Confronting racism in journalism
Is the problem the chicken or the egg?
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
There’s been a disgusting, back-room adage in journalism about who is worth what in terms of coverage. I’m not remembering the exact phrasing, but the gist of it is that one dead American is worth 100 dead Russians is worth 1,000 dead Congolese is worth 1 million dead Bangladeshis. You get the point.
American media is meant to reflect the public it serves, which means a broad swath of ethnicities and races. That’s why the industry talks a lot these days about diversity in the newsroom. (Actually diversifying, on the other hand, is generally slow and hard-won.) The idea is that the lived experiences of people of color, LGBTQ+ people, journalists born outside the U.S., etc. are critical to understanding and covering the issues these communities face.
Journalism is also supposed to give the public important stories it’s not hearing about elsewhere, stories that need amplification. This requires that outlets hire journalists with vast experience within a particular beat.
There need to be reporters and editors who have worked around the world in every imaginable unique corner, and hopefully that converges with hiring a diverse news staff — although often it doesn’t. This is the chicken-and-egg form of racism within media: Journalists with experience are often the ones given the resources and the loudest voice, meaning that white, male journalists have been given the leg-up to access such reporting for many years.
I’ve sat in newsrooms too many times watching what I believe are major stories going underreported.
For instance, when I was working on the live Covid coverage at The New York Times, I watched as the virus in entire swaths of the world went unreported. I may not be Syrian, but having extensively covered the Syrian war for years, I wondered why we’d never done a single piece on Covid in that war zone. Was it really just impossible to get data? Or was there not a big Covid outbreak there? Weren’t these “absences” worthy of noting? To my editor’s credit, she agreed, and I wrote the only story we did on Covid in Syria while I was there.
I’ve also covered the global refugee crisis for many years. So when I heard about a shocking disparity in the rules for seeking asylum in the U.S. between Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, I tackled that in a piece that spelled out preferential treatment for Ukrainians.
As media gadflies have watched the wall-to-wall coverage of the Ukraine war, they’ve compared it to the utter lack of coverage of the war in Syria, or in Mexico, or in Niger, or in Yemen. And now there’s a study to prove how biased we really are in the media, at least at The New York Times, one of the gold standards in the industry.
Researchers from Harvard’s journalism think tank Nieman Lab have taken a look at the difference in coverage at The Times of the wars in Ukraine vs. in Yemen. Nieman’s research, perhaps unsurprisingly, “shows extensive biases in both the scale and tone of coverage. These biases lead to reporting that highlights or downplays human suffering in the two conflicts in a way that seemingly coincides with U.S. foreign policy objectives.”
There are basic differences in numbers: The paper ran 546 stories on Yemen between March 26, 2015, and Nov. 30, 2022, according to Nieman Lab. “Headlines on Ukraine passed that mark in under three months and then doubled it within nine months,” the authors write. Front-page stories, they note, have been ubiquitous with Ukraine — not so much with Yemen.
One of the most interesting findings is that headlines at The Times often assigned blame to strikes in Ukraine, while not making this distinction in attacks within Yemen. (FYI: Editors write the headlines to stories 99 percent of the time — sometimes without the journalist knowing what will top their story. It’s partly why I suggest new journalists write a (temporary) headline at the top of their drafts. It offers a guiding light when the writer loses focus.)
So, take this headline from April 24, 2018: “Yemen Strike Hits Wedding and Kills More Than 20.”
“A reader could easily interpret that as meaning that Yemen rebels were behind the attack rather than the Saudis — as was the case,” the authors write.
“It is hard to imagine a Russian strike on a wedding in Ukraine headlined as ‘Ukraine Strike Hits Wedding and Kills More Than 20.’”
Yes, yes it is.
New York Times headlines about Yemen, Nieman Lab found, “were mostly focused on events, accounting for 64 percent of all headlines. In contrast, headlines on Ukraine involved a greater emphasis on context, accounting for 73 percent of total articles.” Contextualizing stories allow the reader to make up his or her own mind. It’s a critical component of journalism, as is news judgement — it’s what separates bloggers and citizen journalists from journalists who work within an editing system.
Stories can provoke moral outrage, which can lead to action, be it in terms of donations or firepower. So when Russia “is portrayed as a violent, relentless and merciless villain: ‘Russian Forces Pound Civilians…’” readers are offered a chance to be morally outraged. To consider Ukrainians as heroes. Unlike with The Times’s headlines and stories on Yemen. But let’s not think of the right thing as a negative, but as a means to recognize where we’re falling short.
“This moral positioning on the conflict in Ukraine is not necessarily a problem,” Nieman Labs writes. “After all, falsely equating Ukraine’s actions with those of Russia fails to account for Russian aggression, which initiated the armed conflict, as well as Russia’s routine targeting of civilian sites.”
Still, “it is noteworthy that New York Times headlines on Yemen fail to employ similarly condemnatory narratives toward the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen,” the authors write. “This is despite reports produced by human rights organizations, conflict trackers, and international and regional experts that have blamed the coalition for the vast majority of civilian suffering.”
In 2021, I wrote: “Major news outlets (especially American ones) have closed most of their foreign bureaus. The New York Times, which is financially healthier than most of its competitors, only has three bureaus in all of sub-Saharan Africa, and, as far as I know, only a couple more full-time correspondents based there. The one closest to Congo is in Nairobi — a 26-hour drive away.” Even if the staff has grown since, it’s still a travesty.
The name of the game is coverage: Coverage drives attention, which drives donations and aid. So why is one story more worthy of analysis and coverage than another?
Racism. And obliviousness, although I have a hard time swallowing that as an excuse.
For a more nuanced thought, here’s what Nieman Lab writes: “War in Ukraine is clearly seen as more newsworthy to U.S. readers. This double standard may have less to do with the actual events than that the victims are white and ‘relatively European,’ as one CBS News correspondent put it.”
The question is, where lies the racism? Among the news staff or among readers? Both? Does one drive the other?
When I shopped around a book proposal about the yearslong rape of little girls in a village called Kavumu, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, publishers repeatedly said that no one would buy a book about what happened because it was “too dark” a story. I mean, I get it — it’s rough. But so is “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
I’ve been told by many people outside the journalism world that we are driven to write what our ad sales departments tell us. That’s never been my experience. I think it’s more insidious than that. In our need for more likes, more eyeballs, we write what will catch attention. And more often than not, that, absurdly, needs to be about something American readers already care about. Aka white Ukrainians, not Arab or Black Yemenis.
We journalists are in a battle between reporting what matters vs. reporting what sells. But again: Never once in my 20-plus-year career have I ever been told by an editor to write one thing and not another because of sales. At this point, I think we reporters and editors have internalized what gets read and what doesn’t. How are we supposed to publish stories about places and issues Americans don’t care about if it just alienates readers? As much as I wish the Fourth Estate was made up of only selfless gadflies, the reality is that most of us are struggling to make a living.
I don’t know the answer. But I do know that what is happening with world and human rights coverage is insidious.
ADDENDUM: My friend Eric Deggans, NPR’s TV critic and media analyst, and the author of Race-Baiter: How Media Wield Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, had thoughts after reading this piece that I want to share with you:
I think media outlets, especially old-school print outlets like newspapers, say they are focused on serving the public, but actually are focused on the sensibilities of their subscribers and the people they think are their audience. It’s one reason why newspapers in super diverse cities like New York City and Philadelphia can produce some of the most racist reporting. When they think of the average reader/audience member, they are not picturing people of color. And they are probably right.
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My friend who lives in Nigeria has told me of the atrocities that are going on in his country, but very little has been written about what Boko Haram has been doing (even now)--small boys being given a piece of bread and then strapped into a suicide vest and pushed into a church, and women, children, foreigners being beheaded. I understand that The NY Times has to appeal to its larger audience but there have been numerous articles on Trans-- obsessively so, it seems, and few articles on significant issues that are definitely worth knowing about. This cherry picking of news is unfortunate.
Important point you make about how the bias toward what will attract the most attention can unconsciously affect the decisions of journalists and editors.
Almost as if quality journalism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible...