‘What Is a Journalist if Not an Advocate on Behalf of the Public?’

Janine Jackson interviewed Rory O’Connor for the July 1, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. | MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: Today’s US news watchers might not recognize that the pretense of objectivity in journalism, the view that reporters should strive to report the news as if from nowhere, is—besides not being possible—not a value that adheres to journalism the world around, or that has even always held sway in this country. Many of those thought of as the giants of the profession — Ida B. Wells, Lincoln Steffens — were advocacy journalists before that term was considered not just a pejorative, but an oxymoron. Things seem to be changing again, though, with a growing awareness that if taking a side against poverty or racism or climate change means breaking some rule of straight journalism, then it’s the rules that ought to change.

Our next guest has never separated journalism and social change. Co-founder with the late Danny Schechter of the media group GlobalVision, Rory O’Connor is a filmmaker and journalist and author of, most recently, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media Are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rory O’Connor.

Rory O’Connor: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

JJ: Well, you wear many hats, but I have you here today for a specific reason, which is to talk about the award newly established by your educational foundation, the Global Center. It’s aimed squarely at this question of socially engaged journalism. Tell us about the award.

RO: Well, we call it The Danny for short, and it’s going to be an annual award. This is the first year we’re offering it. And it includes, importantly, a $3,000 stipend to support both future reporting and advocacy work by the winner. And I’m really pleased not only that we’ve been able to establish this award to remember my late partner, Brother Schechter, but also the initial recipient, Jose Antonio Vargas, is just spectacular. And if your listeners don’t know about him, they should find out really, really soon.

JJ: Well, tell us about the connections here. What is it about Vargas’ work that you think connects it to Danny’s? In other words, what are the values of Danny Schechter’s life and work — and his birthday was yesterday, June 27 — what are those elements that you hope the award reflects, and that you see reflected in Jose Vargas?

RO: I think that this idea of, quote unquote, “objectivity” and false equivalence that you’ve been talking about is eroding in journalistic circles, although it is still somewhat prevalent in the mainstream. But when Danny and I started GlobalVision nearly 30 years ago, that was far from the case. You know, the first thing that we did was we did a program about apartheid in South Africa called South Africa Now, and we found, to our surprise, that the fact that the program was anti-apartheid on the face of it was a matter of controversy, and in fact that we were kept off of the airways by Public Broadcasting Service here in the United States, for the reason that we actually took a stand against apartheid. That type of thinking still exists, although it is eroding, and we want to get rid of it entirely.

Danny and I actually paid, you know, a fairly significant price. We were denounced in the pages of the Boston Globe, for example, as, quote, “hardline Marxist propagandists.” And we really felt we had been branded with the scarlet letter A, for advocate or activist, and people said we weren’t journalists.

So we want to encourage more and more people like Jose, who is, after all, a Pulitzer Prize–winner from the Washington Post. He has had an outstanding career in journalism, but he’s also probably one of the leading advocates and activists in America when it comes to that very hot topic of immigration. He himself is an undocumented immigrant to the United States, what other people like to call an illegal alien, and he has very proudly and bravely stepped up and announced to the world that he is here and undocumented, and that he is not leaving. So he’s a leader in that field, as well as in journalism.

JJ: We do seem to be getting past this idea that advocacy is somehow the opposite of fairness,  this idea that, well, how can we possibly judge a piece of work’s fairness if it represents a point of view? I think people are coming to understand that you develop critical skills; you don’t just designate some outlets good or some reporters good and then believe everything they say. You have to bring critical skills to bear, no matter what you’re looking at. Do you think that social media is part of how people have just kind of gotten more subtle about it, more critical about it?

RO: Yeah, I think social media has democratized the process, and more and more people are realizing that, you know, frankly it’s hard to talk about objectivity in journalism with a straight face, as one expert, Pat Aufderheide, put it.

JJ: Right.

RO: And, you know, I quote her to that point in an article that’s just appeared on AlterNet today, that I would encourage people to go check out, called “A for Activist.”

So leading theorists like Pat, like Jeff Jarvis, for example, at the CUNY School of Graduate Journalism, they’re on record now as saying if a piece of journalism isn’t advocacy, it isn’t journalism: “After all, what is a journalist if not an advocate on behalf of the public?” That being said, you’re absolutely right that we do have responsibilities as journalists and as advocates to be fair, to provide balance, to look at the situation and come back to the public and tell them to the best of our ability what we believe is the truth, not what is on the one hand this, on the other hand that, he said, she said. That’s not a truthful way of reporting, this so-called objectivity, and I think that we’ve all now begun to realize it in the age where, thanks to social media, frankly, all of us are potentially journalists.

JJ: Well, I think one of you and Danny Schechter’s gifts to media criticism and activism was to go from that insider point of view, from working within corporate media, so-called mainstream media. Because we talk a lot about owner bias and advertiser bias, and those are real, for sure, but one of the things that you shone a spotlight on was just an institutional climate that leads to a timidity within journalists themselves. And I only say that to say you’re not joking to underscore that there’s a stipend with this award, because we have to actually reward different kinds of work, don’t we, if we want to encourage them?

RO: We have to reward and we have to encourage it. And I can tell you from my past, from having left the corporate media, the mainstream media, and going independent, that getting resources is always the biggest struggle. Getting the story is hard, but getting the resources to put that story out there in front of the public is even harder. So we thought that it was important, not only to honor the work, but to support the work. And I’m very happy that an anonymous donor came forward and has funded the first five years of this award. So we are able to offer a small stipend, but $3,000 in the right hands can be the difference between success and failure.

JJ: I want to underscore that although we’re saying that we are seeing more and more of people reporting, and being recognized as good reporters, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that they’re expressing a point of view, at the same time, activism, and that includes activist journalism, by definition isn’t really safe. And I guess you could hardly make that clearer than with the inaugural winner, with Jose Antonio Vargas. But it’s important to remember that we aren’t talking about just doing super-good reporting; that’s going to win you any kind of award. It’s a particular kind of barrier-pushing work that you’re looking to honor.

RO: That’s absolutely right, and when we started looking for people who might qualify this year, what we found is that there was a plethora of great candidates, ranging from the people who revealed the video in Chicago that led to the police department coming apart and the firing of the head of the police department and a lot of pressure being put on the mayor there. There were a number of cases, just in the past year, of people who had done excellent work from outside the mainstream that made a huge difference in the journalist world, but these were people who were, quite frankly, identified, self-identified, as advocates and as activists. And that’s the shift that we’re seeing, and it’s the shift that I hope that The Danny and the small stipend that comes with it will encourage and will move forward even more rapidly than it’s happening now.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Rory O’Connor. You can find the article “A for Activist: No Longer Journalism’s Scarlet Letter” on AlterNet.org. Rory O’Connor, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RO: Thank you. And thank you, FAIR, for existing.

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