about their rigorous processes of verification.”

CPJ had, in fact, undergone a recent stress-testing of its methodology, in 2025. In the spring of that year, staff representing all parts and regions of CPJ met four times to discuss who counted as a journalist. The meetings, according to emails I reviewed, involved “kicking the tires” of the organization’s definition and figuring out “where we most often get tripped up.” Where, exactly, is the point at which someone becomes a propagandist, an activist, an influencer, a foreign agent? CPJ staff agreed that “accuracy” and publishing “fact-based” material was crucial to inclusion as a journalist; that the medium or platform in question did not matter; that for someone to be considered a journalist, their witnessing should not be a one-off; and that CPJ should look at the individual journalist, not the organization to which they were affiliated, when determining their status. The process led to a slight tweak in CPJ’s public definition: “CPJ defines journalists as people who regularly cover news or comment on public affairs through any medium to report or share fact-based information with an audience.” (Changes in italics.) In June of 2025, the board of directors voted to adopt that definition.

CPJ’s long-standing inclusion of reporters affiliated with state-backed media or militant or armed groups has made it a target of bad-faith organizations like Honest Reporting. But it’s worth emphasizing that CPJ researchers evaluate whether people killed were genuinely engaged in regular journalistic activity, and that anyone they judge to be actively engaged in combat or inciting imminent violence is automatically excluded from the data. This is in line with how many human rights organizations define journalists. The UN Human Rights Office, for instance, has said that journalists are people “documenting events, analyzing issues, gathering facts, and processing data, to inform society on matters of public interest.” Notice: not people who work for journalistic institutions, but people doing journalism. This rubric could include journalists at Al-Aqsa TV in Gaza (affiliated with Hamas, the militant group that runs the government); Xinhua News Agency in China (owned by the one-party state); or, for that matter, Stars and Stripes (owned by the US Department of Defense) or Voice of America (overseen by the US Agency for Global Media). “We recognize that across the world, individuals working for these outlets are essential in providing information to communities,” Ginsberg has said.

Some human rights professionals argue that making the test of who is a journalist about one’s function, not the politics or affiliations of their employer, is important because witnesses who work for one political group or another are more likely to be found in places where ordinary reporting is suppressed or access is denied. Amos Barshad has documented for CJR how international journalists have been trying to get into Gaza for years. Does that not make any bona fide journalistic work on the ground there a public service? A vital way of recording a war that would otherwise go unseen? And if someone is killed for doing that journalistic work—for performing the role of witness, even if they report for a state-owned media organization affiliated with a group whose politics we may find grotesque—why should they be excluded from a tally of journalists slain for doing their jobs?

Ismail, of AMEJA, told me that, following his meeting with Ginsberg, it became clear that the two separate reviews were being conflated in some reports and on social media. He added, though, that he understood why the misunderstanding had elicited such a fierce response. “This is emotional for so many people, for obvious reasons. This is a matter of life and death,” he said. “We’ve seen so many examples of the Israeli military justifying the killing of journalists who no one would question their status as journalists.” He noted the grim emergence of a new term used by the Israel Defense Forces: “They were calling these people ‘combat propagandists.’ It’s not a thing. And even if that were the case—where somebody was on someone’s bankroll—that does not make them a military target.”

Other Notable Stories …
By Jem Bartholomew

On Tuesday, NPR published—then quickly retracted—an article by Nina Totenberg, NPR’s Supreme Court correspondent, stating, incorrectly, that Samuel Alito, a Supreme Court Justice, had retired. Totenberg, who is eighty-two and has been a well-sourced reporter on that beat for decades, apologized to Alito and called it her “worst professional mistake of my more than fifty years in journalism.”

Totenberg explained that the error grew out of her having misheard the answer to a question: “I asked somebody what was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘Retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the s on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed—something no reporter should ever do—that” Alito was retiring, she said, according to CNN. (The announcements referred to court staff retirements.) One NPR host told Brian Stelter of CNN that the retraction was “a worst-case scenario for us.”A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to temporarily halt its requirement for journalists to be accompanied by an official escort while inside the building, the New York Times reported. The ruling came in response to the second of two lawsuits the paper has filed in recent months seeking to overturn restrictions imposed on journalists by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. The latest lawsuit, filed in May, targeted the escort requirement, calling it “retaliatory.” Judge Paul L. Friedman, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said in a preliminary ruling that the escort policy violated the First Amendment. For more on the Pentagon’s effort to muzzle critical national security reporting, see Ivan L. Nagy’s recent timeline for CJR.

On Monday, a reporter and a photographer for CBS News Chicago were attacked during a shoot by three men, the news organization reported. One of the men reportedly shouted a racial slur at one of the journalists, who is Black, and ordered a German shepherd to attack (it did not obey); the assailants also cracked the windshield of a CBS News van with a traffic cone and smashed a camera. “They just were trying to do anything they could to scare them unnecessarily,” a witness said. Chicago police later arrested the three men, who face felony charges including committing a hate crime, criminal damage to property, and aggravated battery of a police officer. Lisa Nandy, the UK’s secretary of state for culture, media, and sport, said last week that she was likely to ask the country’s competition watchdog to scrutinize Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will significantly grow the Ellison family’s media empire and give it control over CNN. Nandy has given Paramount until July 6 to respond. “We are confident that our proposed transaction does not pose any media plurality issues in the UK and remain confident in our stated transaction timeline,” a spokesperson for Paramount said. In other news, Sky has announced a deal worth 1.6 billion pounds (2.1 billion dollars) to buy the broadcasting and streaming arm of ITV.For Vanity Fair, Margaux MacColl interviewed Goli Sheikholeslami, the chief executive of Politico, about, among other things, the outlet’s drive into AI. “While some media leaders have erred on the side of caution, enforcing policies that prevent or severely limit the use of AI tools, Sheikholeslami has leaned into experimentation, launching multiple public-facing AI tools and chalking up now-defunct products” as useful means of data collection, MacColl writes. One AI tool—which was still in beta and was later shut down—was asked by employees during testing to produce feature reports on fictitious lobbying groups, which it did, hallucinating false information and attributing it to Politico articles. “If you don’t participate, you don’t learn,”

 Sheikholeslami told MacColl.Three men were found not guilty on Friday of murdering Lyra McKee, a journalist from Belfast who died after being struck by a bullet in Derry, Northern Ireland, in April of 2019, at the age of twenty-nine. McKee was reporting on rioting at the time; the New IRA claimed responsibility for her killing. The three men had been on trial at Belfast Crown Court since May of 2024. Judge Patricia Smyth said “M​​cKee’s murder was an act of senseless violence” but added: “The gunman has never been brought to the court, and the evidence against those accused of assisting or encouraging has fallen short of that required for conviction.” Reporters Without Borders urged authorities to continue pursuing all legal avenues to secure justice for McKee. And Charles H. Townsend—who was chief executive of Condé Nast from 2004 to 2015, during the media industry’s transition from print to digital—died on June 11 in Florida, aged eighty-two. His daughter told the Times that his death, in a hospital, was from sepsis. Townsend “might have been an ideal steward for Condé” in an earlier era, Michael Grynbaum, a Times journalist, wrote in Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. But he “had the misfortune to reach the summit just as the mountain began to melt.”

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‘America Knows Less About Itself At The Very Moment It Needs To Know The Truth’

John Duprey / 1963 Birmingham photograph from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

BY SUSIE BANIKARIM

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission in response to widespread demonstrations over the treatment of Black Americans. The following year, the panel released a report, outlining systemic white racism across society—and sharply criticizing the press’s failure to cover the subject of race. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report concluded, calling on newsrooms to hire and promote more Black journalists. A decade later, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) started a recurring survey to track the news industry’s progress toward inclusion, setting an ambitious goal: that the demographics of newsrooms would mirror those of the broader US population by the year 2000. The survey, which for years served as one of the industry’s primary benchmarks for tracking newsroom representation, was last conducted in 2019. ASNE, later known as the News Leaders Association (NLA), disbanded in 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a more apt metaphor for the state of Black representation in media today. At a time when the Trump administration is aggressively dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and targeting communities of color, many newsrooms have all but abandoned promises they made during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to increase racial diversity in coverage and staffing. As CJR reported last month, 76 percent of journalists identified as white in a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, compared with roughly 58 percent of Americans who identified as white in the most recent census. “You saw the industry making all these promises, but we are in a moment where we’ve got this backlash that is really exposing which of those promises were values and which ones were window dressing or branding,” Errin Haines, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists and editor at large of The 19th, told me.

In the past year, NBC News has shut down all of its verticals dedicated to reporting on Black, Latino, queer, and other underrepresented groups. CBS eliminated its Race and Culture team. Bloomberg and Politico wound down their newsletters about race, according to Nieman Lab. In February, the Washington Post laid off 45 percent of unionized Black staffers amid widespread reductions, but journalists at the Post told my colleague Riddhi Setty that leadership had given up on diverse coverage long before that.

These are a few suggestive examples—but what we know about the bigger picture of representation in journalism is largely anecdotal. There is no comprehensive or current data on reductions of race coverage or diverse staffing across the industry. In 2025, the American Press Institute (API) announced that it had “acquired the survey” from the NLA so that it could relaunch and expand that research. Robyn Tomlin, the executive director of API, told me in an email that they “are working to identify potential funding to support it in the future.” For now, only historical survey data is available on the institute’s website.

“We’re absolutely in a moment now where Black journalists are being disproportionately affected by choices around whose beats get cut and what kind of teams get dismantled,” Haines said. “And frankly, whose expertise is valued versus whose expertise is considered expendable and whose communities and what kind of audiences are just optional.”

It is particularly troubling to see newsrooms cowed by the administration’s cynical efforts to reframe DEI as discrimination, because these are the institutions on which we rely to tell that story. “The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people,” Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and this magazine’s publisher, wrote for CJR in 2018. Six years later, many news organizations are still failing to tell the full American story. “You can’t say democracy is under threat and then just eliminate the journalists that are best positioned to explain how that threat is landing in Black communities,” Haines said. “If we get pushed out, America literally knows less about itself at the very moment that it needs to know the truth about itself.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of “second sight” and the ability it gives Black Americans to see the country as it truly is rather than the ideal it is often claimed to be. In A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom, Sarah J. Jackson, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, explores how that double consciousness is both a burden and a privilege for Black storytellers, giving them “a profound insight: the ability to see through the veil, to understand the contradictions of American life with a clarity often unavailable to those at the center of power. Second sight is a vision, a tool, a gift.”

The book, out this week, is an alternative history of media in America, an insightful and invaluable examination of how Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, and podcasters have shaped the nation, even while their contributions have too often been excluded from the official record. Jackson combines deep historical analysis with interviews of contemporary Black media-makers conducted over four years to trace the stories of those “who have used the tools of their time—pen, press, lens, mic—to critique the nation and imagine it otherwise.”

By structuring the book around the founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Jackson shows how figures such as Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune fundamentally reframed our understanding of these concepts. She draws a direct line between their work and journalists of today who continue to interrogate the idea of the American project—including Cobb and Haines, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Gene Demby, Gabriella Angotti-Jones, and Chenjerai Kumanyika. These journalists, Jackson writes, continue to give us “a more nuanced, evocative, and honest story about our nation. Their belief that the public can hold—and act on—this story is itself an extraordinary act of faith.”

In the book’s coda, Jackson reminds us that, as the country prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, “one measure of the integrity” of the flood of expected media coverage will be how it treats the stories of Americans on the margins. “Are the stories and contributions to democracy of countless unnamed Americans—whose lives and futures are tied to these histories—considered worthy of remembrance and celebration?” Jackson asks. “Whose freedom is celebrated? Whose life and liberty? Whose happiness protected? What futures imagined?”

One morning in the fall of 2022, Juliana Pache was solving the New York Times’ “Mini” crossword, as she did every day, when she came across something that stumped her. “I don’t remember the clues from that day, but there was something about one of the clues in particular from that Mini that I was like, ‘This feels like a white person would know this and I probably wouldn’t,’” Pache recalled.

The experience prompted Pache, a first-generation Afro-Caribbean American, to look for puzzles centered on Black history and culture. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to make it herself. “That day, I bought a bunch of domain names, because I wasn’t sure what to name it yet. And I had never made a crossword puzzle before. I was like, ‘How hard could it be?’” She laughed. “It turns out it’s way harder than it looks.”

Pache taught herself how to construct puzzles by watching YouTube videos and found support on a Discord channel. Three months later, she debuted Black Crossword with her first mini. She has published a new puzzle every day since. The site’s tagline: “If you know, you know.” Clues this week included “‘There’s Always This ___: On Basketball and Ascension’ (2024 book by Hanif Abdurraqib),” “Radical Puerto Rican civil rights organization, The Young ___,” and “Dancer and choreographer ___ Ninja.” (The answers: Year, Lords, Willi.)

For Pache, it’s important that Black Crossword not present Black culture as a monolith. “A really big part of my goal is to connect people across the diaspora culturally,” she told me. “Language is such a huge part of how black folks across the diaspora communicate with each other. We have these kinds of shared languages.”

She has also published two puzzle books: Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora in 2024 and Black Crossword: 100 Midi Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora last year. She is currently brainstorming for her third book, which will include a wider variety of puzzles, including word searches and logic games. “There are so many ways to challenge hatred and systemic erasure,” she told me. With Black Crossword, she has found a way to do that by centering Black culture. “My primary feeling,” she said, “was this would be a joy to have.”

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Offscript With Chika Oduah

Chika Oduah (Wikipedia)

BY ORITSEJOLOMI OTOMEWO

“The way I practice my journalism is to go as close as possible to the source. It’s an influence of my anthropological training, where we go into the field.”

In April 2014, that instinct took Chika Oduah to Chibok, a northeastern town in Nigeria.

Boko Haram had just kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the Government Secondary School, and most articles being published about it were being filed from Abuja, Lagos, London, New York, or Washington. Not many journalists had actually gone to Chibok. An editor at The Guardian reached out to Oduah and asked if she could write something. She looked at the coverage and immediately saw the gap.

She had been attending the Bring Back Our Girls rallies in Abuja and had connected with a man from Chibok who had not been back to his hometown in years. He became her guide. They hired a car and drove fourteen hours north, through increasingly remote and deserted terrain, until they arrived. When they did, she crossed paths with Adam Nossiter, the New York Times correspondent, who had come the same day with politicians and a large entourage. Oduah had come differently. “I like to travel low-key,” she says. “Wear a hijab, speak my small Hausa, and just go.” A local businessman offered her a bed for the night. Before he left her to sleep, he pointed to a machete by the wall and told her to use it if she heard anything. She did not sleep easily. But she got the story.

It was not a one-off. The story of terrorism and its aftermath became a major thread running through her career, one she would return to again and again. But more than any single assignment, Chibok captures something essential about how Oduah works, and why she has spent years building a journalism practice that many of her peers in international media have never attempted.

For most foreign correspondents covering Nigeria and Africa, the job is done at a distance. Stories about the continent are filed from comfortable newsrooms, stitched together from wire copy and phone calls. Oduah has never seen the point of this. She has spent her career working with international media organisations while insisting on doing the reporting on the ground, where the story actually happens. That conviction made her turn her back on a career in the United States and move to Nigeria. It is what now guides her as she builds her own platform, Zikora Media and Arts. To understand where it comes from, you have to go back to a small village on the banks of the River Niger.

Oduah was born in Ogbaru, a rustic community sitting on those banks, as the first daughter of her parents. Life in the village was busy and full of nature. As the first female child, she was expected to be many things at once. That sense of doing several things at the same time stayed with her. “I was raised to be a multitasker. It is why I wear many hats.”

At two years old, she relocated with her family to the United States, settling in Georgia — a state that, with its sprawling greenery and slower pace, carried some of the same rural texture as the village she had left behind.

But Georgia was not Ogbaru, and America was not home. Even as a child, Oduah felt the dissonance acutely. “I felt like a fish out of water,” she says. “The US was not for me. It was a country of corporate slavery and capitalism stripped of humanity. I saw all of this when I was about eight years old and told my parents I was not going to stay.”

Growing up, she was a restless, creative child. She danced, sang, and wrote poetry. By her teenage years, she had started writing articles on current affairs. She had so many interests it was difficult to choose: fashion design, anthropology, fiction writing, activism. Her parents pushed her toward journalism. Her mother first suggested it, and her father convinced her she did not need to be on television to do it. She could write. That was all she needed.

At sixteen, Oduah walked into her first newsroom, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the most prestigious papers in the American Southeast. It was there that she began to understand what the craft demanded. She went on to study Journalism and Anthropology at Georgia State University, embracing the multimedia approach that was being pushed hard at the time — learning to write, shoot, edit video, record audio, and produce. It helped that CNN’s headquarters sat a few minutes from her campus. Inspiration was always within walking distance.

In those early years, the stories she wrote were almost always about immigrants and marginalised voices. After graduating, she landed a job at NBC News. But before that, she had spent time in Kenya, working at K24: the country’s first twenty-four-hour news station, drifting from place to place doing documentary and feature work. It was her first real taste of on-the-ground journalism on the continent, and she loved every moment of it.

Back in New York, she joined Sahara Reporters as a creative director, helping build what was then an ambitious attempt at a pan-African television broadcast station. In 2012, she was accepted into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, a recognition of the literary ambitions she had never fully set aside.

After she left Sahara Reporters, she decided to return to Nigeria. Her mother cried when she announced she was leaving the US, but her father was supportive. “He was like, that’s my girl. He always loved my go-getter spirit.”

In 2013, she moved to Abuja. The choice was deliberate; Al Jazeera’s African headquarters was in the capital. She had been applying from the United States, but the emails and calls had not been taken seriously. When she showed up in person at the Abuja office, they finally understood she was serious and offered her a job as a producer for the West African region.

As producer, Oduah was responsible for everything: pitching stories to Doha, organising teams, arranging fixers, conducting risk assessments, going into the field, editing the final product. The role took her across Nigeria and into neighbouring countries. She covered the farmer-herder conflict in the Middle Belt, the Benue massacres, and communities in the northeast living under the shadow of Boko Haram. “I have been able to travel across Nigeria more than people who have lived there their whole life.”

After leaving Al Jazeera, she worked as a freelance journalist covering West Africa for several international media organizations including Vice, Voice of America and France 24. It was during this period she found her way to Chibok.

In 2017, she moved to Senegal. The reasons were layered. The first was safety; her reporting on Boko Haram had made certain people unhappy, and she needed distance. The second was language; most West African countries are francophone, and she needed French to cover the region properly. The third was art. Senegal has a deep, living tradition of artistic practice, and she wanted to immerse herself in it.

But it was her frustrations with the international media industry that eventually pushed her to build something of her own. There was the outlet that planned to cover a Nigerian election without telling the only Nigerian on the team. There were the organisations that did not like her dreadlocks and wanted her to look a certain way on camera. And then there was a video of a Burkinabé mystic and spiritual philosopher named Patrice Malidoma, a man who had spent his life bridging African spiritual traditions and the Western world. In the middle of a talk, Malidoma stopped and said, seemingly out of nowhere, that someone was listening who had not been brought to Africa to report on bad news, but to find solutions. Oduah got chills. Shortly after, she learned that Malidoma had died.

She started Zikora Media and Arts in 2023. The name means “show the world” in Igbo. “Africans still apologise for being African,” she says. Zikora is her attempt to change that, through journalism, literature, performance, and events.

Looking ahead, Oduah talks about Zikora the way a young reporter talks about her first big story: as something whose full shape she cannot yet see, but whose direction she is sure of. There is more of the continent to cover, more voices to find, but she wants those voices to speak for themselves.

It is the same instinct that put her in a car for fourteen hours to Chibok, that walked her into the Al Jazeera office in person. The instinct to go close, to go in person, and to show the world whatever she finds there.

SOURCE: COMMUNIQUE

In 2025, Press Freedom Came Under Direct Attack

BY AIDA ALAMI

We must not respond to this existential crisis with silence and apathy.

In 2025, CJR extensively covered alarming assaults on free speech and press freedom in the United States and across the world. I am referring to the killing fields of Gaza, but not only that. I am also thinking of the banning of the Associated Press from the White House’s press briefing room in February, and the absurd new rules imposed on the Pentagon press corps in October, as well as physical attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on journalists, and the deportations of at least two media figures, Mario Guevara and Sami Hamdi. Billionaires are fighting for control of media companies, and many media workers of color are being pushed out of their jobs. In short, this year has felt like an endless horror film.

I started 2025 by reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This—a book that hit me strongly because it spoke more eloquently than I could have ever imagined about the fraught relationship between Western institutions and someone like me: a Moroccan, Muslim journalist closely following the devastation of Gaza. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly two hundred and fifty journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. (Other sources put the count higher.) These journalists also faced acute starvation; in a CJR story about the famine from July, Meghnad Bose quotes a journalist saying, “I used to chase the truth. Now I chase calories.” In so many instances, reporters in Gaza were targeted precisely because they wore their press vests.

The second chapter of El Akkad’s book is called “Witness.” It discusses “utterly meaningless” words on the killing of journalists by Antony Blinken, the former secretary of state. El Akkad writes, “The journalists who bring the reality of the world to light are daily slaughtered. Meanwhile an embarrassing number of their Western colleagues, who for the most part fear no such outcome but accept it as the sad lot of those distant others, travel within the protective cocoon of people like the very concerned secretary and measure his vacuous declarations of solidarity with their craft as just another part of the horse race, just another part of the game.”

In March, months before he won the National Book Award, I interviewed El Akkad for CJR. He told me that accolades no longer meant much to him, because “I’ve seen them not be applied when the moment called for it most vehemently.” In other words, being compensated and rewarded for urgent, rights-defending work by the very institutions that have failed to express the same urgency or values rang hollow to him. This sentiment was something I would spend the rest of the year thinking about.

In August, CJR asked an essential question: What can the media do collectively to stop Gaza from being the deadliest place for journalists in the world? We collected almost two dozen responses from journalists, academics, and advocates to think through solutions. My colleague Azmat Khan wrote about the “muted responses” of journalism organizations to the killings of journalists by Israel: “A growing number have come to view this, ultimately, as a failure to contend with man-made human catastrophe in Gaza, including for reporters—and it has marked a breaking point in their relationships with legacy news institutions.” Atossa Araxia Abrahamian also put it well when she wrote, earlier this month, “Over the past two years, Gaza has shown governments around the world just how much they can get away with when it comes to silencing the press.”

To me, the way the media industry has responded to the horrors happening in Gaza has not come as a surprise. My own past experiences with extractive journalistic relationships, where my local knowledge was indispensable to news companies while my labor was erased by several peers, made the dehumanization I’ve witnessed these past two years feel inevitable rather than anomalous.

A crisis abroad can only weaken journalism at home. What we tolerate elsewhere eventually hurts us—and the pressure from outside the industry is real. The second Trump presidency has been marked by daily assaults on the press. I mean not only viral sound bites, but also real restrictions. In April, I profiled Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, and spoke to reporters who called the atmosphere in the briefing room “surreal.” CJR’s Ivan L. Nagy wrote a suite of stories about new policies implemented by the Pentagon that exchanged accreditation for agreements from reporters to have their material vetted. As a result, the Pentagon press is now staffed with MAGA sycophants.

The Trump presidency will also be defined by the deportations of Guevara and Hamdi and by ICE’s violence against US journalists. On CJR’s podcast, The Kicker, Josh Hersh talked with journalists from Chicago’s Block Club, which joined several of that city’s news outlets in a lawsuit against the Trump administration and other top officials, filed in US District Court, alleging that federal agents had used “extreme brutality” against the press and others at protests. “We have seen clashes and we have seen federal agents, initially just ICE—then Border Patrol, led by Gregory Bovino—using chemical weapons on protesters and journalists,” Francia García Hernández, a reporter for Block Club, said. Stephanie Lulay, Block Club’s co–executive editor and cofounder, told Hersh, “Four of our journalists have been shot with pepper spray bullets and tear-gassed while covering protests.” Just last week, my colleague Jem Bartholomew covered a new report from the Freedom of the Press Foundation that documented at least thirty-two arrests and a hundred and seventy assaults on journalists so far in 2025.

Through all of this, journalism survived—as reporters continued to do their work in spite of attacks on their dignity and safety. In so many instances it continues to thrive. I have never been more in awe of the people who are delivering timely and essential reporting around the world—such as the more than twenty journalists who were arrested in October for trying to reach Gaza. But at the same time, I fear that press freedom is slowly and quietly eroding while institutional silence and apathy do nothing to protect it. Freedom is never lost at once.

Other Notable Stories…

By Jem Bartholomew

Three hours before broadcast, CBS News abruptly pulled a Sunday-night report on CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison where the Trump administration deported more than two hundred and fifty Venezuelan migrants earlier this year, sparking a backlash from one of its high-profile correspondents. According to Semafor, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief recently installed by David Ellison—I wrote about Weiss for CJR in October—had “serious concerns about the piece,” with the network holding the segment “pending comment or an interview with White House officials next year.” In an email to colleagues last night seen by the Wall Street Journal, reporter Sharyn Alfonsi said that Weiss “spiked our story,” which she said “was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.” Alfonsi said the decision was political, not editorial. (For more on the ordeals of 60 Minutes, read this reported feature from the fall by Adam Piore.)

The Justice Department released thousands of files relating to investigations into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Friday afternoon. (The timing was notable, as Jim Derogatis and Seth Stern write for CJR, as it follows the R. Kelly secrecy playbook.) The DOJ said it will keep releasing documents in the coming weeks, with hundreds of thousands of files reportedly still being reviewed. That defies the instructions of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed on November 19, for all files to be released within thirty days. In the meantime, news organizations set about sifting through Friday’s cache, but the files were heavily redacted and contained few revelations. (The release appeared to shield Donald Trump while focusing the spotlight on Bill Clinton; a Clinton spokesperson said he was being used as a “scapegoat.”) Trump’s reluctance to unearth the Epstein files has led to a fracturing of his MAGA base, with, as Emily Bell wrote for CJR earlier this year, the president “now confronting the outcome of a media ecosystem he invented, one based on panicky, consensus-squashing conspiracy theories.”

On Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, appeared before an oversight hearing by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The testimony made headlines for Carr’s comment that the FCC “is not an independent agency, formally speaking”—a statement that alarmed many observers as another instance of power flowing toward the executive branch under Donald Trump. (In the minutes after Carr’s comments, Axios’s Sara Fischer spotted that the FCC website was updated to scrub “independent” from the agency’s description.) Carr has already faced criticism for wielding the FCC like a political cudgel, pressuring ABC over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and exacting promises from Skydance to remake CBS News in its takeover of Paramount. Texas Republican Ted Cruz, the Senate committee chairman, told Carr on Wednesday: “Democrat or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion.” (For more Carr’s allegiance to Trump at the FCC, read our piece by Kyle Paoletta.)

Over the past year, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, has spoken eleven times to Chris Whipple, a Vanity Fair writer, addressing a range of topics with unexpected candor. But when the piece finally went live on December 16—alongside close-up portraits of administration officials—Wiles attacked the write-up. (Among her comments: Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality,” JD Vance is “a conspiracy theorist,” Elon Musk is an “odd duck” and “avowed ketamine” user, and Trump will “keep on blowing boats up until [Venezuelan leader Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle.”) While not denying the veracity of the quotations, Wiles said on X: “Significant context was disregarded” and much material was “left out of the story.” Christopher Anderson, the photographer for the story, said about his blemishes-and-all photo shoot: “It was my attempt to circumnavigate the stage-managed image of politics and cut through the image that the public relations team wants to be presented.”

Paramount Skydance suffered another rebuff last week in its takeover attempt of Warner Bros. Discovery—this time for more than 108 billion dollars—with the board rejecting the offer, in favor of progressing with Netflix’s takeover, in a reported unanimous vote. According to Variety, that was despite Ellison, Paramount’s chairman and chief executive, offering Warner Bros.’ David Zaslav a pay package worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (Ellison reportedly texted Zaslav: “It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to be the owner of these iconic assets.” Zaslav did not reply.) Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that Soo Kim, the founder of New York hedge fund Standard General, has been approached by at least one major Warner Bros. Discovery shareholder about acquiring CNN.

On Thursday, the UK prime minister’s office announced a shake-up of press briefings. Instead of twice-daily, on-the-record briefings from the prime minister’s spokesperson to political journalists (“the lobby”), the plans call for one briefing a day. This will also sometimes be replaced by a press conference, where content creators and trade journalists may be invited, at which questions must be submitted to officials ahead of time. The government defended the plans as an attempt to broaden scrutiny. But the UK Society of Editors condemned the move, saying it could limit accountability. The Foreign Press Association (FPA) told CJR it’s part of a wider distaste for scrutiny since the Labour government was elected in 2024. “Labour has effectively canceled the foreign lobby,” Deborah Bonetti, the FPA director, said, citing accreditation struggles at recent summits and conferences leading to “a broken relationship.” “Their questionable approach to press scrutiny has now spilled into the UK lobby,” Bonetti said.

And the BBC said it will defend itself against a ten-billion-dollar lawsuit filed by Trump over the editing of a speech he made on January 6, 2021, in a 2024 documentary. As I wrote for CJR last month, “The BBC’s error is regrettable not so much for its content—the program’s larger point that Trump was cheering on an antidemocratic riot still holds true—as for how it was ultimately weaponized to call the broadcaster’s legitimacy into question.” As right-wing foes circled, the director general and head of BBC News were forced to resign. Last Monday, Trump sued in Florida—claiming defamation and violating a trade practices law—ratcheting up his pressure on the press following his lawsuits against the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But the case itself, legal scholars have said, holds little merit. “Trump must show knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth,” a very high bar, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor, in comments to CNN.

RDEAD ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Did Andy Warhol Exploit His Superstars? A New Book Says Yes.

Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in 1965. Sedgwick, our reviewer says, is “a frequent and always beguiling presence” in the book.Credit...Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

BY MARK BRAUDE

Laurence Leamer in “Warhol’s Muses” sets out to explore the lives of 10 women in the artist’s orbit whose cultural contributions, “artistic ambitions, personal struggles and occasional triumphs” have been “largely overlooked.” The veteran author has successfully carried off this kind of self-imposed rescue mission before, in well-researched books including “Hitchcock’s Blondes,” “The Kennedy Women” and “Capote’s Women,” the delicious source material for the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology. On this go-round, however, the formula leaves Leamer with little to offer aside from the expected tour through the Warholian fun house of Brillo boxes, tinfoil, amphetamines, cheap glamour and high society given by so many before him.

Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick and Nico are among the first “muses” (or Superstars, as Warhol dubbed them) to be considered. None qualifies as overlooked. Tom Wolfe was looking straight at Holzer in 1964, diagnosing her in real time as a new breed of It Girl. (Leamer himself acknowledges that Wolfe’s piece on Holzer, “The Girl of the Year,” caused “a sensation” on its publication.) Jean Stein’s “Edie: American Girl,” edited by George Plimpton, a foundational work of oral history and an international best seller, took Sedgwick’s ambitions, struggles and triumphs seriously, as have, in Nico’s case, several biographies and documentaries placing the musician at the unsteady center of the zeitgeist. More recently, the transgender actress and icon Candy Darling, another of Leamer’s subjects, was the focus of Cynthia Carr’s exquisite biography. And Blake Gopnik’s “Warhol” hardly skimped on the Superstars over its more than 900 pages.

Leamer wants depth but sacrifices it for breadth. Dipping in and out of so many lives in such a slim book yields the kind of surface treatment and repetitive clichés that might work as provocation in a Warhol screen print but make for a prose style unlikely to be anyone’s cup of soup. Each woman is introduced with a few sentences: One is “sophisticated beyond her years,” another “game for almost anything,” and another the product of “decidedly humble circumstances.” Holzer has a “party pooper of a husband.” Valerie Solanas is “deadly serious” about killing Warhol. Nico is judged “statuesque” twice in the same paragraph. She is “transcendently beautiful,” and a page later trades on her “transcendent beauty.” Warhol fares no better. At a party he is “like a Roomba, constantly sweeping the room, picking up useful scraps.”

Leamer is undeniably excellent at setting a scene, especially a louche one. He knows just when to have someone wonder if he’s caught crabs from a couch or a crotch. And Leamer is very good on rich people playing at being disheveled, tuned to the comic possibilities of that particular brand of tourism. (Holzer, of Florida real estate wealth, announces after seeing the Stones for the first time that “they’re all from the lower classes. … There is no class anymore. Everyone is equal.” Leamer adds that Holzer’s “maid and butler might have disagreed.”) Nearly every page has at least one great sleazy anecdote or pinch of gossip.

The problem is that so many of these scenes, however expertly set, are variations on the same stale theme of boomers getting up to wild stuff because the times they were a-changin’. Does anyone still need reminding that “the ’60s was a decade of radical political and cultural dissent”? Or that it was once considered shocking that a high-culture figure such as Rudolf Nureyev could go straight from a performance of “Swan Lake” to dancing “to rock ’n’ roll in a nightclub wearing dungarees. Dungarees! Not a suit and tie like some uptight New York businessman”? Reading this book felt akin to being trapped in an endless Time-Life loop of jingle jangle mornings, lazy Sunday afternoons and warm San Franciscan nights, the author providing the stentorian voice-over as the usual footage rolls by: Bob Dylan “would soon emerge as the poetic troubadour of the ’60s”; Brian Jones, “addicted to drugs and sex … was on a short road to an early death”; Jim Morrison, “a troubadour of the counterculture … wrote poetic lyrics that chronicled the lives of his generation.”

Such minor sins might have been forgiven had I ultimately gleaned some deep or unforeseen insight into the lives of the book’s subjects — a group that includes Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Berlin and other Factory figures — or, failing that, into Andy Warhol’s work. But I got neither. Nor was I convinced by the whopping claim that “without his Superstars, Warhol might never have become a world-celebrated artist.”

Meeting these 10 historical actors in roughly chronological order as they enter Warhol’s life, one has a view of the artist and his milieu that actually narrows rather than widens. Warhol, a shape-shifter so manic and intense that he could slide into several personas in the span of a single season, is here reduced to a necessarily static figure so that the women can bounce off him. Which is fine as a narrative strategy, but then not much happens to the women, either. As each one flickers into view, her upbringing (often troubled) is dutifully covered before she provides some service to Warhol — as entertainment, as emotional consort, as visual material, as key holder to Park Avenue penthouses — and then fades out to make room for the next one. (Sedgwick is the exception, a frequent and always beguiling presence; Solanas, the would-be assassin, and not one of the 10 Superstars, stands out as foil rather than helpmeet, but appears only briefly.)

Rarely is there any sense of genuine collaboration or exchange. The book’s subtitle gives away the game: In the end, these women of varied backgrounds, with their respective dreams and desires, are all here to play the same passive role — to be inevitably and unsurprisingly “destroyed by the Factory fame machine.”

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Washington Post’s Turnaround On Its Opinion Pages Is Returning Journalism To Its Partisan Roots − But Without The Principles

BY JOSEPH JONES

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MEDIA

ETHICS AND LAW AT REED COLLEGE
OF MEDIA, WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY

Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest person and owner of The Washington Post, announced in February 2025 significant changes to the editorial pages of his Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper.

The editorial section, also called the opinion section, is where editors and contributors with a deep and broad understanding of the latest news offer their analysis of the day’s issues. This content is distinct from the fact-based news reporting of the outlet’s everyday journalists.

Both kinds of content serve the public interest. Journalists report news to inform the public, while editors and opinion writers analyze and explain news, putting facts into a larger context to aid understanding.

At the Post, instead of news editors making independent decisions on what to write and the perspectives they should take, Bezos tweeted, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Opinion and analysis in the Post was thus going to limit itself to one particular viewpoint.

As a journalism historian, I analyze how journalism has changed over time. Over the years, the purpose, practices and forms of journalism have evolved.

Bezos’ decision harks back to an earlier time when editors and owners were the same person, and newspapers offered a specific interpretation of the world, not just a neutral report.

Informed opinions and analysis

While editorial writers and opinion columnists offer their opinions, these views are still expected to be grounded in journalistic principles, building from verifiable facts and comprehensively considering context to offer well-reasoned analysis.

Many of today’s news editors and journalists stake their professional reputations on their obligation to truth, independent of special interests or particular ideologies. They pride themselves on reporting and explaining the news without fear or favor.

After Bezos’ announcement, editorial page editor and veteran journalist David Shipley resigned from his position. Shipley told his staff he was stepping down “after reflection on how I can best move forward in the profession that I love.”

Journalists and media critics from across the political spectrum read Bezos’ editorial policy change as going against the tradition of a paper that long prided itself on editorial independence in the name of public service. Historically, the newspaper’s opinion section offered a range of views on a variety of issues.

Limiting the newspaper’s opinion section to a single viewpoint, critics argue, doesn’t seem to align with the Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as it stifles public discussion and purposefully turns off some of the lights.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told the Guardian, “If you’re trying to advance the cause of democracy, then you allow for public debate, which is what democracy is all about.”

Putting all of this in historical context can help illuminate Bezos’ decision as well as the current state of American media.

Opinionated early American journalism

At the nation’s founding, the very first newspapers were highly partisan, supporting and receiving much of their funding from particular political parties and government subsidies. Newspapers were small operations where editors, owners, writers and typesetters were usually all the same person.

As the country and its political direction were just forming, these editor-owners felt a public obligation and duty to stake out a clear political position. There were no standards of journalistic neutrality; editor-owners framed news reports, wrote columns and published other people’s opinions based on their own particular viewpoints.

Editors wrote passionately, using language that suggested the fate of the nation was at stake. They were also principled and willing to criticize their own parties if they thought it warranted. And because they were transparent about their views, readers responded by gravitating to their preferred newspapers. Consequently, the number of newspapers in the U.S. increased from 35 in 1783 to 1,200 by 1833. Historians have thus argued that the early United States was a “nation of newspaper readers.”

Unlike modern notions of journalistic impartiality, if a newspaper didn’t support a political party or remained neutral, it was dismissed by readers as either lacking morals or being too stupid to form an opinion.

As newspapers of the early republic developed from reporting recycled news from other sources to guiding public discussion, the editorial thus emerged as a short opinion essay separate from reports on local speeches or foreign news.

Fact-based journalism and informed analysis

For various reasons, the partisan press gave way to a journalism that attempted wider appeal. By 1900, many news outlets aimed for impartiality and neutrality.

By the 1920s, most journalists embraced the ideals of objectivity, the notion that journalists should only report facts.

Interestingly, this led to a growth in editorials, opinion columns and news analysis.

Opinion columns written by journalists provided interpretive frameworks for readers to understand the meaning of news events. One such journalist-commentator was Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), a political analyst who wrote a number of influential columns, including a piece infamously viewed as a catalyst for Japanese internment during World War II.

Such content provided journalists a means to show their independence from the powerful. Journalists could commit themselves to truth and verifiable facts while still asserting their independent role to contextualize news, explain its implications and guide the conversations necessary for democracy.

Research has shown that such opinion-based news content can influence what citizens and media outlets prioritize as important, as well as how policymakers approach certain issues.

Today, especially with the increase in partisan television, radio and internet outlets, there is no shortage of opinion-based news and analysis.

As long as people stay empathetic and open to others with different experiences, this is not inherently bad for democracy. Problems arise, however, when opinionated news outweighs fact-based reporting and people begin to mistrust all reporting they do not agree with, a psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias.

In today’s digital world, everyone can broadcast or publish their opinion, whereas fact-based reporting takes time and resources. While news analysis and thoughtful opinion can generate important social conversations and help citizens understand news, too much opinion that isn’t grounded in facts can also lead to a general atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. This spells trouble for the good-faith understanding, open dialogue and mutual trust so vital to democracy.

Profiting from polarization

Polling data suggests Americans are more divided than ever.

Perhaps Washington Post owner Bezos is simply responding to the public’s documented preference for partisanship over truth or to the profitability of partisan news.

But as a matter of context, there is a difference between the principled partisans of the early republic, the professional analysts of the 20th century, and an owner who demands his media outlet’s opinions should be limited to his preferences.

When he purchased The Washington Post in 2013, Bezos said the newspaper would not change and that “the paper’s duty will remain to its reader and not to the private interests of its owners.”

In this latest move, he has signaled that his private interest is a priority, at least for the editorial section. This limits the perspectives the Post-reading public can encounter and restricts the free marketplace of ideas. So when a Post journalist of 40 years wrote a column opposing Bezos’ editorial decision, her bosses refused to publish it.

Apparently, light criticism was not a “personal liberty” afforded a longtime employee. With her beloved employer not even willing to discuss the column – discussion being the cornerstone of deliberative democracy – the veteran journalist resigned.

