KRISTINA BORJESSON (The Whistleblower Newsroom), MILES KENYON (Citizen Lab), REINA ROBINSON (Center for Urban Excellence), JEFF SHARE (UCLA), FRED BROWN (Society of Professional Journalists), and VICTOR PICKARD (Media, Inequality, and Change Center)
Edited and introduced by
ANDY LEE ROTH and MICKEY HUFF
It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds.
—timothy snyder, On Tyranny1
In his 2017 bestseller On Tyranny, the historian Timothy Snyder drew on his expertise about Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to reflect on current authoritarian threats to democracy in the United States. He advised that one way to preempt the rise of authoritarianism is to “stand out.” Noting that it is “easy to follow along,” Snyder wrote, “[i]t can feel strange to do or say something different.” But this unease, he advised, is necessary to freedom, and standing out can break “the spell of the status quo.”2
This spell of the status quo is reflected in the dismal reporting that passes for journalism when corporate news media succumb to profit-driven logic. That logic reduces news to just another commodity to be hawked and consumed, and the mind-numbing effects of poor journalism (as illustrated in previous chapters on Junk Food News and News Abuse) can aid and abet authoritarianism.
In bright contrast, the contributors to this year’s Media Democracy in Action chapter “stand out” by rejecting the status quo in favor of cultivating our individual capacities to discern facts and our shared need for trustworthy knowledge about the world. From a Toronto-based research group that tracks links between developing technologies and digital censorship, to a media literacy program in Oakland that empowers youth impacted by incarceration and violence, this year’s Media Democracy in Action chapter provides inspiring examples of how to build a (more) civil society.
As the contributors here demonstrate, these goals entail the establishment of clear ethical guidelines for journalists, new platforms and protections for whistleblowers who risk their reputations and livelihoods to call out abuses of power, and educational settings in which young people can question the politics of media representations and develop their identities as conscientious community members and global citizens.
Power, Snyder writes, “wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen.”3 Exemplifying what Project Censored means by media democracy in action, the individuals and organizations spotlighted here call on each of us to engage, together, in building a more inclusive, equitable, and democratic society.
New York University’s media professor Mark Crispin Miller unwittingly catalyzed the creation of The Whistleblower Newsroom when he invited three investigative reporters—Celia Farber, Stephen Jimenez, and me—to come enlighten his students about extreme forms of press censorship and retaliation for reporting the truth.
Celia Farber is an exacting investigative journalist who had drawn the abject wrath of AIDS researchers and activists by writing “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science” for Harper’s Magazine, in which she exposed human experimentation, murder, and corruption in AIDS research.4
Farber’s article “ignited a blaze of condemnation,” according to NPR media critic Brooke Gladstone in her introduction to an interview with Farber’s editor, Roger Hodge, on her radio show On the Media.5 Citing a group of scientists who, “on behalf of a South African treatment advocacy organization, issued a 35-page fact-by-fact rebuttal of the scientific material in the piece,” Gladstone challenged Hodge; “And so I wonder,” she said, “in a case where the author’s thesis depends so much on medical specifics, how do you reassure yourself that the factchecking is good enough?” Gladstone had accepted the account of an AIDS group in South Africa called Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) that has been accused of taking donations from Big Pharma. TAC issued a rebuttal to Farber’s reporting with the dubious claim that her article contained 56 errors.6 Gladstone was not alone in believing TAC; other major press including The Nation and the New York Times had gullibly run with TAC’s allegations while also reporting how “shocked” and “betrayed” AIDS researchers felt because Harper’s had published an “AIDS denier.”7 Harper’s Magazine’s response was that the article had been thoroughly fact-checked, and they continued to stand by it. “The fact that [Farber]’s been covering this story,” Hodge said, “does not make her a crackpot—it makes her a journalist. She’s a courageous journalist, I believe, because she has covered the story at great personal cost.”8 The AIDS research community’s virulent attacks on Farber continued, leaving her with post-traumatic stress disorder and a shattered career.
Stephen Jimenez described his run into a hurricane of rage after the publication of his investigation, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard.9 Shepard was a 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming who was killed in the winter of 1998. The brutal killing—Shepard was tied to a fence, pistol-whipped, and set on fire—was determined to be an anti-gay hate crime, and it sparked national outrage. “As a result of Matthew’s death,” Guardian reporter Julie Bindel wrote, “many good things have happened for the gay community. . . . Politicians and celebrities pledged support and funding to combat anti-gay hate crime. . . . There have been numerous documentaries, dramas, books and events based on the story.”10 Enter Jimenez, who blew up the story in his book, reporting that Shepard was a meth dealer and had been killed for $10,000 worth of crystal by people he knew, including a gay sex partner. “This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement,” Jimenez told The Guardian’s Bindel, “[w]hich is a big part of the reason my book has been so trashed.” Bindel reported that Jimenez’s enraged critics accused him of being “a revisionist, a criticism usually reserved for extreme rightwing ideologues that deny the Holocaust,” and Bindel noted that he had been labeled “a homophobe.”
I told my story about being hired and fired three times by three networks: twice while working on the story of the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island, New York, and once while working on a story about who was responsible for pushing the United States into the Iraq War on false pretenses. I, too, saw my work attacked in the mainstream corporate press and shunned by fellow journalists. I described my experiences as “being buzzsawed.” But I bit back, publishing a book in which well more than a dozen journalists, including me, detailed our run-ins with censorship. I am still proud of Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.11
After the panel discussion in Miller’s class, Farber and I became fast friends. I told her I had been thinking about doing a podcast called “The Whistleblower Newsroom” that would provide a platform for whistleblowers. We could do it together, I suggested. She agreed, then called Progressive Radio Network founder Gary Null, and The Whistleblower Newsroom was born.
Our first show, “Russiagate Debunked,” featured Ray McGovern, a retired Central Intelligence Agency analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), talking about forensic evidence which showed there was no “hack” of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s computers. McGovern was part of a team of VIPS experts who had discovered that the speed at which the data was removed from the DNC computer indicated a download, not a hack. This finding should have been of extreme interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators. It wasn’t. Scant attention was paid to the VIPS report, even though other key experts working with McGovern were elite National Security Agency (NSA) techno-geniuses: William Binney, former NSA technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis; J. Kirk Wiebe, ex–senior analyst at the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center; and Edward Loomis Jr., former technical director in the NSA’s Office of Signals Processing.
The only major outlet that did cover the VIPS report was The Nation. Patrick Lawrence’s piece, “A New Report Raises Big Questions about Last Year’s Hack,” came out on August 9, 2017.12 The backlash from powerful progressive quarters was immediate. Lawrence was attacked and The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, responded by gathering a group of “dissenters” to counter the VIPS report. “A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo” may have mollified the baying critics but it was hardly a forum.13 The exchange between the VIPS researchers and the dissenters was far too limited and inconclusive to be worthy of the term. We invited Patrick Lawrence on our show two years later. A highly accomplished journalist with a distinguished career, he was clearly still reeling from his experience at The Nation. We understood. We’d run the gauntlet for our truth-telling too.
Celia Farber and I continued to cover the disintegration of the official Russiagate narrative that the establishment press clung to with pathological tenacity. We conducted a series of interviews with financial analyst Ed Butowsky and his lawyer, Ty Clevenger. Butowsky is suing NPR and other press outlets for defamation after they claimed he fabricated a news story to eliminate “suspicions that the Russians had a hand in President Trump’s election.”14 Butowsky had told several Fox News hosts and then–press secretary Sean Spicer that he had been asked by a friend, news analyst Ellen Ratner, to call the parents of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich and relay a message from Julian Assange. The message: WikiLeaks had published the DNC documents after receiving them not from a Russian source, but from Seth Rich. Seth Rich’s parents, Butowsky says, when confronted with this information which could be important to the investigation of their son’s murder, told him they already knew their sons (plural) had leaked the DNC documents to WikiLeaks. Subsequent to Butowsky’s going public with the story, Ratner quickly backed away from Butowsky and has all but disappeared. Unfortunately for Ratner, says Butowsky’s lawyer, Butowsky still has his email exchanges with her. And on YouTube, there’s footage of Ratner saying that she had met with Assange for three hours at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and that he had told her the DNC leaks “were not from the Russians, they were [from] an internal source from the Hillary [Clinton] campaign or from somebody that knew Hillary—an enemy.”15
Instead of covering a different story every week, Celia Farber and I often drill down on the same story for months. Besides Russiagate, we’ve done a series of shows on Jeffrey Epstein and other pedophile rings in powerful circles and government agencies; on vaccines and viruses; and on the biggest unresolved crime of all—9/11.
Co-hosting with Celia has been magical. She’s a master of the unexpected question or comment that comes out of nowhere and persuades a guest to bare their soul. Guests are always saying things they didn’t intend to on our show in response to her. Her reporting wheelhouse is the medical industry and science, particularly viruses. My guest interaction style is frontal, direct. I’m obsessed with hard and forensic evidence. My wheelhouse is high-level malfeasance and the mechanics of major cover-ups. Both of us are completely ourselves on the show. That we can actually be that and be of service to whistleblowers and our audience at the same time is the greatest blessing of all.
KRISTINA BORJESSON, an investigative reporter, became internationally known for blowing the whistle on corruption in the US press following publication of her landmark books, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press and Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11, Top Journalists Speak Out. Her groundbreaking documentary, TWA Flight 800 (2013, Epix Premium Cable Channel), featured high-level whistleblowers from inside the US government’s official investigation into the jetliner’s explosion, revealing a massive, multi-agency cover-up and almost two decades of false reporting on the subject. A veteran network television and radio producer, Borjesson currently co-hosts The Whistleblower Newsroom on the Progressive Radio Network.
Advances in technology are inseparable from their implications for human rights: the same tools that can spark a revolution can quell dissent. Understanding how technology and human rights intersect in society is integral in ensuring that free expression grows unabated and autocrats are held accountable for censorship and the dampening of free expression.
Based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research group. We bring together computer scientists, political scientists, legal advisors, and subject area experts to focus on research at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. This often positions us at the center of stories involving censorship, technology, and members of civil society.
Journalists form a key part of our research strategy, helping to translate highly technical reports into language easily understood by general audiences. They also provide a direct link to some of our most important stories, as they are often targets of authoritarian governments with access to powerful tools of suppression.
In May 2019, WhatsApp identified a vulnerability that allowed attackers to inject spyware onto phones simply by calling up a target’s device. More than 1400 individuals were believed to be targets, representing a serious breach of the popular app. After the incident, Citizen Lab volunteered to help WhatsApp identify cases in which the suspected targets of this attack were members of civil society, including journalists.16
WhatsApp has since traced this targeting to spyware created by the Israeli technology firm NSO Group and launched legal claims against them. NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware is a powerful tool of espionage, granting high-paying operators access to everything on a target’s phone, including secure chats. Attackers can even turn on an infected phone’s camera and microphone to capture activity in the user’s vicinity, transforming the phone into a near-omnipotent spy device.
While NSO Group claims that their powerful spyware is sold exclusively to governments for the sole purpose of tracking terrorists and other criminals, Citizen Lab research has shown otherwise. In Mexico it’s been used to target journalists, public health officials, human rights lawyers, and anti-corruption advocates. Closer to the Lab’s home in Canada, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi Arabian dissident and YouTube satirist, was targeted.17 Abdulaziz was a friend and confidant of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Given their connection, the nature of their conversations, and the access that spyware operators had to his phone, Abdulaziz suspects it was the presence of spyware that led to Khashoggi’s execution.
Citizen Lab’s analysis of Abdulaziz’s device traced the operator to Saudi Arabia. The same operator also targeted Ben Hubbard, Beirut bureau chief of the New York Times. He was targeted in June 2018 but only decided to disclose the incident publicly in January 2020.18 Given his experience reporting on Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, one could surmise why he might be a target of digital reprisal.
There is clearly reason for journalists to be wary of powerful and targeted digital threats. But research has shown that even the suspicion that government surveillance might be taking place has a chilling effect on free speech, thus infringing on a bevy of human rights for everyone.19 While digital attacks often target specific individuals, Pegasus spyware and similar technologies potentially impact anyone with, or even near, a smartphone.
Information controls—actions conducted in or through information and communication technologies that seek to deny, disrupt, secure, or monitor information for political ends—shape how we are able to view the world around us.20 Consider the influence of internet filtering products, tools deployed by network managers to determine which websites users are allowed to access and which ones will be blocked. Canadian company Netsweeper has created one such product.21 In the hands of well-meaning librarians, it can be used to block student access to pornography or websites containing hate speech. But in the hands of authoritarian governments, it can be used to limit access to dissenting beliefs and place unnecessary restrictions on public discourse. Citizen Lab research investigated how Netsweeper was used in ten countries with histories of human rights abuses, finding the blocking of religious content in Bahrain, political campaigns in the United Arab Emirates, and media websites in Yemen.
Among our findings was that Netsweeper had created a category called ‘Alternative Lifestyles’ that served no purpose other than blocking access to non-pornographic LGBTQ2+ websites, including some that provide life-saving HIV/AIDS information. After a public campaign and critical media attention, Netsweeper acquiesced in January 2019 and removed the filtering function, signaling a victory in a long and continued fight for free expression.22
While Citizen Lab will continue to document foundationless attacks on free expression, authorities must be willing to resolutely address the dangers of an unregulated environment that allows spyware to be sold to countries with egregious human rights records. If spyware sales are allowed to continue unabated, human rights defenders will continue to be targeted, critical media will be silenced, and our collective rights will be vitiated.
To keep up to date about Citizen Lab’s ongoing research, see https://citizenlab.ca/.
MILES KENYON is a former journalist and current communications specialist at the Citizen Lab, where he studies how LGBTQ2+ content is censored online.
Working with justice-involved youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve witnessed the ways criminalized activity is displayed and surveilled on social media. Problematic content discovered on cell phones and/or social media accounts perpetually causes young people to violate courts’ probation terms. As the intersection of urban youth violence and digital media attracts more and more attention from law enforcement and the judicial system, activists, advocates, and educators must demand critical digital and social media literacy education for underprivileged populations, in alternative education programs and schools for incarcerated and marginalized youth.
The digital sphere enables us to manipulate and create our social identities. YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat social media platforms currently dominate youth attention. A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that at least 90 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds use some form of social media.23 Social media encourages oversharing, and the typical consumer is unaware of the potential consequences. In 2018, seeing the general lack of understanding among young people of the risks posed by their social media use motivated me to establish a nonprofit organization, the Center for Urban Excellence (CUE), and to create a free critical digital and social media literacy educator resource guide.
CUE is specifically aimed at supporting youth affected by incarceration and violence. CUE encourages safe, critical media praxis by providing trainings, event coordination, and a youth-focused curriculum that pushes past conversation. For the first Urban Excellence Convention at Oakland’s Museum of Children’s Arts in March 2019, panel-style discussions and performances supported the theme “digital and social media literacy as a critical aspect of justice-involved Black youth success (life, freedom, and social and economic opportunity).” CUE’s digital and social media literacy curriculum has been implemented in Bay Area juvenile justice institution schools and youth organizations, and in April 2019 Dr. Colleen Mihal began using the CUE educator guide in her classes with Project L.A.’s San Quentin Prison program.
We collaborate with nonprofits such as SHIFT Inc., Contra Costa County Independent Living Skills Program, Museum of Children’s Arts, and Vallejo Girls Youth Empowerment Group to provide free community events, trainings, and supportive services for justice-involved youth. To date, nearly 450 young people have participated in or benefited from CUE’s programs and services.
Justice-Involved Youths’ Problematic Reproduction of Social Norms
Youth create digital content grounded in their life experiences and the norms of their elected social groups. The intersection of high rates of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and limitations on opportunities to expand social identity forces justice-involved youth into a social undercaste.24 Some youth use digital media to capture problematic scenes of their reality to share online. These images and posts document experiences that are outside of “mainstream” norms but are normalized within their social circles, such as content involving alcohol, drugs, sex, or weapons.
To target specific consumer markets, social media giants like Instagram (owned by Facebook) use algorithms to sift through user profile data and analyze them for users’ interests, preferences, and traits. This overt stereotyping and automated categorizing for advertisers is just the most obvious consequence of unprecedented digital surveillance, but other consequences—including the exploitation of user data by law enforcement and the justice system—are far more insidious. While over-policing of Black and Latinx communities is well documented throughout history, dehumanizing “stop and frisk” tactics have been restructured and expanded in the digital age to a degree almost unimaginable to today’s youth.25 Developing youths’ critical digital and social media literacy, as well as their ability to create advantageous experiences to capture and share, has the potential to aid them in escaping social media silos and expand their social identity through new and safer group memberships.
About the Educator Resource Guide
The Digital and Social Media Literacy Educator Resource Guide is a tool for educators within underprivileged, alternative, and incarcerated education settings whose students face issues of violence and problematic behaviors. The guide uses a social identity perspective to reconceive of digital and social media and the types of content that users share. Social identity theory posits that people’s perception of themselves is based on the groups they are part of. Creating alternative visions for oneself through digital media can assist with liberation from problematic social norms. Digital and social media literacy education can help students
- develop critical questioning and thinking skills;
- reflect on how digital media messages shape society;
- identify target marketing strategies;
- recognize bias, misinformation, and fake news; and
- advocate for positive change in the digital sphere.
The guide provides socially relevant readings, videos, and activities. It is organized into five units and can be modularized. The guide invites conversation on racially biased media, social identification, and social comparison. It is organized as follows:
| Unit 1: What is the internet? | A simplified explanation of the internet, the World Wide Web, and web browsers. We discuss basic understanding of the internet, accessing information on the internet, and spotting misinformation (fake news). |
| Unit 2: What is a digital footprint? | Discover how digital lives leave forever searchable footprints on the internet. |
| Unit 3: What is social media? | Develop an understanding of social media and how it is used. |
| Unit 4: What is social media literacy and why is it important? | Discuss oversharing (identity), safety (security), and responsibility (agency). |
| Unit 5: What is social media etiquette (“netiquette”) and how is social media used for good? | Explore the ways to display social media etiquette and how social media is used for online activism, spreading awareness, and connecting to opportunities. |
Critical digital and social media literacy education allows for social media subversion and social identity transformation. While there are limitations to social justice in education and juvenile justice institutional spaces—such as navigating strict zero-tolerance policies, instruction time tables, and bureaucratic approval systems—the Digital and Social Media Literacy Educator Resource Guide acts as a practical starting point for essential transformative discourse between educators and students. Request a free copy of the guide by visiting https://www.centerforurbanexcellence.org/contact.
REINA ROBINSON, MA, is the executive director of the Center for Urban Excellence (CUE), a certified Community Resiliency Model (CRM) trainer, and a coordinator of services for San Francisco Bay Area justice-involved youth. Her work focuses on digital media literacy, spectrum thinking, and social and economic opportunity development.
In the education department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), students are critically engaging with media, information, and technology to interrogate the role of these tools in society—the positive contributions that inform, entertain, connect, and empower, as well as the negative influences that mislead, distract, exploit, surveil, and oppress. Through interactive lessons that involve analysis and production, students question dominant ideologies, misrepresentations, biases, stereotypes, and possibilities for creating alternative messages that support social and environmental justice. When students learn to critically analyze and create images, sounds, multimedia, and text, they deepen their critical thinking skills to question the social construction of media, the politics of representation, and the inequalities of power, and they develop their identities as conscientious and empowered global citizens.
The pervasiveness of social media and digital tools is analyzed through critical lenses, such as Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of surveillance capitalism.26 A quiz about the function and purpose of Google’s search engine helps students rethink the tool that more than 90 percent of internet users go to for answers. The quiz asks students to think through the lens of surveillance capitalism and answer: What is the purpose of Google’s search engine? What is the raw product they extract? What is the finished product they create? Who are the customers? Who are the workers? What is the ultimate goal?27
The critical media literacy course explores the development of media education, defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills and more as a framework of conceptual understandings.28 Much of the theory that informs critical media literacy has evolved from cultural studies, a field of critical inquiry that incorporates an understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audience theory.29
Every class begins by reviewing the critical media literacy framework to analyze media texts through asking questions that support the six conceptual understandings of media shown in Table 1. Researchers at UCLA constructed this framework based on decades of work from cultural studies scholars and media educators throughout the world.30
table 1
Critical Media Literacy Framework
| 1. SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM All information is constructed by individuals and/or groups of people who make choices within social contexts. |
WHO are all the possible people who made choices that helped create this text? |
| 2. LANGUAGES/SEMIOTICS Each medium has its own language with specific grammar and semantics. |
HOW was this text constructed and delivered/accessed? |
| 3. AUDIENCE/POSITIONALITY Individuals and groups understand media messages similarly and/or differently depending on multiple contextual factors. |
HOW could this text be understood differently? |
| 4. POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION Media messages and the medium through which they travel always have a bias and support and/or challenge dominant hierarchies of power, privilege, and pleasure. |
WHAT values, points of view, and ideologies are represented or missing from this text or influenced by the medium? |
| 5. PRODUCTION/INSTITUTIONS All media texts have a purpose (often commercial or governmental) that is shaped by the creators and/or systems within which they operate. |
WHY was this text created and/or shared? |
| 6. SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Media culture is a terrain of struggle that perpetuates or challenges positive and/or negative ideas about people, groups, and issues; it is never neutral. |
WHOM does this text advantage and/or disadvantage? |
A series of assignments require students to work collaboratively to create a variety of media projects such as photographs, podcasts, memes, Validated Independent News stories (VINs), social media posts, and advertisements.31 One example from the critical media literacy class is a lesson in which students in teams take photographs to visually communicate a word. This lesson begins by comparing two different photographs of the same person. Through a whole group discussion, students deconstruct the techniques that the photographers used to create the two images. Their ideas are charted on the board and are then reconceived as visual literacy skills for the others to employ when taking their photographs.32 Students then leave the classroom in teams to create a single photograph that will communicate their assigned vocabulary word. After taking their pictures, they choose one image to be projected for the entire class to see and attempt to guess the word.
Photograph to illustrate the word “overwhelmed.” The student pictured is Rogelio Pizano.
photograph by ruoshi huang
Throughout the process, students are encouraged to be metacognitive about their learning and reflect on their conceptual understandings of the critical media literacy framework. For example: Concept #1—The process they engaged in to create the photographs demonstrates how media messages are socially constructed through every decision they had to make (such as choice of camera angle, lighting, composition, etc.); Concept #2—The techniques of photography they used are the codes and conventions of visual language that they applied to create the pictures; Concept #3—The variety of responses to each other’s photographs show how audiences can read the same message differently; Concept #4—Their choices of what to photograph (or what to leave out) and how to take the pictures are influenced by their positionalities and context that contribute to the bias of the photographs; Concept #5—Everyone’s photograph had a clear purpose since the task required that they illustrate a specific word; and Concept #6—Each photograph they took required students to consider if they were perpetuating a stereotype or creating an image that could have a negative effect (unintended or otherwise).
The process of analysis, production, and reflection is part of all assignments because learning is enhanced when students can demonstrate their understandings through applying analytical concepts in the creation process. However, simply creating media does not promote critical thinking if the process does not encourage students to critically question the representations, context, and process. Therefore, this class incorporates critical analysis and practice with all activities. Students use the critical media literacy framework to guide their inquiry while they are analyzing and creating alternative media messages. It is essential for everyone to deepen their critical capacity to question all information, to analyze the context in which it is constructed and shared, and to act responsibly with that knowledge, because society requires critical thinkers to participate in the process of shaping democracy.
JEFF SHARE has worked as an award-winning photojournalist, bilingual elementary school teacher, and since 2007 as a teacher in the Teacher Education Program at UCLA. His research and practice focuses on preparing educators to teach critical media literacy in K–12 education, for the goals of social and environmental justice. He now teaches critical media literacy to undergraduate students as well.
Introduction and Brief History by fred brown,
former president of SPJ
For journalism to fulfill its purpose of producing and distributing well-researched information with honesty, clarity, and precision, its practitioners must follow a code of ethics. It’s one thing that separates responsible, informed journalism from random spurts of tweeting or blogging.
Ethics has been one of the principal missions of the Society of Professional Journalists for decades, but SPJ didn’t actually have an ethics code until seventeen years after it was founded as a fraternity called Sigma Delta Chi (SDX). In 1926, SDX essentially borrowed the American Society of Newspaper Editors’s canons of journalism, which served SDX until it drafted its own code in 1973 in the aftermath of Watergate.
The 1973 code underwent modest changes in 1987 but still adhered to the basic principles—truth and accuracy at the top of the list, along with preserving freedom of the press, avoiding conflicts of interest, and striving for fairness and objectivity.
There was continuing debate over whether there should be some sort of enforcement clause, as other professions like law and medicine have in their codes. Instead, the 1973 and 1987 codes had a pledge at the end, in which journalists were asked to promise that they would uphold the standards of the profession. The 1973 code said journalists should “actively censure” violations of the standards; the “censure” language was replaced in 1987 with a pledge to “encourage” adherence.
In 1996 the ethics code was rewritten more extensively, to confront what even then seemed to be a growing public mistrust of journalism and its perceived negativity. So the 1996 code added a major section headed “Minimize Harm,” comprising several principles in the previous code but with a clear message that journalists should consider the consequences of what they’re doing—not to stop them from telling the truth, hurtful though it may be, but to emphasize that they should at least be aware of what might happen.
Instead of any attempt at enforcement or even a “pledge,” there was an admonition that journalists had a responsibility to be accountable for their actions and to call attention to any ethical missteps they might encounter.
After that code had been around for more than a decade, it became apparent that changing technologies and changing marketplaces were having a profound effect on how journalism was practiced. Anyone with access to the internet could profess to be doing real journalism.
But rather than try to keep up with rapidly evolving delivery systems for information, SPJ decided to adapt its code of ethics for more general application, allowing for any medium of communication through which journalism is conveyed. The Society’s 2014 code eliminates any reference to specific technologies and techniques and focuses instead on what the code’s drafters hope are abiding principles.
Those principles are the four spelled out in the 1996 code, with language only slightly updated to account for the influence of the crowded, sometimes careless world of reportage steeped in the fast-moving realm of the internet: Seek Truth and Report It; Minimize Harm; Act Independently; and Be Accountable and Transparent.
Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.
The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.
Seek Truth and Report It
Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
Journalists should:
—Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.
—Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.
—Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.
—Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.
—Be cautious when making promises, but keep the promises they make.
—Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.
—Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Explain why anonymity was granted.
—Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.
—Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.
—Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable. Give voice to the voiceless.
—Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
—Recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government. Seek to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open, and that public records are open to all.
—Provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate.
—Boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear.
—Avoid stereotyping. Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting.
—Label advocacy and commentary.
—Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.
—Never plagiarize. Always attribute.
Minimize Harm
Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.
Journalists should:
—Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.
—Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.
—Recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast.
—Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.
—Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.
—Balance a suspect’s right to a fair trial with the public’s right to know. Consider the implications of identifying criminal suspects before they face legal charges.
—Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate.
Act Independently
The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.
Journalists should:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
—Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.
—Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news. Identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.
—Deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.
—Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two. Prominently label sponsored content.
Be Accountable and Transparent
Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.
Journalists should:
—Explain ethical choices and processes to audiences. Encourage a civil dialogue with the public about journalistic practices, coverage and news content.
—Respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness.
—Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently. Explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.
—Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.
—Abide by the same high standards they expect of others.
The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles supported by additional explanations and position papers that address changing journalistic practices. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.
FRED BROWN, retired political reporter, editor, and columnist for the Denver Post, teaches media ethics at the University of Denver. He is a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and recently completed editing the fifth edition of the SPJ’s Journalism Ethics: A Casebook of Professional Conduct for News Media.
The notion of censorship typically evokes fear of oppressive governments or corporate media policing the bounds of acceptable discourse and constricting the range of political opinion. A long history—including many cases carefully documented by Project Censored over the decades—shows that we should be concerned about such abuses. However, a deeper, more systemic form of censorship warps our media, one we too often neglect. This subtle—but no less malignant—filtering process is a byproduct of toxic commercialism, a set of values that systematically privilege entertainment over information, treat audiences as consumers not citizens, and consistently marginalize progressive arguments and issues. Resulting in a truncated public sphere and an impoverished imagination of what is possible, this profit-driven logic structures much of our news and information. We might refer to such patterns of omission and emphasis—where some voices and views are elevated and others muffled according to commercial values, profit accumulation, and corporate power—as “market censorship.”
Against Market Censorship
The idea of market censorship has received only passing attention in media scholarship over the years. Sue Curry Jansen offers what is perhaps the best definition: “Market censorship points to practices that routinely filter or restrict the production and distribution of selected ideas, perspectives, genres or cultural forms within mainstream media of communication based upon their anticipated profits and/or support for corporate values and consumerism.”33 C. Edwin Baker rightly observes that much of this power to filter or restrict ideas traces back to the influence of advertisers, who act as the “most consistent and the most pernicious ‘censors’ of media content.”34 Other models shed light on various aspects of the filtering that takes place, but too rarely draw linkages to a commercial media system’s structural characteristics.35
Much to their disadvantage, progressives must try to politically organize and communicate their messages within this inhospitable media landscape. Their arguments seldom receive a fair hearing by a system so stacked against them. The treatment of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in our establishment news media could serve as exhibit A.
Progressives cannot compete because their issues rarely sell advertising. What sells advertising? Fear sells advertising. Hate sells advertising. Simplistic soundbites—and anything that captures our attention—sells advertising. That is, after all, what ratings are all about: baiting and selling our attention to advertisers. It is what led the now-disgraced CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, to acknowledge that Donald Trump might be bad for America, but he is “damn good for CBS.”36
Corporate television outlets, owned by gigantic media conglomerates, make obscene amounts of money from these relationships, and we can never shame them into better behavior. To counter market censorship, therefore, we must combat the commercial logic driving it. As much as possible, we must remove news and information from the market altogether. But this will not happen if we misdiagnose the root of the problem. Our media-related challenges exceed the bad behavior of right-wing journalists, run-amok corporations, and an overbearing government. These are all problems, of course, but they are symptoms of deeper pathologies—they reflect the values of a commercial or capitalistic media system.
Commercialism drives many of the negative attributes that we rightly decry in our news and information systems, from social media to news media. It is what incentivizes Facebook and other platform monopolies to practice surveillance capitalism. It drives corporate outlets to routinely trivialize, ignore, or sensationalize life-and-death issues such as hyper-inequality, mass incarceration, and climate change. In a truly democratic system, journalists would maintain a laser-like focus on these issues to help find practical, community-driven policy solutions.
Market values also are culpable for driving journalism into the ground. Public service journalism was always in a precarious position within a commercial system. Now that the 150-year-old print advertising model has fallen apart, these preexisting fissures have blown wide open. Because any hope for a democratic society requires a free and functional press, we need non-market alternatives. The journalism crisis is an opportunity for imagining something bold and new to replace the failing commercial model that is now collapsing beneath the weight of its own contradictions.37
Since structural critiques of capitalism have been beaten out of the discourse over the years, we often miss the forest for the trees and fail to understand the systemic biases at work. To correctly diagnose the core impediment to a democratic media system, this commercial censoring of our news and information deserves far more attention—an essential task in building structural alternatives to the corporate, heavily commercialized, and barely regulated media system that we have inherited in the United States.38
Imagining Structural Alternatives
Nicholas Johnson, former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, famously argued that whatever your first political priority is, your second should be media reform—otherwise you will not make progress on your first issue.39 A market-driven media system will almost always champion the status quo, which means that working toward social change should also include de-commercializing and democratizing our media. Ultimately, we should treat news and access to information as public services that should not be left entirely to the mercy of capitalist logic. We must build systemic and sustainable alternatives.
Working toward such structural alternatives inspired Todd Wolfson and me in 2018 to launch the Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center, a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University.40 We see MIC as not just a traditional academic research center but also an activist center—one that moves from theory to praxis. We deliberately set out to not just better describe the world but to change it. Our research is dedicated to social justice and to creating a more democratic society.
At the theory level, MIC serves as a policy workshop to imagine and advocate for alternative structures of ownership and control over core systems in society. At the praxis level, we assist activists, journalists, and workers who are trying to create a more just and equitable world. In particular, we are trying to actualize visions of a progressive future for work and for media. This project includes creating new systems for a truly publicly owned and democratically governed local journalism. Toward these objectives, we are collaborating with gig workers, labor journalists, and policy advocates on a variety of projects to envision a better society. We aim to craft counter-narratives to the market fundamentalism and neoliberalism that has misguided so much of our society for so long and we strive to broaden our political imaginary about what is possible. We call on progressive academics and intellectuals—especially media scholars—to join our endeavors. The struggle before us all is a long one. Reimagining and restructuring society looks far beyond Trump and the pandemic crisis. History is open-ended and we can seize these opportunities if we organize accordingly.
VICTOR PICKARD is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center. He has authored or edited six books, including America’s Battle for Media Democracy; Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights (with Robert W. McChesney); After Net Neutrality (with David Elliot Berman); and, most recently, Democracy Without Journalism?
Notes
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), 73.
- Ibid., 51.
- Ibid., 83.
- Celia Farber, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2006, 37–52.
- Brooke Gladstone, interview with Roger Hodge, “Harper’s Bizarre?” On the Media, WNYC Studios, May 5, 2006, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/128750-harpers-bizarre.
- Robert Gallo et al., “Errors in Celia Farber’s March 2006 Article in Harper’s Magazine,” Treatment Action Campaign, March 4, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060318155138/ https://tac.org.za/Documents/ErrorsInFarberArticle.pdf.
- Richard Kim, “Harper’s Publishes AIDS Denialist,” The Notion blog (The Nation), March 2, 2006, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harpers-publishes-aids-denialist/; and Lia Miller, “An Article in Harper’s Ignites a Controversy Over H.I.V.,” New York Times, March 13, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/business/media/an-article-in-harpers-ignites-a-controversy-over-hiv.html.
- Miller, “An Article in Harper’s.”
- Stephen Jimenez, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard (Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2013).
- Julie Bindel, “The Truth behind America’s Most Famous Gay-Hate Murder,” The Guardian, October 26, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behind-americas-most-famous-gay-hate-murder-matthew-shepard.
- Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2002/2004).
- Patrick Lawrence, “A New Report Raises Big Questions about Last Year’s DNC Hack,” The Nation, August 9, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc/hack/.
- Various Contributors, “A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo,” The Nation, September 1, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-leak-or-a-hack-a-forum-on-the-vips-memo/.
- David Folkenflik, “The Man Behind the Scenes in Fox News’ Discredited Seth Rich Story,” Morning Edition, NPR, August 16, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/08/16/543830392/the-role-of-ed-butowsky-in-advancing-retracted-seth-rich-story.
- Ellen Ratner with John LeBoutillier, “Speaker Series: John LeBoutillier and Ellen Ratner,” YouTube video of the “Left to Right after Election Day” event at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on November 9, 2016, posted by “EmbryRiddleUniv” on November 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdtkACCxdnc [quote begins at 1 hour 2 minutes 25 seconds].
- “NSO Group / Q Cyber Technologies: Over One Hundred New Abuse Cases,” Citizen Lab, October 29, 2019, https://citizenlab.ca/2019/10/nsoq-cyber-technologies-100-new-abuse-cases/.
- Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Adam Senft, Bahr Abdul Razzak, and Ron Deibert, “The Kingdom Came to Canada: How Saudi-Linked Digital Espionage Reached Canadian Soil,” Citizen Lab, October 1, 2018, https://citizenlab.ca/2018/10/the-kingdom-came-to-canada-how-saudi-linked-digital-espionage-reached-canadian-soil/.
- Bill Marczak, Siena Anstis, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert, “Stopping the Press: New York Times Journalist Targeted by Saudi-Linked Pegasus Spyware Operator,” January 28, 2020, https://citizenlab.ca/2020/01/stopping-the-press-new-york-times-journalist-targeted-by-saudi-linked-pegasus-spyware-operator/.
- See, for example, Jon Penney, “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 31 No. 1 (2016), 117–82, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645; and Shelby Meyers and Mickey Huff, “Fear of Government Spying is ‘Chilling’ Writers’ Freedom of Expression,” in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015), 57–58, reposted online at https://www.projectcensored.org/7-fear-of-government-spying-is-chilling-writers-freedom-of-expression/.
- Jakub Dalek, Ron Deibert, Sarah McKune, Phillipa Gill, Adam Senft, and Naser Noor, “Information Controls during Military Operations: The Case of Yemen during the 2015 Political and Armed Conflict,” Citizen Lab, October 21, 2015, https://citizenlab.ca/2015/10/information-controls-military-operations-yemen/.
- Jakub Dalek, Lex Gill, Bill Marczak, Sarah McKune, Naser Noor, Joshua Oliver, Jon Penney, Adam Senft, and Ron Deibert, “Planet Netsweeper: Executive Summary,” Citizen Lab, April 25, 2018, https://citizenlab.ca/2018/04/planet-netsweeper/.
- “Netsweeper: Stop Censoring LGBT+ Content Now!” All Out, December 13, 2018, updated January 21, 2019, https://go.allout.org/en/a/netsweeper/.
- Andrew Perrin and Monica Anderson, “Share of U.S. Adults Using Social Media, Including Facebook, is Mostly Unchanged since 2018,” Pew Research Center, April 10, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-s-adults-using-social-media-including-facebook-is-mostly-unchanged-since-2018/.
- Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) refer to ten experiences that researchers have identified as risk factors for adult chronic diseases: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, family violence, household substance abuse, household mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and having an incarcerated household member. A study of 64,329 juvenile offenders in Florida revealed that 73 percent of the youth had lived with at least three ACE factors. See Michael T. Baglivio, Nathan Epps, Kimberly Swartz, Mona Sayedul Huq, Amy Sheer, and Nancy S. Hardt, “The Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) in the Lives of Juvenile Offenders,” OJJDP Journal of Juvenile Justice, Vol. 3 No. 2 (Spring 2014), 1–23, https://web.archive.org/web/20140905115936/ http://www.journalofjuvjustice.org/JOJJ0302/article01.htm. On social undercastes, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010/2012).
- Desmond Upton Patton, Douglas-Wade Brunton, Andrea Dixon, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Patrick Leonard, and Rose Hackman, “Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations,” Social Media + Society, Vol. 3 No. 3 (July–September 2017), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117733344.
- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
- Google Surveillance Capitalism Quiz, with accompanying answers: 1. What is the purpose of Google’s search engine? To be a supply route for the product. 2. What is the raw product they extract? Behavioral data about us. 3. What is the finished product they create? Predictions about our behavior. 4. Who are the customers? Advertisers and governments wanting predictive power. 5. Who are the workers? Us. 6. What is the ultimate goal? Make money through modifying behavior.
- David Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003).
- Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner, eds., Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
- Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Sense, 2019).
- For a detailed description of the course, see Kellner and Share, The Critical Media Literacy Guide.
- For a more thorough explanation of this lesson and other educational uses of photography, see Jeff Share, “Cameras in Classrooms: Photography’s Pedagogical Potential,” in Essentials of Teaching and Integrating Visual and Media Literacy: Visualizing Learning, eds. Danilo M. Baylen and Adriana D’Alba (New York: Springer, 2015), 97–118.
- Sue Curry Jansen, “Ambiguities and Imperatives of Market Censorship: The Brief History of a Critical Concept,” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Vol. 7 No. 2 (October 2010), 12–30, 13, https://www.westminsterpapers.org/articles/abstract/10.16997/wpcc.141/.
- C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.
- One great exception is the five filters of the Propaganda Model in Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988/2002).
- Eliza Collins, “Les Moonves: Trump’s Run is ‘Damn Good for CBS,’” Politico, February 29, 2016, https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/les-moonves-trump-cbs-220001.
- I expand on this project in Victor Pickard, Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
- For a history of how this system developed, see Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- See, for instance, Nicholas Johnson, Your Second Priority: A Former FCC Commissioner Speaks Out (Morrisville, North Carolina: Myrtle Orchard Press/Lulu.com, 2007/2008).
- For more information, visit the MIC Center website: https://www.miccenter.org/.