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What can we learn when we as journalists turn our eyes from the world around us and onto our profession itself?
Join us on August 17 at 6:30 p.m. to interrogate and discuss objectivity in the media industry. Moderated by Guild President, Susan DeCarava, and featuring panelists Karen Ho (Quartz), Carla Murphy (Echoing Ida), Sandy Nelson (Tacoma News Tribune), Lewis Raven Wallace (Press On), and Steven Thrasher (Northwestern Medill School of Journalism ), this timely conversation has long been discussed and debated in our field.
This forum will cover a range of questions and debates currently unfolding in our profession. How are journalists with marginalized identities grappling with and impacted by the dominant standards of objectivity? How did those standards develop in the first place, and how have they morphed over time? What is possible in the future as we wrestle with age-old questions in the major stories of the year?
About the Panel
Karen K. Ho is a global finance and economics reporter for Quartz based in New York. She has been published in a wide number of outlets, including GQ, Interview, the San Francisco Chronicle, Glamour, Refinery29, The Goods at Vox, NBC News, The Daily Beast and many others. Karen wrote a cover story on the blockbuster rom-com Crazy Rich Asians for TIME, completed a Delacorte Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism Review, and received a master of arts specializing in finance and economics from Columbia's Journalism School. Her media newsletter is titled White Guy Confidence.
Carla Murphy is part of the inaugural cohort of "50 Women Can Change the World in Journalism" leadership program, and she was a journalist co-leader at the 2018 annual Kopkind Colony retreat as well as a fellow of The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Her work has appeared in The Daily Beast, The Nation, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, The Chicago Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other national and community outlets. She is a member of the Journalism and Women's Symposium (JAWS), and she is an Echoing Ida editor, and a trained workshop leader for the NY Writers Coalition.
Sandy Nelson is a veteran journalist, writer, editor and writing coach. She started her journalism career in 1980 as a reporter at a daily newspaper in Aberdeen, Washington, before being hired to a union job at the Tacoma News Tribune three years later. Her career as an activist started in 1974 when she joined a socialist-feminist organization in Seattle. The two interests collided in 1990, when the McClatchy-owned newspaper transferred Nelson to the copy desk as punishment for her off-duty activities on behalf of a campaign to outlaw anti-gay discrimination in Tacoma. Management objected to Nelson’s insistence on exercising her First Amendment rights to speech and association and her advocacy of progressive social movements for the rights of LGBTQ people, women, workers, political radicals, Native Americans and people of color. The ensuing battle, Nelson v McClatchy Newspapers Inc., was a landmark case that spanned seven years and challenged the myth of newspaper “objectivity.” The U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 denied the American Civil Liberties Union’s writ of certiorari and let stand a 7-2 Washington State Supreme Court decision that newspapers could limit the political rights of reporters to maintain the “appearance of objectivity.” While the legal case ended in defeat, the ruling strengthened political rights for all other Washington workers and encouraged younger journalists to bring their experiences of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination to their writing, enriching society’s understanding of persistent inequalities.
Lewis Raven Wallace is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina. He’s a co-founder and co-director of Press On southern movement journalism collective, the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. He previously worked in public radio, and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is a frequent public speaker and trainer on topics including legacies of resistance in journalism and transforming journalism for the 21st century. He is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South.
Steven Thrasher is the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting (with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community) and an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Thrasher has worked as writer-at-large at the Guardian, staff writer at the Village Voice, and facilitator for the NPR StoryCorps project. His articles are regularly published in the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, Esquire, the Nation, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Daily Beast. He’s also a former researcher for Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” Thrasher's research combines journalistic and ethnographic methods to study how racism, homophobia, policing, medicine, incarceration, culture, and health intersect. A scholar of the criminalization of HIV/AIDS, Thrasher’s work centers marginalized populations. As a teacher, he encourages students to draw upon history, theory, culture, and reporting to critically read and create media narratives. Research and reporting areas include U.S. Civil Rights; international histories of LGBTQ and gender identities; social movements; court reporting; media frames; colonialism; critical race theory; queer methods; policing; art criticism; public health reporting; and, HIV/AIDS history.
About the Moderator
Susan DeCarava is the President of the NewsGuild of New York. She began working for the Guild in December 2008 as a Local Representative, after serving two years as unit chair at the Writers Guild of America, East. At the Writers Guild, she organized against an anti-union campaign, fought to increase wages and eliminate pay inequity between the administrative and professional staff, and preserved paid sick leave. As one of the Guild’s longest-serving local representatives, she worked with members across the Local to achieve strong contracts and to address issues including wage suppression, hostile work environments, access to professional training, career advancement, affordable employer-sponsored health care, and increasing diversity in the newsroom.