In the current media environment, organizations and people who don’t participate in news production or share its values can purchase journalistic outlets and alter their standards and practices. As a result, principled journalists may decide to leave rather than compromise their mission of public service.

Ultimately, Bezos is being transparent. It is thus up to the American people to decide on the kind of journalism and pursuit of truth they desire. It’s worth noting that tens of thousands of canceled subscriptions have already begun to make that decision clear.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Mainstream Media Faces A Credibility Crisis – My Journalism Research Shows How The News Can Still Serve The Public

BY ANITA VARMA

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR,

SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM,

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

“The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process,” the polling firm Gallup concluded in a 2024 analysis.

Despite news organizations’ pledges to provide fact-based reporting, and ongoing investments to build trust, people across the political spectrum in the U.S. are unconvinced of mainstream media’s self-described credibility.

The category “mainstream media” refers to flagship national newspapers like The New York Times, cable news channels like CNN and Fox News and news networks like ABC or NBC and their local affiliates. Despite deepening partisan divides in the U.S, Pew Internet Research has found that this definition is consistent across Republicans and Democrats.

Mainstream media’s credibility has been diminishing for years. But the trend has attracted renewed attention from news leaders and analysts since the 2024 presidential election, when many outlets again misjudged the electoral chances of President-elect Donald Trump.

I am a professor of journalism and media, and I believe my research offers a way forward for journalism to build credibility: solidarity journalism.

What is solidarity journalism?

Solidarity, as I define it, is a commitment to people’s basic dignity that translates into action.

Since 2014, my academic research has focused on the role of solidarity in journalism that represents marginalized communities – like people who are homeless, face food insecurity or are the targets of violence. These are groups who cannot simply opt out of the conditions placing their survival and safety at stake.

Journalists who cover these populations and topics accurately, I find, approach their reporting in ways that set them apart from the majority of news coverage. Specifically, when reporting in solidarity, journalists use newsworthiness criteria, sourcing tactics and framing styles that are distinct from those typically used by mainstream media.

Few journalists, by the way, use the label of “solidarity” to describe their practices. Instead, my research shows, solidarity emerges in how some journalists do their reporting.

What is newsworthy?

The first question journalists are trained to ask themselves before proceeding is: “Is this news?” In other words, what makes a topic worth covering right now?

Journalists usually know their editors will be looking for a few simple criteria. A strong story pitch usually includes novelty and people with institutional power. It feels important when weighed against other events happening at the same time.

Often, a political leader’s comments are what make an issue newsworthy, such as when President Joe Biden apologized in October 2024 for the inhumane conditions in Native American boarding schools run by the U.S. federal government until the 1960s.

When reporting in solidarity, however, journalists find stories newsworthy because people’s basic survival and safety are at stake.

A story published by Outlier Media on March 8, 2023, illustrates this approach. Headlined “Detroit tenants are organizing and making bigger demands,” the piece focuses on tenants’ struggles for simple needs like functioning sewage systems, hot water and electricity.

The president may never issue an apology for a city neglecting its poorest residents. And journalists reporting in solidarity don’t wait for elite recognition. They believe that when people’s basic dignity is at risk, it’s a topic worth reporting.

Handling of sources

Sources are the people, institutions and data that journalists use to provide evidence in reporting.

In the worst cases, marginalized sources describe reporters as hostile, transactional and extractive. Such journalists “parachute in” to cover a big story and grab quotes and wrenching photos of tragedies. Then, they disappear as abruptly as they arrived.

Journalists reporting in solidarity do their jobs differently.

They show up on the scene of an unfolding issue not only for the story but for the people affected. They spend time listening to people experiencing the issue and return after a story has run to continue the conversation – particularly when the struggles persist.

Reframing the narrative

Framing in journalism refers to how a story is told. It isn’t possible for journalists to include every possible source or every aspect of an issue. Frames shape who and what fits into a story.

Commonly, news framing focuses on how officials define an issue.

Take, for example, an ABC7News story about homelessness from July 25, 2024. Headlined “Bay Area mayors respond to Gov. Newsom’s order to remove homeless encampments,” it is framed around how officials reacted to a mandate to remove homeless encampments from city streets – not on the residents of those camps.

Solidarity framing prioritizes the people who are living an issue that places their basic dignity at stake due to factors beyond personal circumstance or bad luck. Solidarity framing defines issues based on what people experiencing these struggles know – and know they need – through firsthand experience.

A solidarity framing of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to remove homeless encampments sounds like this: “‘We gotta be somewhere’: Homeless Californians react to Newsom’s crackdown.”

This story, published in CalMatters on Aug. 12, 2024, accounts for what people affected by tent bans are experiencing firsthand. It illustrates the impossible situation facing people who have nowhere else to go.

In solidarity framing, official sources aren’t judge and jury. Instead, marginalized people’s direct accounts shape coverage of what they are going through.

True public service

My interviews and interactions with journalists since 2014 find that a subset of mainstream journalists quietly do solidarity reporting already. They tell grounded stories of marginalized people’s struggles and prioritize those firsthand accounts over the messaging promoted by people in power.

I believe this model should be central to how journalism envisions its purpose and public service. And I’m not alone.

Black people have for centuries called for more factual reporting that reflects their actual lives, because mainstream news has long criminalized and dehumanized their communities. Trans people have similarly called for more on-the-ground reporting as a way for journalism to improve its credibility.

Many other groups, from progressive activists to conservatives, have indicated that they would find a solidarity reporting approach more credible than current reporting practices.

Mainstream media “could do a way better job of bringing in … folks who are actually on the ground experiencing this in real time and who were fighting to stop this in the first place,” one social justice activist told me in 2023.

Conservatives, meanwhile, object to what they see as distorted coverage of their communities.

“There’s a lot of different kinds of conservatives, and they just lump them all together as the right-wing extremists,” said one conservative news reader in a study by the Center for Media Engagement.

Through solidarity practices, mainstream media has a chance to achieve what it has always claimed to contribute to society: truthful reporting based on what is happening on the ground, to real people, in real time – and with real impact.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE