CounterSpin interview with Alicia Bell and Collette Watson on media reparations.
Janine Jackson: The 1968 Kerner Commission report didn’t just say that US journalists were mistelling the reality of recent civil unrest in Newark and Detroit and elsewhere. They declared that that coverage was only part of a broader media failure to “report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders, and the underlying problems of race relations.”
And the report linked that failure to the industry’s abysmal record in seeking out, hiring, training and promoting Black people.
For those that remember Kerner, that’s where it seemed to end. But actually, the report didn’t say more Black journalists were the answer. It said that affirmative action was a necessary part of the process of de-centering US reporting’s white male view.
It wasn’t just about making newsrooms look different. It was about changing the definition of news as being only, or primarily, about white men, and about doing that for the good of everybody.
The Kerner report’s themes resound in the experience of Elizabeth Montgomery, a former Arizona Republic reporter and the subject of the new short film Black in the Newsroom.
The film and the actions around it are part of a project called Media 2070 that aims at acknowledging, reconciling and repairing harms the US media system has caused and continues to cause to the Black community.
Alicia Bell is a co-creator and founding director of the Media 2070: Media Reparations Project, and also current director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, housed within Borealis Philanthropy.
Collette Watson is director of Media 2070 and vice president of cultural strategy at the group Free Press.
Welcome, Alicia Bell and Collette Watson to CounterSpin.
Collette Watson: Thank you.
Alicia Bell: Thanks so much for having us, Janine.
JJ: Well, to either of you, I would say obviously Elizabeth Montgomery is special—you know, we all are, but she’s really special—but what is there about her experience that made you think, this is representative enough to hold it up, to use it to highlight some things that we need to talk about? What made you want to tell her story?
CW: I guess I’ll start us off and say that Elizabeth really was not only representative of many people’s experiences, but also very courageous in her willingness to be transparent.
And so often one of the greatest barriers to our ability to shift these negative dynamics, these dynamics of anti-Blackness in newsrooms, is the reticence that surrounds, or the taboo that surrounds, talking about issues of compensation or representation or bias, or just experiences of anti-Blackness within newsrooms. For good reason, because we understand that there’s often the threat of retribution, or losing one’s livelihood, and other kinds of repercussions.
But in Elizabeth’s case, she was in that tradition of brave truth tellers in our community. She was willing to be very upfront about what she was experiencing. And I felt that, for us, it was important to honor that courage, and to help amplify her story.
JJ: What were some of the things, some of the elements of her experience, that had resonance for you, or that you thought would have resonance for other Black reporters who’ve tried to do the work within these “mainstream” institutions.
CW: Absolutely. Alicia works with a lot of media makers every day, and I’m sure will have thoughts. For me, it was the fact that she was doing such great work. And there’s a quote in the film where she says, “I’m making y’all look real good out in the street.”
And I love the way she said it, because so much of any newspaper or media organization’s ability to exist is its relationship with its community and its reputation.
And Elizabeth was covering these incredible stories of the Black bookstore, the only one in Arizona. We talk about that. She was covering this wonderful Black woman resident of the greater Phoenix area whose ancestors were among the first people transported to this land as enslaved African folks.
And that’s just a tiny fraction of the coverage she was providing, and really enabling her newsroom to represent the community in a way it had not, prior to her taking on that reporter role.
And despite that stellar work, despite that real community impact that was bringing to life what this newsroom says it wanted to be about, despite all of that, she was really being mistreated. And I think that that’s an experience that a lot of Black folks in media can identify with.
AB: One thing I’ll add to that is that I met Elizabeth when she was a reporter working at a newsroom in Wilmington, North Carolina. And so when I met her is when she moved and went to another newsroom in Arizona, and I was able to introduce her to Collette and they were able to meet; she had similar experiences.
And the fact that this story of her being a Black journalist who was doing excellent community-rooted reporting, answering questions that folks had, sharing stories so that people could see themselves in the coverage, and lifting up issues that were previously not being lifted up, that was something that she was doing in North Carolina, and it’s something that she was doing in Arizona.
And the fact that in both of those places and spaces, that she was undervalued and underpaid, I think is indicative of the fact that this is not a one-newsroom fix issue. It means that it’s not a regional issue. It’s not just specific to her. And it’s something that carries across the United States, across a variety of Black experiences that folks have going into newsrooms.
And the other thing I’ll add is that we also have data and information to contextualize this story within, right? We have some salary data that shows that Black folks, and especially Black women, are underpaid.
We have the work that Meredith Clark was doing recently with the journalism and diversity surveying work, where folks were just not responding and sharing their demographic information, or sharing salary information, or anything like that.
And so we also knew that this was only a microcosm of a larger issue, because we were able to situate it within data that was existing, and data that folks didn’t want to release, likely because it tells a really terrible story about how Black folks are treated and valued within journalism.
JJ: Back in, I guess it was 1993, Jill Nelson wrote in the book Volunteer Slavery, she talked about how, when she was at the Washington Post, she wanted to tell stories about the Black community that she suspected and worried would be done less well if somebody else did them. And then at the same time, she was irritated when anything would happen involving Black people, and everyone would kind of look at her like: “So this is you, right? You’re going to do this one, right?”
She wanted to do right by her community, but she also wanted to do any kind of story and be a Black reporter doing it, you know? And it was about that dual or even multiple layering of work that Black journalists have to do within these organizations.
And that’s why hiring and retention are not the same thing, right, why folks will take jobs but not stay?
CW: Absolutely. And all of that plays into a sort of dehumanization that folks experience in newsrooms. Another reason that we honed in on Elizabeth’s story was because, around the time that she was publicly testifying about her experience, a study was released by the NewsGuild that showed that 14 different Gannett newsrooms were underpaying women and journalists of color, by as much as $27,000 annually, in comparison to their white male colleagues.
So you’re underpaid and you’re experiencing this sort of hyper-visible hyper-invisibility in the newsroom, similar to what you were describing with Jill Nelson.
The experience of that, and also not having the leadership that’s needed to ensure that folks’ full humanity is being recognized, that there’s care in the newsroom during those traumatic storytelling experiences—all of that becomes very dehumanizing, and therefore folks leave the field.
And Carla Murphy has done incredible work around that, which we touch on in the film, with her “Leavers Survey.”
And what that results in is really a lack of Black leadership, of folks of color in leadership positions, and people really leaving at the mid-career point, just when they would have been able to step into those leadership positions, and really maybe change the direction of a newsroom.
And so when we lose folks at that mid-career point, we lose so much more. We lose the ability for these newsrooms to evolve.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, we have seen some efforts toward what is forever being called “reckoning,” but outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has this “A More Perfect Union” project headed by Errin Haines that is examining systemic racism in, in particular, institutions that are rooted in Philly.
But we see outlets around the country at least saying that they believe that they have a responsibility to examine their own institutional racism. I’m not exactly sure what I make of it.
I wonder what your thoughts are about the seriousness, or even what would be the proof in the pudding, of this self-reckoning that we see some media outlets at least saying that they’re doing right now.
AB: I think that it does garner a lot of feelings and a lot of emotions. When I think about the work of media reparations, I think about something that our colleague Diamond Hardiman lifts up quite frequently, and Collette lifts this up as well, that reparations is already happening.
It’s already been seeded and it’s already blooming. And so the way that I understand that, and the way that we understand media reparations and reparations more broadly, is that it requires at least four kinds of actions.
It does require reckoning, and that kind of knowledge, study, publication. It requires acknowledgement, to say, “This is what we did and it was harmful, and it did this, or it had this impact.”
But the thing that we don’t see happening right now in this journalism reckoning space, and more broadly in any sort of space and place where we see folks commissioning studies around systemic racism or racist histories or anything, we don’t see the next two pieces, which is accountability and restitution.
So accountability being: How do I make up for this harm now? How do I heal it now? How do I stop it now?
And then the restitution part of: How do I make sure that it doesn’t have soil to grow in in the future?
Very often, we see folks stop after the reckoning and after the acknowledgement, and they’ll say like, “We did the thing: We published the report, we published the information. We apologized, even.”
But if there’s none of that in conjunction with stopping the harm and disrupting the soil that the seeds grew in in the first place, to ensure that it doesn’t happen into the future, then it’s not enough.
So I know that reparations have been seeded, and I know that reparations are already blooming and are already coming, because I see the reckoning and the acknowledgement work happening.
But I also know that we have so much more work to do and so much more to fight for, because we have not had anywhere near an adequate amount of accountability and restitution into the future.
And I see that in journalism, but I see that more broadly across a lot of different kinds of reparation work.
JJ: Absolutely. Reparations are so often presented as backward-looking, instead of as a generative idea, as an idea about the future. And Alicia, I know when we spoke back in 2020, in the midst of public protest after the police murder of George Floyd, we were saying how people are talking about building relationships between police and community.
And you were saying, “Well, what about building relationships between media and community?” That needs to also be a real relationship, with real accountability.
And so, you’ve just done it to talk about what reparations might look like, but just the idea, if you want to say any more, either of you, about how it’s a forward-looking, generative thing. It’s about things changing, now and in the future. And it’s a very positive, joyful potential thing about dreaming, and about forging a shared future.
CW: Absolutely it is. That’s why we named our project Media 2070. We understood that 50 years ago with the Kerner report, and 50 years before that was the Chicago Race Relations Commission and the report it issued after the Chicago race riots, that we were in an every-50-years cycle of unrest followed by analysis, that in each case honed in on media as a key aspect of the systemic oppression that Black folks experience in this country.
And so we want to break that cycle, and in 50 years, we want be in a time when we have truly transformed our media, and created a future in which there is abundant resources for Black folks to be able to control our own narratives, from ideation through creation into production and even out into distribution.
And that is a future that is not only abundant with Black narratives, power and control, but also with Black media makers having the resources and the care and support that’s needed in order to tell stories in ways that are truthful and nuanced, and really contribute to our shared truths as a society.
And so when we look toward 2070, it’s not that we’re waiting until then. We’re starting now. As Alicia said, the seeds have been planted, and we understand reparations are inevitable, and we want to know what is the media system that gets us to that future. And that’s the journey that we’re on together.
AB: I really appreciate when you’re lifting up that it’s a joyful thing, that there’s a lot of jubilance and healing that’s there in reparations, because we do understand that to be true. We understand it to be a practice of creating a culture and a society that is more caring for everybody, that is more nimble and responsive and accountable when harm happens, when conflicts happen.
This is not an expectation of perfection, it is not an expectation that there will never be harm again, but it is an expectation that we do better, and that we maintain a certain level of buoyancy.
And as someone who’s raising children, I have never met, and I’m sure these people exist, but I have never met a single parent, across races, across ethnicities, who does not want to raise caring children.
And yet, somehow we allow, we are co-creators of, we are complicit in maintaining a society that does not care for all people.
And so reparation is really looking at what are the infrastructures, the institutions, the policies, the practices that we need to have that care be permeable and felt by everyone.
And what I know is that when all of our folks are cared for, and all of our folks are able to navigate things, to navigate conflict nimbly, have access to joy, to leisure, to work that is serving, work that is fulfilling, that that’s a better society for everyone.
JJ: Finally, let me just say to you both, Black in the Newsroom I know is not just a film, but an opportunity, an opening, for conversation. I think that’s how you see it.
And I wonder if you could tell us about how Phoenix went with the debut, and how you hope to use this film going forward as you travel with it around the country.
CW: You know, thank you for asking. Phoenix was beautiful. We had such a lovely room and conversation after the film screening, we had a panel of organizers and artists and journalists who really talked in a real way with each other about the challenges of being Black in the newsroom, and also the challenges of connecting and telling Black stories, despite so many of the institutional barriers that we face in just trying to exist, much less be in community with each other.
And I think that as we go around the country with this project—we’ve been privileged to be selected for a few film festivals and invited to a few university campuses and things like that. As we move around with this project, it is definitely an invitation, Janine, I’m so glad you put it that way, into extended conversation between community members and the journalists, who are also members of their communities, and for folks to understand that the solution we’re offering is solidarity.
Because we often get asked, “What’s the solution? What’s next? How do we solve it all?” It’s solidarity between community members and organizers who are agitating for that future in which everyone has the care they need, that beautiful future Alicia just described, in solidarity with journalists and other media makers and artists.
And for us to be co-creating this shared future and the narratives that will get us there, because we understand that narratives and myths of Black inferiority have been baked into our media system and its practices since the very, very beginning, as we outline in our Media 2070 essay.
But the reparations framework invites us, as Alicia so beautifully laid out, to acknowledge and reckon with that history, and then to go about truly building that shared future.
And we believe that the Black in the Newsroom conversation, and the lens of understanding the unique experiences of Black journalists, and the care that they deserve as they try to tell Black stories, brings us into a larger conversation of how we can understand our solidarity as we forge that future that’s ripe with reparations, and the just media that we deserve.
So it’s an entry point into the world of Media 2070, into a beautiful shared future. And, really, it’s been an honor to help tell Elizabeth’s story in a way that invites us all into being in relationship and building with one another.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alicia Bell and Collette Watson. For more information on Media 2070 and Black in the Newsroom, you can check out the website MediaReparations.org. Alicia Bell and Collette Watson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AB: Thank you.
CW: Thank you.