Redwood Voice’s Persephone Corvid Rose filed a piece last week, Student Activists Accuse CPH of Suppressing Dissent After Harassment & Arrests, and the comments it’s garnered online deserve a response. Those comments, at least on the Facebook pages it’s been shared to, have been mostly negative. Understandable, in our little red county. But one in particular needs to be addressed. In it, the commenter thought they were pointing something out by saying the piece isn’t “reporting,” and that no article should start with a press release. I agree, in a sense, this piece is not “reporting” in the inferred sense the commenter seems to have meant. It has a point of view, takes a stand, and ends with a “call to action” — all things that would have both purists and partisans up in arms if they occurred above the fold in the Times or Post.
Redwood Voice was initially created to foster youth voices, to show youth that what they think and what they have to say matters. Part of its mission from the beginning has been activism. Admittedly, during RV’s tenure as part of KFUG (it existed as a “project” before, under the auspices of other non-profit sponsors) I’ve personally steered it into the realm of more mainstream journalism, a transformation cemented by the addition of Jessica Cejnar Andrews, a “real” journalist. I’ve done this because our community needs access to itself, we need to know what’s happening in the Flynn Center, on South Beach, up Low Divide. Despite our verdant surroundings, Del Norte is decidedly a “news desert.”
This pull between different journalistic approaches has created tension. In editorial meetings, Jessica and Persephone have often debated the role of RV’s reporting, and how much of a stand we should take in what we report. Most articles, replete with budget numbers and politician’s measured quotes, do not seem to have a “point-of-view,” or their stance is something we can all accept without question, e.g. wildfires are BAD, m’kay? When Jessica and Persephone get into these discussions, I usually sit back and let them have at. I think it’s a very healthy discussion that every journalist should regularly engage in, and organizations such as ours benefit greatly by these exchanges. But, as the guy at the end of the table, I’m usually asked to chime in, and my response is always the same: Every piece of journalism, no matter how dry and functional it seems, has a point of view. The first “stance” taken is an existential one: someone decided you need to know this. After that, everything from word choice to the quotes used colors a piece, giving it, at the very least, a “flavor.” To deny this is to play dumb, in my estimation, and represents one of the biggest challenges modern American journalism faces — the fallacy of objectivity. This fallacy gets expressed most often when journalists, in their laudable effort to be both fair and balanced, end up giving the most space to the loudest participants in whatever the issue of the day might be. Mix in a little profit-motive, and the next thing you know, the news has become a winding gyre of escalating vehemence, each shouting voice trying to “control the narrative.” This is good for clicks, but ultimately bad for us all.
Ultimately, our internal discussions end in the same place: transparency. When RV collectively or one of our reporters singly takes a conscious position in a piece, we strive to make that apparent to the reader. One way we do this is to publish pieces such as Rose’s (and this article, too) under the category we call In Media Res. That’s Latin for “in the midst of things.” These articles place the author (and, by extension, the reader) right in the action, right there in the middle where every direction is a “point of view.” In the before-times, when news was made of paper, these articles would appear on the Editorial or Features pages. Most of the pieces I’ve written have been IMR pieces, only because I enjoy writing that way, and besides, we have Jessica for the “reporting.” (Though a recent article Jessica wrote about the Fire Safe Council losing Federal grant funding got several comments accusing us of being anti-Trump, which only proves that in this age of narrative control, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.)
Interestingly, another debate we’ve had is whether or not RV reporters should be allowed to participate in public protests in their off-time. While I am certainly cognizant of the potential pitfalls and conflicts that could arise if, say, a reporter marched in a demonstration and then reported on that same demonstration, there’s no way in Hell I’d ever tell any RV reporter what he/she/they can or cannot do when they aren’t on the clock. As Editor-in-Chief, my role is to ensure that our reporters report on issues responsibly; and if they have a vested interest in a story, that their “skin in the game” is presented openly as part of that story. That’s an example of the kind of internal checks-and-balances (remember those?) that keep organizations like ours accessible and relevant.
Redwood Voice is comprised almost entirely of humans. (There’s a cat named Sgt. Peepers, too.) And we humans have thoughts and feelings and opinions about what is happening all around us. Take me, for example. Being as public a person as I’ve become, I’ve learned to pick my fights. Another term for this is self-censoring, and that can be just as dangerous an impediment to truth as lying. So, be warned: I am not down with the dismantling of the administrative state, or oligarchy, or billionaires deciding who gets Social Security checks. I don’t want the Postal Service privatized, the Department of Education destroyed, or our forests cut down for “national security.” I believe in inclusion, polyglot diversity, and the right to march in the streets with signs that read “Fuck Trump.”
Does this influence our coverage? Yeah, a little bit. There’s a reason we want to tell the stories of the parks employees who’ve been fired. There’s a point to us telling you about the Federal funding that’s been cut to Del Norte, funding that has been used to take care of the less fortunate and keep the homes of the more fortunate from burning in the next wildfire. None of this is happening in an “objective” vacuum. All of this affects all of us.
While Rose’s piece on the student activists’ arrest wasn’t necessarily “reporting,” it was very much journalism. She reached out to CPH for comment on the accusations leveled in the activists’ press release. (And got a copy-paste statement in reply.) Rose made every attempt to present both sides of a divisive story, corroborate facts, and paint as accurate a picture as possible. Does she have “feelings” about student activists being charged with crimes that seem to criminalize dissent itself? Of course she does. We all should.
It’s important that the youth reporters at Redwood Voice know the difference between advocacy and more “mainstream” journalism; equally important, our readers need to know when we veer from one into another. Rose recognized the point of view she came to the story with, which is why it appears under the archaic and pretentious phrase In Media Res.
Sometimes, in the midst of things, you’re going to piss someone off. For the conscientious, dedicated journalist – like Rose – that can simply mean you’re doing a good job.
