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Today's episode of Small Doses Podcasts, we are joined by Nikole Hannah-Jones and I am going to fan girl. But y'all aren't going to be able to see it, but I'm just saying it so that y'all know what's happening. Because it's an intellectual fan girl, which is happening in here. Nikole Hannah-Jones for those who don't know is a journalist and the creator of the 1619 Project, which came out for the New York Times.
And for many people was a really groundbreaking approach to understanding not only the beginning of slavery, but also how it has manifested through not only America, but globally in terms of creating policy legislation and carrying forth racism in a myriad of ways. And she literally want to pull a surprise for this.
There's also the 1619 Podcasts, there's the 1619 series, I think this is on Hulu, and what makes it so unique is that she is so deathly able to blend together the spaces of journalism as a fact reporting medium and history as a fact reporting medium, but then narrative. And in this interview, she really talks about how narrative is so important as a key to journalism being effective. And that was something that I just had never had the words for.
It was something I feel like I kind of knew intrinsically, like, oh, I responded these stories more. Or I've noticed that people respond to these stories more, but I don't think I had really actually just pinned it down to like, oh, it's because it is presented as a story. Versus as just a gathering of facts presented to you that let you know that it's real, et cetera, et cetera.
And in my work, I really try my best to use narrative to get folks interested in things that they may not have had a curiosity about, right? Even with Inamanda We Trust, the documentary, the method through which I was trying to get y'all to give a fuck about government was through the narrative of what if I ran for office? Right? Like we could have approached it as just like, hey, y'all didn't know about government. Well, now you know this.
But I intrinsically felt like that was the way that people would get more interested in it and then add comedy, et cetera. So this interview was very affirming for me. A main character. This was just in that. But for those of us who are very much closely watching what has been going on in HESA, for those of us who have always been keenly aware of the landscape that we live in as black folks in America, we know that journalism as a craft, right?
Journalism as a profession has also been a tool, right? It's been an integral part of change happening, right? Like when people say, why don't people care more about or care just as much about what's going on in the Congo as much as they do about what's going on in Palestine?
I think a lot of folks, it's not that they don't care. They don't know. And a lot of the reason that they don't know is because there has been an ability for the people of Palestine, as well as the journalists who are of the people of Palestine to get their story out in a way that the people of the Congo have been unable to do so. They've been prevented from doing that in a myriad of ways. And there have been a multitude of efforts that have been made to the point of literally murdering.
I mean, for those of us who see what's happening in HESA, we are just distraught by the ways in which these people are being treated, but also the way that the press has been treated. And we talk about that in this interview specifically. We speak directly to the ways in which just literally journalism in general has approached everything since October 7th and the field of journalism.
So I was really, really happy to be able to speak to somebody from the inside about that because I know as an outsider who is not a part of the journalistic profession, it has been very, very frustrating in a myriad of ways to see how bias the reporting has been. And for many of us, it feels as if that reporting has added to the continued onslaught, right?
The media's unwillingness to truly address what is going on with honesty has furthered and fueled the fire of so many to continue to cast Palestinians aside as not lives worthy of being lived and as a culture that is not worthy of preserving. So it really is a great conversation that we got to have around what journalism actually is, what it has meant for Nicole Hannah-Jones as a profession and what she feels its role is in society.
So stick around, we're going to get into it, but first let's do a little gem drop in. So today's gem drop in is journalist versus pundit. Now I think it's very important to really like specify for y'all that when we're seeing people that are coming on to CNN, etc. And they're just like talking about things. They are not necessarily a journalist and just because they're on a news channel doesn't mean they're a journalist.
I have been on CNN, MSNBC, Al Tassida, I turned down fuck news, I just called it fuck news, Freud and Slip, but I have been on all of those platforms to speak not even as an expert sometimes, but just to speak because they're like, oh she's good at speaking. Like she be having thoughts. And I think sometimes so many of us are misappropriating those people with a title of journalists that they haven't earned.
When we're talking about a journalist, we're talking about somebody that is seeking out information to form a story that needs to be told to the community, the society, etc. in order for there to be advancement around this issue.
Now that can be a feel good story. That can be a police brutality story. You know, that can be like the investigative journalism that we have seen in movies like the paper, movies like damn what's that movie about the Boston Globe who uncovered the story about the Catholic priests spotlight. There it is. The paper is by the way is one of my favorite movies of all time, but journalists are entering into this space with the goal of attracting public interest through reporting.
Pundits are brought into a space to oftentimes represent the public about a topic that's been reported on. The important difference here is that one of these people is very vested and somewhat an expert in the thing that they're talking to you about. And the other is representing folks who are literally not experts, but simply the body that will be affected by this thing.
And we have to understand the difference because we also need to be so much more media savvy in knowing when we are being told facts versus editorialism. Right, being able to understand that this is someone who is telling us something based on sources based on research based on study and this is someone who is telling us something based on their experience based on their opinion based on their insight.
And it's not to say that these things don't have their own values uniquely, but it is important to know that one is giving you empirical evidence and the other is giving you individual evidence. When you can identify those things differently, you're able to know where your truth is coming from and what the truth actually is and how much more truth you need to go get.
So when we're talking about just watching the news and hearing Pundits talk so often I see people see that and then take those statements as like the facts and then repeat them somewhere else because they heard it here and they feel like this is a trusted platform.
I know a former good friend of mine who literally has based him near his whole career on just repeating things he's heard from other people and that people have now given him, you know, carte blanche as if he is an expert on when really it's not even his own research. It's not even his own study. It's not even his own gathering of sources around an opinion. It literally is, oh, this was someone else's opinion and I liked it. So now I'm saying it as my own.
And of course as humans, like that's a natural thing that happens, but when it comes to punditry, you then just continue to perpetuate a thought around something that someone else did.
You're not creating new thoughts. And the idea and the goal of journalism in my opinion is that it is presenting you with information that is allowing you as a reader to create your own response to it, which hopefully will create action that can somehow support it or get rid of it or you know some type of social catalyst.
So I really want us to continue to grow in our media literacy. It's something I try my best to do on my Instagram page is really point out when we see discrepancies point out that, oh, this is an opinion. This is not a fact really identified these things because the better we can be at it, the better will be able to support also true journalism and its most effective fashion and a true journalist in their most effective fashion like this one right here, Ms Nicole Hannah Jones.
Yeah, we are so honored to finally be joined by I mean, I'm not really even sure. Do you know how much people love you? And of course, I don't know. I know how much you know. I feel a lot of love. I do. I'm very grateful. Doctor Nicole Hannah Jones, you are somebody that I feel like has really opened a portal for a lot of folks and not just black folks, but just like into the truth, right?
And as we are in a time that seems to just be so dedicated to like, nah, shut up and not don't learn that like when I saw Florida was bathing dictionaries. That's like, oh, y'all, y'all are on a different level of commitment to ignorance. And it's bonkers to me. I think for, for a lot of folks, they may think that you're a, just like a historian or a professor, but ultimately you refer to yourself as a journalist and I am a journalist.
Right. But I think people don't understand the concept of journalism as being able to be historical and as a space for teaching, et cetera, because I think especially in the current climate, we just don't see a lot of it. We kind of see people claiming to be journalists. I mean, you could be a journalist on TikTok now. I don't know if you know this.
I mean, you could be a legitimate journalist on TikTok. Many are not. You need to be much more discerning of, you know, where we get our information from and our sources. But, you know, to be clear. So since we're talking about truth, I'm not a doctor. I only have honorary doctorates. I don't have a real one that I.
And my primary job is I'm a writer at the New York Times. So I am a journalist. I've been a journalist 20 years. I just have always loved history. My first degrees are in history and African American studies. And I really feel that you cannot practice journalism. If you're not historically informed, how do you write about any of the things we're seeing in our society, but particularly race and politics.
You don't understand the history of our country and what built them. So I am a journalist. People get confused because I spend a lot of time in history. But my real job is the New York Times. That's what I do. And as far as the space of journalism as it exists right now, how would you consider the climate to be different than when you got into the field, if at all.
In some ways, it's very much the same, not diverse enough. Newsrooms are not reflective of the multiracial democracy that we have. Newsrooms often take diversity as optional or something extra you can do if you have money to do it and not as a necessity.
Newsrooms mean our report is more accurate that our report actually reflects what's happening in our country and the real people's lives. It actually holds up to me our highest mandate, which is to whole power accountable and speak on behalf of the vulnerable. And I think we clearly still struggle with that. I think what's different now is we do have black journalists in positions that you didn't really see when I first started out 20 years ago.
We have a tremendous megaphone to do groundbreaking reporting and reporting like the 6019 project. But we're also in some ways fundamentally more broken than we were when I started. There are so many fewer journalism jobs. Local journalism has really been gutted. We're seeing local news organizations shuttering. So I think the American population is at once and undated with information in ways we haven't seen.
But they also don't know what's good information. Yes, what's that information. What's an accurate source of information. And I think we have totally failed to understand how does one cover the Trump era. We are indoctrinated as journalists into this idea of objectivity. But how does one have balance when you have one political party that's gone completely broke that is explicitly saying actually if democracy is multiracial, we don't want it.
And I don't think we have figured out how to cover Trump. I don't think we've figured out how to cover in America where democracy even for white people is not secure. I mean, you know democracy for black people. But where even white people may lose the democracy they have. And I just don't think we figured that out at all. And news in some ways is broken.
I mean, is it I feel like at this point people have oftentimes through their journalistic platforms, bastardized objectivity to become both sides of them. And I thought you're going to have something to say about that, but you just co-signed it. All right. Cool. I mean, so one, let me let me be clear. I've never believed in objectivity. I don't think it's possible.
Because objectivity means you don't have an opinion on what you're covering, you're neutral. I don't think it's possible for human beings to be neutral. I actually, even though I've worked in mainstream media my entire career or legacy white media, I see myself in the tradition of the black press. That's why I say journalism to me is activism. Journalism is not a neutral profession. You know, the Washington Post, the motto of the Washington Post is democracy dies in darkness.
That's not neutral. Right. That's a shaded position. Yeah. That democracy matters and that our job as journalists is to protect democracy. So I think, you know, this idea of objectivity in news is very recent. Prior to really the 1960s, 1970s, most newspapers had a kind of stated point of view. The New York Times was founded as a Republican newspaper, Republicans, you know, before the switch as an anti-slavery party Republicans.
And so you had an understanding that people who report news are human beings and they have opinions on things. I think what I strive for and what I think journalismistically we have to have is objectivity of method. So I'm not pretending when I write about race, I don't have stakes in this, that I don't have opinions on this, that if I'm writing about school segregation, it's clearly because I think school segregation is wrong and we should do better for our kids.
But my method has to be objective. Am I being fair? Are my facts correct? Right. Am I accurately representing the different perspectives? But not with, as you said, this both side is them. I'm not going to represent those who want inequality as having, you know, a valid point of view.
As those who don't, I will reflect their point of view. But what we've run into, we saw this with climate change though we've corrected on that where even though 10% of scientists were climate change deniers, we would give them even weight in a story to make it seem like we were being balanced.
So now we struggle of course with that when we're covering politics. We feel like if we write something that looks negative about Republicans, we have to balance that out with something that looks negative about Democrats when these two things are no longer the same. So that's really what I push back against and most journalists of color that I know, never pretended to believe in objectivity.
The difference is we're much more honest where many of my white journalists, the colleagues pretend to be objective, but you and I can look at the coverage of any given day and not believe that it's objective for a second, right? Not believe that the way that anything is being covered, whether it's from the coverage of Gaza to the coverage of the immigration crisis to racial injustice in the United States to the anti-CRT.
Every day we see evidence that we are not an objective field, we are a field that produces news made by human beings who have thoughts, feelings and experiences and are reporting through their own lens. Life is full of things to manage, your work, your family, your plans and your treatment.
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I feel like there's a lot of people, myself included, who have, you know, had to look at the career that we stepped into and then had to reformulate it once we got into mix. And it's like we still want to do this thing, but we realize that the space in which we're doing it, now that we're in it, is different than maybe what we thought of when we were on the outsider. Do you feel like you had that experience or did you know going in like, I'm going to be in here kung fu fighting.
Yeah, I don't feel like I didn't have to be disabused of any kind of idealism about the profession. I study Race 4, a living, I knew going in that the types of stories I wanted to cover would be a challenge to cover them because that's what drove me to be a journalist in the first place was looking at the way my communities, black communities were being covered in mainstream media and saying that doesn't reflect the reality that I see.
That doesn't reflect the community I live in the people I know so I knew that I was going to be going in oppositional to the normative ways of coverage of my profession so I'm not shocked by that. I think what I did have to adjust to is how hard it would be even when people hired you understanding the type of journalism you wanted to do that they like the idea of it they like phenotype diversity so they like to be able to say.
We hired a black reporter, but they don't want that black reporter reporting from a black perspective and that definitely was a struggle throughout my career. When you found yourself in those situations, how did you stay the course? Yeah, you know, yeah. I mean, it was a few things like one, there was certainly before I moved to New York, I was working at a regional newspaper in Oregon and Oregon. We got you to wait, put a pin in it. Yeah. Oregon.
People literally only go to Oregon to work for Nike. Like what got you in Oregon? Yeah, so you know, when you're starting out in journalism, at least the way it used to be, if you had a very traditional career, it's kind of like academia in that way. You start off in a small market and you go where the jobs are, you just try to work your way up to a big newspaper and a big market where you want to work.
So I started my career covering Durham Public Schools in North Carolina and I really wanted to do narrative journalism. So basically journalism that people want to read that actually tells a story and isn't just dry, but tells stories. And at that time, the Oregonian, which was in Portland, Oregon, was known as a narrative paper. So if you wanted to learn to do narrative writing, that's what they were known for.
And I went there and I did get to train with one of the great narrative writing coaches in the industry. I owe, I think, so much of the success I've had as a writer because of that experience. But I also was in a place where we used to call it Portland Nice. You know this. In a place like Portland, why people are progressive on everything, but race, trees, gay rights, women's rights, drugs, you name it. But when it comes to race, they're just as bad or worse.
Yeah. The most places because they think they're progressive and they don't understand that actually you're progressive because there's no black people here. You've never really had to deal with black people. So it was really a struggle for me. I couldn't even get on the front page of the Oregonian. The stories I wanted to write, they really weren't interested in and all of my colleagues, so many of them, other journalists of color, ended up leaving.
