Lewis Raven Wallace - The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity

LEWIS RAVEN WALLACE

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2019 by Lewis Wallace

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58917-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66743-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226667430.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wallace, Lewis Raven, author.

Title: The view from somewhere: undoing the myth of journalistic objectivity / Lewis Raven Wallace.

Description: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019014782 | ISBN 9780226589176 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226667430 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: JournalismObjectivityUnited States. | Journalistic ethicsUnited States. | Social movementsPress coverageUnited States. | Social justicePress coverageUnited States.

Classification: LCC PN4784.O24 W35 2019 | DDC 302.23dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014782

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Ten days after Donald Trumps inauguration in January 2017, I adjusted my tie inside the unisex bathroom at an Au Bon Pain in Midtown Manhattan, messed with my salt-and-pepper hair (I was thirty-three, but my job doing daily news was aging me quickly), and tucked a cigarette behind my ear. I was walking the path of so many journalists before me, on my way to get fired. Fifteen minutes later, I calmly hung my coat over a cheap metal chair at a bistro on Lexington Avenue where I was meeting the chief executive of American Public Medias Marketplace, the national radio show where Id worked as an on-air journalist for the past eight months. I sat down next to the shows VP, Deborah Clark, while a woman from HR perched nervously across the table. I had told myself I wouldnt cry or even flinch.

I knew Clark was firing me because of a blog post Id written the previous week, questioning the role of objectivity in journalism. After posting it to my personal Medium blog, Id gotten a call from the higher-ups in Los Angeles, asking me not to come in the next day. Initially I took the blog post down. But then, overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, I changed my mind, reposted it, sent a long explanatory email to Marketplace management, and waited. An email on Friday afternoon let me know Id be meeting the boss Monday morning.

That weekend felt unreal, in my life and in the country: the new president, Donald J. Trump, had just introduced the so-called Muslim ban, and people rushed to airports around the country to protest. I was out interviewing people as the crowds gathered at LaGuardia, and later watched people dance in the streets when a federal court paused the ban with an injunction.

The previous weekend had been wild, too. I had taken the bus to DC, seen the middling crowds for the inauguration of the forty-fifth president of the United States and the huge crowds for the Womens March, stopping up the streets. But Trump insisted, on his first full day as president, that his had been the biggest crowd ever at an inauguration. Sean Spicer, his press secretary, pushed the point. The Sunday morning after the giant march on Washington, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway was asked on national television about the aerial photos showing far more people at Obamas 2009 inauguration than Trumps in 2017. She said the administration was just offering alternative facts. I came back to work early Monday to reruns of that clip: alternative facts had entered the lexicon.

My mind was churning with fear about how journalists would face this new reality. On my blog a few days later, I suggested that maybe the best response to alternative facts was not to keep doing exactly what we had been doing last week, and the week before, and five years ago.

The post was titled Objectivity Is Dead, and Im Okay with It. I wrote about my experience as a transgender journalist, never neutral on the subject of my own humanity and rights, even as they were being debated in both sides journalism. I suggested that rather than pretending there is no why to what we do as journalists, we should claim our values, standing firmly against those who propose to chip away at free speech, civil rights, and government transparency. How else could we help hold back a rising tide of white supremacy and transphobia, the normalization of tyranny? I knew there was a long history of objectivity changing to accommodate the shifting status quo, and I wanted a journalism that rigorously pursued verifiable facts while claiming a moral stance, fighting back against racism and authoritarianism. And I thought that might be a way to rebuild trust with our audiences.

When I posted the blog, I knew it might be controversial. What I didnt know was how dramatically it would change the trajectory of my life, as my own story became part of a tense national conversation over truth and journalism. I didnt know it would lead me, eventually, to this book: a dive into the history of objectivity in US journalism and the stories of people who have challenged and changed how we think about truth in the news.

...

At the bistro that Monday morning, Deborah Clark, the boss, seemed nervous. She had clearly prepared her speech, maybe during the flight from headquarters in LA. She let me know that my blog post and subsequent communication had made it clear that, as she put it, I didnt want to do the kind of journalism we do at Marketplace. She said she believes in a clear line between journalism and activism, and that I had crossed that line. By way of demonstration, she told a story: When she was in college studying journalism, shed been an activist around the issue of apartheid. Clark is white and British and would have been in college at the University of California, Berkeley, sometime in the 1980s, the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. She told me she had a professor who said shed need to make a choice: stop doing anti-apartheid activism, or abandon her desire for a career in journalism. Shed chosen journalism, she said to me with a straight face, as if leaving the anti-apartheid struggle was something a white person ought to be proud of in retrospect.

As far as I know, there hadnt been any audience complaints about the blog post or about my bias as a reporter. Still, Clark fired me on the spot, effective immediately, with an offer of two weeks severance in exchange for agreeing not to speak publicly about what had happened. My health coverage ended two days later. I had been the first and only transgender person to work on air at the show, and one of the only trans people working at any national broadcast outlet.

I wandered off into the streets of Manhattan in shock, and the next day I put the measly severance offer in the recycling bin and went public with my story in another blog post. My goal was to expose what I saw as a troubling double standard in which cisgender white men are treated as inherently objective even when theyre openly biased, while the rest of us are expected to remain neutral even when our lives or safety are under threat. I saw this playing out in real time: