This newsletter is almost four years old, and during that time we have chronicled again and again how research has shown how deeply frustrated many consumers are with news as it exists today. In the U.S., that’s especially true for conservatives who feel alienated by the mainstream media, and thus have abandoned local and national news sources in favor of Fox News and other alternatives.
But they are not the only ones who feel forgotten or misunderstood by journalists. Many immigrants, African-Americans, and other communities report also turning away from traditional news organizations that they find alienating, instead looking to friends and family, ethnic media, and social media influencers to fill the void.
These problems can seem intractable, and, as our featured research article shows, the potential remedies can seem obvious in theory but hard to implement in practice: “Make content inclusive! Listen more! Diversify your newsroom!" But these solutions get subsumed by the daily chaos of economic crises, pandemics, and the like.
That scenario is all too familiar and dispiriting for many newsrooms — but it’s not inevitable, as Sue Robinson and Patrick Johnson illustrate in their newly published article in Journalism Studies, “Rectifying Harm Through Care-Based Practices: How Journalists Might Tend to Disengaged Communities.”
Truly, there is a lot of woe-is-journalism these days — just witness the many media layoffs in January — but Robinson and Johnson offer a compelling dash of evidence-based optimism, at least when it comes to capturing how journalists might learn to listen and engage more proactively, and why doing so might lead to journalists who are “more receptive, flexible, and empathetic to audiences.”
For the research, Robinson and Johnson partnered with Trusting News, which works with news organizations on trust-building in their communities, in asking nine newsrooms to host 78 listening sessions, nearly all involving a journalist talking one-on-one with “disengaged” community members. Roughly half of these community members were white conservatives and the other half were BIPOC individuals. Trusting News provided the participating reporters with a set of open-ended questions to ask in the listening session, with the instruction that the journalist not get defensive at the responses. Questions included: “What do journalists often get wrong about you or about things in your life (interests, demographics, values, beliefs, etc.)?”; “What could local news organizations and journalists do to earn more of your trust?”; and, “Tell me about your experience consuming the news. What does it feel like, and what do you hope to get out of it?”
The researchers wanted to know, first, what people who are disengaged from mainstream news need from journalists for them to be willing to engage with — or even subscribe to — the news brand. Second, using the journalist-conducted listening sessions in combination with follow-up surveys and reflections with reporters and participants, the researchers wanted to understand how these disengaged community members feel that journalists might “cause, relieve, or otherwise negotiate harm in their communities.”
The answers that Robinson and Johnson heard led them to suggest “care ethics” as a way forward for journalism: “The ethic of care offers a moral framework that prioritizes the meeting of needs for all through intentional and active outreach and nurturing.” In essence, how can journalists actually rectify the feelings of harm that are present among disengaged community members?
So, back to research question one: What do people need from journalists? The specifics varied between participants of color who were mostly independent or liberal and the other half who identified as right-leaning white people: e.g., conservatives saw journalists’ increasing use of “woke” language as a progressive bias and thus an automatic rejection of their values, and BIPOC participants were frustrated that journalists rarely do the “work” to understand their communities and portray them in a nuanced, holistic way. But the overarching feeling was the same for both sides: nearly everybody felt that their group was being over-generalized, under-represented, and depicted in a negative way.
As Robinson and Johnson write, “journalists need to be careful with their word choice and framing to avoid using polarizing language and stereotypes; journalists need to go out of their way to ensure many different voices are included; journalists need to produce more positive stories reflective of cultures and ideologies; and journalists need to partner with people in the communities to produce more inclusive content.”
On the second research question, about how harm is inflicted or remedied, “community members told journalists that they felt trauma when journalists failed to appreciate the cultural relevancies associated with their political ideology, racial identity, or sexual orientation,” the authors write. This is complicated, of course, by different ideas among different people about what harm looks like: For example, one community member talked about the harm of “journalists inaccurately [conflating] things on Latinx people … assuming they’ve all experiences being undocumented,” while, on the other hand, conservatives felt harmed by what they saw as excessive and overly celebratory coverage of diversity and inclusion issues.
Yet across the board, there was a common thread in participants calling for journalists to be more positive (even if, as reporters responded, such stories don’t get the same number of clicks as negative news), to avoid overgeneralizing by quoting “the loudest person in the room” as a stand-in for groups and ideologies, and to care about the issues and people they care about.
“It was clear to us as we parsed all of these research stories,” Robinson and Johnson concluded, “that all the community members — BIPOC or right-leaning — yearned for a more care-based practice of journalism that that reflected these five values [drawn from Joan Tronto’s ethic of care]: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity.”
Each is important, but perhaps the most useful of those five elements for journalists, the authors suggest, is the fourth one. Responsiveness means “making sure to align the caring practice for the actual needs of the individual or community. In other words, the caregiver must not assume all kinds of caring are beneficial or equal. What is caring for one person, may be harm to another.”
That may be tough when different community members define care and harm differently, but journalists can clearly do better, as the study contends: They can avoid polarizing language (such as “don’t say gay” and other nicknames used for policies or bills), they can break out of the left-right, Democrat-Republican binary that frustrates people, and they can develop more and better relationships — ones built on attentiveness from the start — with people representing marginalized groups in their communities.
Journalists can simply start listening.
Indeed, consider what Robinson and Johnson say are “the most significant and startling findings to come from the listening sessions in the post-surveys from the community members: More than two-thirds of the participants reported feeling that the conversations had built trust for them with the news outlet and the specific journalists, and a third of the sample wrote that they were considering subscribing to the news brand. This is so remarkable, especially given that the transcripts of these listening sessions seemed, in many cases, to demonstrate so much anger and vitriol toward the journalists and the mainstream news brands.”
This article was originally published on the RQ1 Newsletter and republished on IJNet with permission.
Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash.