by Kristin L. Gustafson, University of Washington Bothell
When I encourage students in my classroom to interrogate biased journalism practices and challenge media norms, I get a mixture of responses. Some students throw up their arms and say it is impossible to get it right and so why try. They easily step away from a producer-of- journalism role, a decision that has fewer consequences if they have the privileged perspective of the dominant media. Other students push back, defending a journalist’s right to go into public spaces unrestricted and publish without worry of offending. This perspective assumes press freedom trumps all and should remain unquestioned. And still other students are frustrated that the discussion has gone, once again, in a direction of either-or thinking and missed the original point.
As journalism educators and media historians, we can help students crack open myths about press freedom. This is especially relevant as news headlines echo tensions in our understanding of protest, assembly, diversity, and the marketplace of ideas. We can offer students tools to interrogate freedom historically, politically, constitutionally, and materially. We can provide examples of past media practices and consider how those apply today.
A recent New York Times article brought press freedom to view. “With Diversity Comes Intensity in Amherst Free Speech Debate” described how hundreds of students at Amherst College protested racial injustice during a sit-in and drafted demands for the university administration. One of the Amherst Uprising’s demands was that students displaying posters that read “All Lives Matter” and “Free Speech” get racial and cultural competency training. The first poster was a familiar challenge to the movement’s message of “Black Lives Matter.” The second poster appealed to press freedom as a defense for any speech and echoed how counterprotesters at the university characterized other Amherst Uprising demands as attempts to “sanitize history,” restrict “political freedoms,” and repress a “free market of ideas.”
In analyzing the construction of the Times article itself, I can see tactics familiar in historical media coverage of protest and marginalized people. Instead of explaining the protesters’ concerns that the posters were insensitive to students who faced racial harassment and death threats, the message of the posters— which prioritized press freedom and presented it as the victim amid the protests— was inserted into the article without elaboration. In contrast, the politically aware and organized student activists who achieved success—including the hiring of a chief diversity officer—were described in ways that minimized their action, such as their drafting demands “in the heat of the moment” and conducting a sit-in as “a confessional.”
Earlier that same month, actions on the University of Missouri echoed themes of press freedom. Football team members boycotted and a studentled a hunger strike criticized the administration’s response to several racially charged incidents, many of them carried out by white students. Protesters called for and eventually got a president’s resignation. In the midst of this tangible success, free speech moved to the foreground when a university professor blocked photojournalist Tim Tai from protesters. Tai claimed his right to access based on the First Amendment; protesters waved signs that read: “No Media, Safe Space.” He appealed to them saying he and the protesters shared claims to freedoms of speech and assembly.
Terrell Jermaine Starr, a New York City-based freelance journalist who writes about U.S. and Russian politics, wrote a Washington Post column acknowledging that the news photographer could legally enter the space at the publicly funded university. “But that shouldn’t be the end of this story,” Starr said. “We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.”
As a journalist, Starr sympathized with the frustration of being denied access to people or places essential to a story. However, covering these student protesters is different from covering public officials. The students were concerned about racism on campus and insensitivity encountered in news media, he said. “Then, in the noisy conversation about First Amendment rights that Tai elicited, journalists compounded the insult by drowning out the very message of the students Tai was covering.”
As journalism and media educators, we can help students refocus the conversation as they unpack meanings, origins, and context of the freedom being espoused. For example, our pedagogy oftentimes links U.S. freedoms to the Bill of Rights and Constitution. This is a place we can roll up our sleeves to radically examine the contradictions of U.S. freedom and the un-freedoms of black people. Students examining key terms might explore how “facts” operate, how work practices prioritize some reported truths and hide others, and when norms such as objectivity are applied unevenly.
Melita Garza, an assistant professor for Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, uses a classroom unit on alternative media as one tool to challenge assumptions of inclusion and fairness in media coverage. Early in the quarter her students learn theories and concepts—such as inclusion, roles, control, and framing. Then they learn that alternative media were launched in the absence of a true marketplace of ideas.
“Even so,” Garza said during a discussion about her class lesson, some students still struggle with this “to understand the need for a separate, independently owned media and often classify it merely [as] ‘propaganda.’” Her students investigate a particular historical event by looking up mainstream coverage and alternative media coverage. They conduct searches—which become scavenger hunts—using library databases or the Internet. For example, her students might look at news coverage in the Hearst daily Chicago Examiner and the black weekly Chicago Defender concerning a July 1909 incident involving U.S. Senator William J. Stone of Missouri and a Pullman porter. They record observations about differences, apply relevant theory and share via a research-think-pair-share activity. They use the different lenses to analyze and understand how the events were “seen, experienced and chronicled.” Her students see firsthand how dominant, often white-owned and mainstream, media “dictate how race, ethnicity, gender and ‘others’ are understood”; then they consider how these manifest today.
As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs to share with one another. As teaching chair, I continue to invite you to share your best practices that encourage pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice. Send them to me at gustaf13@uw.edu.