Confronting Racial Bias in Journalism—and Exercising the Self-Audit

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

By: Maeghan Ouimet

A reckoning is happening in our world today. What was once, quite wrongly, a subtle rumble is now a roar. 

Racial injustice is sewn into the fabric of our lives—it touches every industry and is perpetuated in pervades out everyday experiences. For some, racial injustice has always been the reality, for others, a new revelation. LaunchSquad is committed to doing the work and having the uncomfortable conversations required to make sure that the industry in which we work (namely, journalism and its peripheries) confronts racial bias today and in the future.

We believe the work starts by understanding and acknowledging. So, before we dive into a giant topic that won’t be fully covered by a single blog post, we acknowledge that we are two white people of privilege. We’re not lecturing, merely sharing what we have learned from Black voices like journalist Isaac J. Bailey, NYT op-ed editor Janee Desmond Harris, WBUR talk show host Tonya Mosley, and artist and media critic Alexandra Bell.

It’s no secret that racial bias is prevalent in journalism. It’s loud in the newsroom and it’s been louder as of late: just look at the culture of racism coming to light at Conde Nast publications like Bon Appetit or the Pittsburgh Gazette silencing two Black reporters for speaking out on Twitter about the George Floyd protests. Beyond the examples, the numbers are dismal. According to Pew research, just 7% of newsroom employees are Black. This needs to change and is a glaring issue the industry needs to reckon with. 

It will take time and we believe it can happen. But one thing we can work to change in the short term is the implicit bias in the industry. There are a number of areas where this happens, but time and again we see it in source materials, passive voice, and headlines and layout. And once we acknowledge these, the next step is  to commit to take an objective look at our own work in this context—the self-audit.

Source Materials

At the beginning of an interactive workshop on counteracting bias held by Harris and Mosley a few years ago, the two asked the more than 50 journalist attendees to participate in an exercise: close your eyes and think about the 5 people you trust the most. When eyes were opened the challenge was, “when it comes to race, gender, sexual orientation and disability, are these five people different from you?”

The answer was revealing. Reporters have trusted sources and they use these sources repeatedly, but, more often than not, those sources think—and look—a lot like they do. Here is where the real work comes in, the work of the self-audit.

“If implicit bias is essentially having our thinking on auto pilot, the self-audit is the journalist re-taking the wheel,” Bailey wrote.

Journalists and communications professionals can retake the wheel with our source material by pushing ourselves to be more inclusive in our outreach and in the places we turn to for information.

Passive Voice

As writers we’re taught that the passive voice is really just a bad style choice. Sometimes it’s merited and even needed, most times it’s not. But the passive voice, especially in journalism, can both serve as a way to decrease the accountability of the subject of a sentence, and, when used inconsistently, it can show bias toward one person or group over others.

Dana Sitar from Poynter shared this example from a recent New York Times tweet. While the writer of the Tweet appears to have pulled verbiage from the articles it references, the intent doesn’t matter, the impact is the same.

The focus on the protestors in the second headline is clear, as they are the subject of that sentence. There is less focus and accountability on the officer who shot a reporter with a rubber bullet since he is the object of the sentence. This tweet is powerful because it shows, side-by-side, the different effect the passive voice and the active voice have on the reader and the biases it perpetuates. It is also a lesson on the importance of consistency.

Headlines and Layout

Headlines, photos, and layout are equally as important to edit for bias than the actual words of an article. In fact, with so much media consumption on platforms that often only show headlines and photos (social media, Slack, news aggregators), this type of editing may even be more important to audit for bias.

This New Yorker video featuring Bell shows stark examples of widespread bias in headlines and the way news pages are produced. In the video she shows an example of a headline from the Brazil Olympics about the U.S. men’s swimming team robbery scandal alongside a large photo of a black sprinter, Usain Bolt (with a separate, unrelated caption).

This type of juxtaposition in the page layout, no matter what is written in the article, contributes to unfair stereotypes and racial bias. And as with the active/passive voice example, no matter the intent, the lack of a self-audit produces a harmful result.

Moving Forward

The potential for bias in the media can come from many different places. It’s not just writers. It’s editors, photo editors, layout editors, headline writers, fact checkers, and more. This underscores that self-auditing as an industry (and also as readers) is the only way we will start to recognize and eliminate the biases that have gone unnoticed by so many for so long. The action we, LaunchSquad, will take based on our learning here is to bring a new lens to the way we write, read and edit. We will be conscious editors and self-auditors, with an eye for the usual things like style and grammar, but also for more important things like equity and justice.