By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

NOTE: This is from Stacey Woelfel’s Substack column, The Last Editor by Stacey Woelfel.

Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.

And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.

News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com

Arrest of Journalists Exposes an Even Bigger Issue for Us to Tackle

Journalists shouldn’t be arrested for reporting the news. That’s an easy position for me to take. But there’s something more important to say about last week’s arrests.

Authoritarians love to jail journalists, so the arrest of two reporters involved in covering a church protest in Minnesota is something we probably should have expected. Dictators will always want to criminalize reporting. It’s their dream to be able to put journalists behind bars to silence them. We’ve been in “soft launch” mode for this tactic for the last 45 years as Republican administrations have verbally demonized reporters and their reporting to turn the public against us. Now it seems we may be moving to full operational status. But here’s the thing—the changing face of journalism (and some bad decisions on the part of journalists) will make it easier for tyrants to justify putting us in jail.

If this were just a case of the feds grabbing reporters from the street as they recorded an event, it would be easy to cry foul and take the high ground.

But the complicating factor in this instance is the mission of the journalists who were arrested. The better known of the pair is Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor (whom that network eventually fired in part due to ageist and sexist comments on air).

In his career’s current iteration, Lemon is what most would consider to be an “advocacy journalist,” part of a movement within our profession that rejects pure objectivity as being impossible to obtain and instead focuses on advocacy as a more effective form of journalism. Its tenets run parallel to most mainstream objective journalism, including the pursuit of truth and accuracy, but the discipline rejects the notion of balanced coverage and the traditional “he said/she said” style of reporting (which advocacy journalists see as amplifying lies and false narratives) in favor of an educated presentation of facts to support solving a problem. Lemon’s YouTube channel is filled with examples of this sort of work. If you ignore the clickbait titles like “Republicans are Running Scared!” and “MAGA’s Second Amendment Hypocrisy Around the Minnesota ICE Crisis!” and actually watch the videos, you’ll see many in-depth discussions of the topics.

Lemon interviews experts—and plenty of pundits—to get his information, favoring those on the left much of the time, but still filling his videos with verifiable facts buried in all the opinion. Also worth noting is that Lemon is Black and has a higher percentage of Black guests on his videos, perhaps his effort to make up for the lack of Black sources on many traditional news outlets.

The other journalist arrested is Georgia Fort. Fort is also Black and makes that identity central to her reporting efforts. She has founded the news site BLCK Press as a means to “connect journalism to Black culture.” And her stories show her advocacy in the topics she chooses to cover, mainly focused on Black and other minority issues in the Twin Cities area. Her approach (and Lemon’s) is not entirely new, but it runs counter to how most journalists working today were trained.

The practice requiring journalists to stand at arm’s length from any ideology or position to maintain their objectivity is largely a 20^th century invention.

One hundred years or so ago, impartial journalism came into vogue as a way to gain professionalism after the yellow journalism era. Most journalists still cling to that practice now despite knowing Fox News basically put an end to objective journalism’s commercial viability 25 years ago. Journalists like Lemon and Fort are, of course, working to make a living and they know they need to do something to attract an audience. Just as partisan broadcasting has made Fox News the most profitable of the cable “news” channels, it seems clear there is potential profit to be made in doing the same on a smaller scale. But I believe there’s more than just a profit motive for each of these journalists. Both Lemon and Fort embrace their Black identities and see themselves as valuable advocates to right the wrongs that group faces at a higher rate than others. Having said that, it’s important to note, for the record, that I am a straight, white, upper middle class, cisgender man with a Ph.D. I am not a member of any disadvantaged group. In fact, the entire system in this country is set up to help me succeed at the expense of everyone who’s not in my group. As a member of my very privileged group, I can be empathetic to the plight of others who are disadvantaged, but I can never experience the impact of the system that exploits them. So it is impossible for me to know the lives Lemon and Fort experience. But I can understand their motives.

To be clear, I am NOT advocating a return to an entirely partisan press.

These arrests have been a thorn in the side of many members of the traditional media in Minnesota. Speaking with one longtime journalist there, it was clear that the actions of Lemon and Fort irritated those members of traditional media who follow the traditional set of rules. I get that—I wouldn’t have covered it the way Lemon and Fort did either—and understand why those journalists covered this story in a traditional manner. Traditional, impartial journalism still serves us very well as a method for covering a great deal of the stories we need to cover. But there is something to be said for the notion of giving certain journalists more freedom to advocate. My time teaching documentary journalism at Mizzou showed me the power of in-depth advocacy journalism in the form of documentaries. Very few documentaries focused on current events approach their subject matter from a position of objectivity. Documentary filmmakers often conceive of and execute their films based on standing for a position or principle. If you look at it by the numbers, perhaps the two most commercially successful documentary filmmakers of the past couple of generations are staunch advocates—Michael Moore on the left and Dinesh D’Souza on the right. While I would stop far short of calling either of them journalists, they have demonstrated commercial success in a medium in which advocacy journalism can survive and thrive.

For those of you reading this and getting an icky feeling about advocacy journalism, I would argue you’ve been consuming and accepting it for years. I have yet to meet anyone covering the environment who favors more pollution. I have yet to meet anyone on the science beat who favors cutting scientific research. Even in the political sphere, journalists have always advocated for free, verifiable elections, transparency in government and the rights of all citizens to be involved in the process. The work Lemon and Fort are doing are important extensions of what their backgrounds and experiences have made them believe the norms of society should be.

The important word I’ve left out of these musings so far is “independence.”

Can an advocacy journalist remain independent (Guest writer Scott Libin has an excellent take on this in the Dave Busiek on Media Substack today)? The question needs clarification because we must also specify independent of what or whom. Lemon makes a serious mistake in his coverage of the church protest, using the word “we” when seemingly referring to the intended actions of the protest group. It was part of a live feed on YouTube and he may have misspoken, using the royal “we” to speak just of himself. More likely, he truly was referring to himself acting with the group. An impartial journalism would have used the word “they” to reference only the group he was covering.

As for Fort, she hands over her microphone to one of the protestors, leaving the impression that person is speaking into the camera as a member of Fort’s crew. Again, it may just have been a practical way to hear what the protestor was saying over the loud commotion going on at the time. But it may may also have been a sign that Fort associates herself with the protest organization and is not acting independently of it.

That perception of a lack of independence from these two journalists is key for me.

I believe there’s a place in our profession for advocacy journalism IF the journalists employing it stay independent from specific organizations and institutions and focus only on the ideal for which they are advocating. For instance, one can practice advocacy journalism on behalf of the environment without becoming a mouthpiece for organizations like the Sierra Club. To address reporting on the church protest, I believe Fort and Lemon could have covered the event as advocacy journalists focused on the ideals of equal treatment for all and not have cozied up so much to the specific protest group they accompanied into the church.

I respect Georgia Fort’s and Don Lemon’s passion for the subject matter they are covering. As stated, I cannot fully understand what they live each day and believe they are better suited to cover the plight of the less privileged than I am. My desire is for them and other advocacy journalists to find a position of independence that allows them to passionately seek truth about the issues that matter to them the most. The perception that Lemon and Fort did not do that when entering that church with the protestors has distracted from what should be the real offense we are talking about—the arrest of journalists covering a story. That threat still looms large. In its now commonplace hypocrisy, MAGA will continue to praise the one-sided advocacy of Fox News while condemning legitimate journalists who step even slightly off the line of completely down-the-middle reporting. Those in power who have long harbored the desire to put journalists in jail for doing their job have tasted blood with these arrests—and they’ll likely be back for more soon. Let’s not make it easy for them to pick us off one by one.

TV Sports Reporter Loves Storytelling: Being On-Camera? Not so Much