Share and speak up for justice, law & order.
This article is based on questions (below) addressing the relevancy of media objectivity by the Columbia Journalism Review. I spent thirty-five years directing multi-award-winning media relations for national and state criminal justice organizations. I understand what happens when events go from incident to issue. I wrote a book about my experiences (below).
What do I mean by incident to issue? Incidents are just that, they are events that get media coverage for short periods of time. Issues go on for much longer. American policing is now an issue receiving widespread negative media coverage over the course of years.
Abstract
Lewis Raven Wallace was fired from Marketplace for questioning the mainstream media s conception of journalistic neutrality. He developed his critique in his 2019 book,
The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, a podcast of the same name, and in several ancillary products. Wallace concludes that “objectivity is a false ideal that upholds the status quo”, and news judgement has less to do with objective criteria than with “who controls the narrative, whose narratives matter, and how the appearance of mattering is created in a society rife with entrenched inequality”.
Recommended Citation
Boynton, Robert S., The View from Somewhere: A Review,