But I honestly, I couldn't think of anything else I was going to do with my life. Like I've wanted to be a journalist. Oh, they left their profession. They left their profession, right? They, I mean, at that time, it's kind of like it is now the news industry was really in a death spiral. They were layoffs everywhere. No one was hiring. So it's not like if you didn't like what you were doing, you could go somewhere else. There just wasn't really a lot of options.
And a lot of people just get burned out because you go from one newspaper to another, but you're facing the same issues. Again, they want to be able to tout the diversity numbers, but they don't actually want the diversity of thought that you bring and the eye for story. But I just couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do. Journalism really is my mission. It's my calling. So I stuck it out just because what was I going to do with my journalism? I couldn't imagine it.
Luckily it worked out for me. I was able to come to New York and really have the career. Can you tell me how that happens? That I hope to have. Like how you ended up in New York? Yeah. Was it a resume? Like what was it? Like you were just like, it's time. Well, you know, this is the other thing you learn in life. So much of the opportunities you get is not what you know, but who you know.
You have to know things as well, but just simply having a good resume and putting in the work, sell them open sedoers for you. It's not even just who you know. It's who knows what you do. Right? Yeah, exactly. Because I know people that like know people, I'm like, yeah, but do they know that you're an XYZ? And it's like, well, no, but you know, like I'll get to it. I'm like, you better come out here like, I am a narrative journalist. Hello. Right. Or will they advocate for you?
Right. Well, they pull your resume to the top because I come from a working class family. Like my family could get you a job at the Tyson plant. They could put in a word for you there. But that's right. You could be on the poultry line, but that's literally the only connections that my family had. And I really believe I went to the right school. I'm doing the right internships that that would open the doors. It just, it really doesn't work like that.
So one of my former bosses at the Oregonian left there and came to New York and founded ProPublica. The investigative news organization. So I worked for him. I knew him well. And I had landed on this investigative project about how the government wouldn't enforce the Fair Housing Act. So I called him. And I was like, I don't know how to do this project. I just need help. And he tells me, you know, well, actually, we're hiring. And you want to come do that project for me.
And I was like, hell, yeah, I need to get out of Oregon. I've always wanted to move into New York. So that's literally how it happened. But if I didn't personally know him and he didn't personally know me, my career would have had a very different trajectory. But you know what? Can I just also interject here that he also knew your work ethic?
Like I think sometimes people forget that like even if you're at the place that you don't want to be at, still do the job that you showed up to do because you don't know how that is going to carry you in the next space. If you had been at the Oregonian, like, man, fuck the Oregonian. I'm about to do this bullshit. I'm going to quiet quit. Then when you ended up talking to him at ProBubblica, he'd be like, I mean, you know, when we was working together before, he was very bad. So that's right.
That's right. That was the judge's years. Please, yes, please. Like, listen, I don't ever wanted to mean self-care and the self-care regimen. I never want to sound like you're an old school last woman. Though I am. But I'm also like, what I tell like young people all the time is you can't control anything outside of yourself but your own excellence. That you can control. I can't control how they're going to judge me, whether they're going to give me a fair chance or not.
I can't control any of that. But what I can say is, if I don't get opportunity, it's not for anything that I did not do, that I will have myself in the ready. And then I can look back on my life and whether I had made it out of there or not, I would feel okay about it because two things, for sure. I never sold myself out. So even though they were like, we don't want you writing about this. I was like, this is what I'm here to do.
So I always maintained, even when it hurt me, that I was going to tell the stories I got into journalism to tell. And I was going to do it as excellent as I could no matter what was coming at me. And so you're absolutely right. So when I got my moment, you know, it is a divine sense of cosmic justice, that the thing I am most well known for is the exact type of journalism that I was punished for doing. The blackest shit, the New York Times ever, ever printed is what I'm most known for.
And if I had sold myself out or if I had not been excellent because they were beaten me down, none of this would have happened. So yeah, I needed a well placed, and let's be honest, a well placed white man, I needed that. But I had to be in a position to take advantage of that opportunity when it came. And that I can control. Nobody else can control that but you. Life is full of things to manage, your work, your family, your plans, and your treatment.
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I guess the question I'm trying to ask is like, I think for some people they think of that as like a very specific route. But to me, it seems like your point of view is that that is journalism. Like it's not like this is the type of journalism I do. Like that is journalism as a craft. Yes, absolutely. So one again, to be clear, I'm a reporter. I report. My work is factually sound. I spent many years of my career as an investigative reporter.
So I am in a position where I speak out, I do the type of work I do. Because I first built a career as a good-ass reporter. Like I'm not just coming in, just spouting my opinion. I build a whole career out of that. But I also think journalists of color often get labeled as being activists. But the question is very simple. If I cover child protective services as just a beat reporter. And I expose, you know, how child protective services failed a family and a child die.
I'm not just doing that reporting because I'm like, it would be cool if people knew this. I'm doing that because I want that agency to serve children. Well, I want people to be accountable to the public. That is activism. Now, it's not the activism that's like marching in the street at a Black Lives Matter protest. I'm not allowed to do that as a journalist. And I don't need to do that. Because what I do, why are you not allowed to do that?
Well, because we are not supposed to engage in that sort of activism. Right? Our job is to report the news, not be a part of the news. So to me, our role is we're the journalists who expose what happened to George Floyd. We're the people who provide the information that then leads people to act in the streets. Because they have the information about how these systems are failing us. Or what happened exactly when George Floyd died, right? That is our role.
And that can be tricky because for many Black journalists and young Black journalists in particular, you got into journalism because you want to change your society. And so trust me, it's very hard. I wanted to be in the streets. Of course I do. But I know that's not my role. That my role is to provide the reporting to do the digging to expose the malfeasance. And then you pass that baton to activists to use that information to take to the streets. And we have to work together.
You know, you just look at, for instance, the Civil Rights Movement. One of my favorite books on journalism is called The Race Beat. And it really shows how everything that Dr. King, that Fred Shuttle's worth, that all of the civil rights activists were doing until the media covered it, it didn't matter. Those white politicians did not care. Black people had been living under Jim Crow. They had been being thrown into the river, lynched, killed.
But once the media decided, oh, this is a story we're going to cover. We're going to expose what's happening. That's when we were able to bring about the change. We really have to have both of those forces working together. And I understand my role is to do the digging and the exposing and to bear witness. And other people's roles are to be in the streets forcing politicians and others to change policy. But again, that is a form of activism. That is a form of activism for sure.
I believe in democracy. I believe in equality. I believe in justice. I believe we can have a better country than we have. And my way is to expose the people who make the decisions to keep our country the way that it is. How do you feel about the way the greater journalistic spaces have covered the recent and current genocide on Palestine? Okay. Now you're trying to get me fired. I'm really not. I thought I was not a while. I was like, I don't have a problem with critiquing.
I was like, I don't have a frame this question in a way that does not put her in jeopardy. You know, listen, I think we, my biggest critique of journalism in general and certainly in the way that they have covered the war, is we tend to reflect power and not truth. And I think that so much of the coverage, especially in the early days, the coverage has changed a lot. But when the war first started, well, I wouldn't even call it a war. Oh, it's a war against gazes for sure.
I mean, because I've seen people call it a conflict. Yeah, I don't call it the war against Hamas. I've yet to see the success of that strategy. But, you know, I don't think so. It's fascinating to me that the same profession that talks about independence, that talks about holding power accountable was so timid in the coverage and really was reflecting a very particular world view, which is long been the case really in mainstream media's coverage of Israel.
So myself along with many journalists have been frustrated. And I think the place I have felt the most liberated to speak out on is just the silence around the number of journalists who have been killed. Unbelievable. More journalists killed covering what's happening there than any war that we know of. Literally. In a few months time, and if one journalist, two journalists gets killed covering conflict anywhere else in the world, our profession rises up in a tremendous collective outrage.
There's a journalist right now in Russia, who is being held by the Russian government. And you see ads and newspapers, you see all of these efforts to free him and to make sure that we keep talking about it and in solidarity. And instead, what our profession is largely done is treat was skepticism, whether those journalists and Gaza being killed are really journalists. Literally, like, oh, well, they might be members of Hamas.
Like seeing that was really what blew my mind in terms of the willingness to just that easily just give up the ethical nature of journalism as a unit. Because even, I think for those of y'all who may not be a part of a certain professional, as a comic, there's a camaraderie that we share as comics.
Knowing that we're in the world in a certain way, and that that's going to garner a certain type of behavior, etc., etc., and so when you see other comics being attacked or harmed or during the pandemic, a lot of comics weren't able to work. And so then people pulled money to help. Like that is something that is not easily just severed. So the ease with which that same connectivity within the journalism community was severed from the Gaza journalist was like, it really took me a back.
And I didn't know I'm kind of back too. So that was because I'm like, is that something that is there a journalist group chat where y'all are like, what y'all doing? I mean, my journalist group chat was Twitter, but or X. No, no, it's Twitter. But is Mama, way I'm a calm clay. It's Twitter. Right. Okay. What's so crazy about it, though, Amanda is Western. I don't even like using words like that, right? But journalists from the US, journalists from the UK, we're not even allowed into Gaza, right?
Cover the conflict. So literally the only way to get, I mean, how many times did you see standouts from Tel Aviv that are telling you, ostensibly what's happening in Gaza, but those journalists couldn't even get in there. And if they were, they had to do with IDF and they had to sign agreements, the IDF would review everything before publication, which we don't journalistically were not supposed to do.
And yet you have actual journalists who are from that community who are there covering it, who are dying whose entire families are being killed, and we're not standing up collectively for them. I think that has also changed somewhat, but it's been shameful, frankly. And I also recognize that spirit that oftentimes black journalists who work for
community, you know, black news organizations who do community journalism are also discounted as not real journalists, right? Because you haven't been professionally trained or, you haven't been co-signed by a big white company. But the truth is our profession has only recently been professionalized. Journalism has always been a trade for the vast history of our country. These weren't people who had college degrees in journalism. These were, you know, Frederick Douglass, right?
Right. William Lloyd Garrison. These were people who just went out and began to collect news and put out news, but it wasn't something that you had a master's degree in that you necessarily had a college degree and at all.
That's changed recently, but who is more close to community than people who are in and of the community. And so you would look at this extreme skepticism of reports coming from Gaza journalists, even if they were working for, you know, a mainstream publication, like I just said, and get not that same type of skepticism from people who obviously are also reporting is a Gaza journalist bias towards Gaza.
I would presume so. Right. Like, especially is a Gaza journalist who has seen other Gaza journalists harmed are there's going to be a bias. And do you see the conflict in a different way, right? You're not marking that conflict in October. I mean, this is the same thing that black folks, right? It's like the George Floyd moment doesn't start at the George Floyd moment.
There's decades, there's centuries that read up to that moment, but mainstream media often wants to tell it from the moment of that specific interaction. But while we can recognize that a Gaza journalist is reporting with a bias for sure, we don't recognize that the American journalists are reporting with a bias that they're also not neutral arbiters of the truth that they're also making decisions.
I remember the first few weeks of the conflict. I was like, even when you're reporting on the death toll on Gaza, the only people you're interviewing are Israelis about what happened to them three weeks ago. And that story deserves to be told, but that's not the only story that deserves to be told. So I'm like, you'll be like, oh, 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza.
So let's go back to the Kaboots and talk about, you know, what happened three weeks ago. Okay. But you also have to be there like actually interviewing the living, dying people in the conflict area. And it took us far too long to do that. And if it was a matter of access, then we should just say that we want to interview them, but the Israeli government will not allow us to get in, but we didn't do that.
I mean, I did an Instagram live with Mansor from his tent in Gaza. So it's like if we wanted to, we would and we find ways. We find ways. Life is full of things to manage. Your work, your family, your plans, and your treatment. Consider Kisimta, Ophatuma Mab 20mg injection.
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I feel like when I'm watching certain headlines, I'm like, you shouldn't get to call yourself a journalist. At this point, I mean, so that Brian is actually the one who'll be like, stop calling yourself a journalist. She's like, what about point, I'm out. I mean, I saw a headline that said, less people dying in Gaza. And I was like, you wrote that. I can't comment on that one.
But I'm like, that to me, though, is the kind of headlines that I say to myself, oh, this is the new era of journalism. And I know we're about to go to some questions. But just in case somebody didn't ask this, where does clickbait land? When I say clickbait, where does that land for you? What does that bring up?
Okay, so first, just let me clarify that journalists don't write headlines. We don't write the headlines for our own pieces. And so so often, the headline is not reflecting the journalism, the quality of the journalism, the nuance and the complexity of the story.
The headline writing is not easy either. It is easy for me to like critique everything that journalists are doing, right? But it's actually really hard what we try to do every day. And Lord knows I don't always get it right either. But I do think, you know, the reason it's called clickbait, as you know, you are buying for attention with people who got 10,000 things coming at them.
And so yeah, you try to write that pithy headline that's going to get someone to click through. Now, whether they read the story or not, you need them to click it. That's how Internet advertising works, right? That's why when you're reading an article, it'll have you clicking say, continue reading because those clicks are what adds up to advertising dollars.
And so I do think it's a problem. And as we know, most people don't read articles. They read headlines. And that's all that they end up knowing because they'll say, oh, they didn't talk about this. I'm like, you didn't read the article because it's in the fourth paragraph. I mean, I've literally like, it's because of that. Like someone wrote a headline that was a completely false headline. And I got
different. Based on a headline. If you read the article, you see like nothing in that headline is actually supported in this article. But that line was all that was needed. Yeah. And headlines by definition, who does write that? Cannot have nuance. So for instance, at a newspaper, we have copy editors. So they're the ones who kind of are like the last layer of defense going through checking to make sure the copy is right. And they are the ones who also read the story and write the headline.
Now, again, you have a certain amount of space to write the headline. So they may try to write a more nuanced headline, but it has to fit across the page. And so they have to try to then make it more simple so they can use fewer words. I'm not justifying anything, but it is hard to do right all of the time. And then if you also consider the people writing the headline, they're working on multiple articles a day. They don't have the expertise.
They're reading it or like, this seems like the most interesting thing. So let me put that in the headline. But that wouldn't necessarily be with the person who has the expertise who wrote the article, who has all of the backstory and the nuance, what have used for the headline. And oftentimes journalists will read a headline, go ballistic.
Yes. And then right and then say, oh, my God, you'll have to change this headline. The beautiful thing though about social media is we can get corrections now in real time, which was not the case when I first started out. It comes out in the newspaper. You read it. You're like, this shit is crazy. All you can do is send a letter to the editor that may or may not get published. But now I mean, we see it all the time.
A headline will come out. People will get outraged on the internet. And then that headline will change within the hour. And I think the beautiful thing is even as news is struggling. It's also become more democratized that any of us can actually have feedback and change coverage.
Just a side note, you said something that really like struck me because you said, you know, journalism only recently became like professionalized like it was a trade. Like it was something that people picked up. And like, I think I've really forgotten that I like spent a good amount of time like doing journalism. Like, I used to write for double XL and for the source and for all hip hop.com. And I was like literally in this moment. I'm like, hola.
I was just like, I wasn't just writing the story. Like I wanted people to hear something from these people, right? And my questions weren't just like, hey, what's your album? Like, so I don't know. You just awaken something from me that I have been telling me lately. Like, thank you for the work you're doing. Like, whether it's on Instagram. And I'm just like, well, I'm just like sourcing things and sharing them or like, you know, trying to provide context, etc.
And over, I'm like, you're kind of journalistic, but I don't want to claim it because people really do this as a goddamn job. And I will never take on someone's craft that I'm just like kind of dad. I don't like the dabblers. People who like dabble in something and be like, yeah, I'm a DJ. That's an iPhone. That's an iPhone. Cut it out. Cut it out.
But what I was going to say about that is that I think the responsibility of truth is like the biggest difference I've seen in people who are journalists and people who are just like in these positions. And when I look at the older videos of anchors, like Connie Chung and such. And how they echo the anchors that are frustrating so many of us right now who are considered journalists, right?
They're like called like news journalists or like, and I'm like, no, that's anchor. They're reading a prompter. But they're given this title of journalists because they're like, I guess talking about news. I'm not joking. Nicole, I don't realize how much Fox News shit was happening before Fox News. Like I didn't realize how much swaying was happening. I saw an interview of Connie Chung interviewing a mirror baraka the other day in 2001 post 9-11 and she was standing 10 toes down.
10 toes down on like, no, you don't know what you're talking about. And now here we are in 2024. And it's like, well, ma'am, you didn't know what you was talking about neither. But you had the system at your back, right? Like you had CNN at your back. And I wonder how much of that was not just them having CNN at their back, but on their back to push this particular agenda.
And so many of us didn't know better than to understand that like, oh, this is somebody who knows the news. He's the guest. She's on the news channel. She's the journalist. And it's like, no, so that's one of the things I'm noticing now as we're seeing journalism shift in terms of it dying. I'm seeing more people start to question what does this space really mean and being deliberate about lifting up people like yourself who are representing it in a way that I feel like they want it to mean.
Like I think people want journalism to be about activism and about actual truth and not just about saying what happened today. Yeah, so let me just speak out on behalf of my profession. I've spent a lot of time critiquing the profession. And I've been a print journalist my entire career. And so I really tend to see journalism through that lens, even though I think the way most people interact with journalism is through television. Yeah.
And I can tell you there are within my organization within every news organization, people just as dedicated this profession does matter. And we all fail to some degree. I wish we could be more self reflective as a profession. But most people I know really are trying to do a service.
Most people who got into journalism did get into journalism because they think it's critical to our democracy and to a fair society. It doesn't mean they don't have flaws. They don't bring their own biases. They don't reflect the hierarchies of our society. They do. But they also spend months and months and months tracking down public records and sitting in on school board meetings and reading the budget for all the people who would never go to a county commission meeting.
And I hope our profession is not dying. We're struggling. We're struggling a lot because people don't think they should have to pay for news. They don't understand that. It costs a lot of money to be the one sitting in all these meetings and revealing all the shenanigans of our elected officials and powerful people.
And I fear Amanda that it's going to be one of those things where it's hard for us to realize what we're losing because we feel like we're getting a lot of information. But we're not getting a lot of good information of vetted information that journalist actual journalists have standards. We have to actually, you know, verify things. We have to be able to know source that these are facts. Right. We have to have sources.
Most people don't actually understand the degree to which journalists stay up at night every time you publish a story because you're afraid that you got something wrong. All of us do that if we're actual journalists. And that when we lose it is when we will realize how much we need it and it might be too late. I don't agree with our founders of this nation on almost anything.
But one thing they understood is you can't have a free society without a robust press. And I just think that our democracy is in danger. If we do not maintain a strong press and we are in a bit of a desperate, especially with local news. And I'm not sure what we're going to do to save it. But I just fear that the average American won't realize what's lost until it's gone.
I just feel like the standards that you named are being upheld professionally in the same way that you were held to and you came into this space. I think for most journalists, yes. Not individually from the journalists, but from the actual powers that be. I do. I do. I mean, I take Fox News out of that altogether. I don't consider Fox News a news organization.
I think most news organizations do try to adhere to standards again, fail all the time, critique media all the time, but they strive for it. I do think so. I think most people in who's taken their seriously. Now the problem is, of course, we have a lot of billionaires who are just buying up news organizations who see them as they hope as a money making scheme.
I don't know how you were good. They thought that was going to be the case. Right. They're not actually interested. I think some of the ownership is not necessarily interested in standards. And, you know, yeah, it's like Boeing being run by billionaires who don't care about these planes should actually fly without pieces falling off in the middle of the lake. No, that was DEI. That was all. It was, you know, it was actually a lot for them. It was a lot.
So I'm blessed enough that I work for, you know, the New York Times is still family owned and it is owned by the same family that founded the New York Times and they care about journalism. Doesn't mean we don't make mistakes, but I don't ever come to work thinking I work for institution that does not actually care about journalism.
So I think most are, I do think we get confused about the difference between punditry and journalism. Yes. Right. So, yes. People you see on your TV news aren't journalists. Nope. But people think it is, but you understand what people think it is. That's, of course they do. Yes. I'm watching a news channel. I'm assuming that the people who are speaking to me, unless they're an expert in the government or an expert elsewhere, are journalists.
But many of them are not. And so I do think that that is confusing to people. And I think that that leads to the distrust that many people have of the news. And then we all get lumped together again. The New York Times does something very, very different than the hour long cable news show on CNN. We don't do the same things. Now there are reporters at CNN who do the same things, but they're not the ones hosting the show. Right.
So I think that that has helped build distrust, but I think on a daily basis, people get into this profession because they see it as a tremendous service. And they feel an obligation to try to report the truth, even if again, they often do so very imperfectly.
Well, we have some questions from the people because the people are very curious about just your thoughts on everything, but we're going to keep it specific to this. Now shout out to all of our Patreon members. The Seal Squad is in the building. So if you want to listen to these questions, you got to head on over to my Patreon.
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Damn, you know, that was not, I have been interviewed many, many, many, many times. And I definitely never got that question. I don't want to get a question about my shoe fetish, but we're going to go with my love life. You know, this is probably the question that asked my husband and not me. I will tell you, one thing my husband, he would joke about is when I'm in the throws of a story, nobody better talk to me. Period.
I go down in the basement. I stay in the basement for days up on end. If I was a man, I'd come out with a beer, and I'm not a pleasant person to be around. Writing is hard. Journalism is hard. You know, trying to translate what's in your head to the page is grueling. Most journalists hate writing. We just love having written. Once it's done and out in the world, it feels amazing, but the process is grueling. So yeah, yeah, that's all I'll say about this.
Well, we appreciate you sharing even that tidbit. Thank you so much for the work that you do and that you continue to do and for what you are inspiring folks to do. And, you know, I think what's been great about my audience is that they're really an action based audience. A lot of the people that listen to this podcast, like they really want to live in their best selves and preserve the best parts of this society to the best of their ability.
And you gave folks real tangible ways in which they can, you know, not only engage in supporting the journalism that they want to see, but how they too can engage in being journalists that they want to hear more from. And I will also say that I think a lot of folks understand that being black in America is a very unique experience and that we need people in all spaces, not Justin medicine, not just in politics, but also in journalism who are in that space with a bias about us.
A bias for justice. I'll claim that I know that was your close remarks, but I just want to add two quick things. Go for it. We all have the potential to be journalists. Some of the most important reporting has been done by citizen journalists and particularly around police brutality, right when mainstream media, you know, Eric Garner, Walter Scott was buying the line of the police.
It was citizen journalists who recorded what was happening in their communities and bypass the media and went to social that caused that to become a mainstream media story. And the year I was awarded the Pulitzer, the young lady who filmed George Floyd's murder was also awarded a Pulitzer as a citizen journalist. So I want us all to feel empowered that when we see things in our community, we can record and we can bear witness. That is the role of all of us.
And the last thing I want to say is I'm just so appreciative of you, Amanda, the way that you use your platform. Comedians always have been some of the most kind of searing cultural and political commentators, but not everyone uses their platform in the way that you do. I love following you. I learn things from you every day and like you are such a voice of justice, even though I know how that causes people to come at you.
I'm just grateful, you know, jokes are one thing, but this is real life. And this is real death for a lot of people and you could be using your platform in many, many other ways. And I'm just grateful that you choose to use it this way. And I say that sincerely. Well, I'm going to cry.
I'm a cancer and because I really, and because really I do honor your work and your work had damn I really am going to cry and your work has your work has like affirmed just like my existence like in so many times like there's just been so many times I'm just like see see see.
I'm not just saying it. It's real and not crazy. No, it's a conspiracy against us. You're not crazy. And I just want you to know I was I was on a fly. I told you this in D.M. But I'll say, you know, for the people like I was on a Delta flight last year and started watching these, you know, these little master class tidbits on black history.
And you and other great black women, I'm being specific because I felt like the brothers was weak, but y'all was really, you know, you and Gwen, I full and Professor Kim Lee, Crenshaw and Angela Davis, et cetera, we're we're really revealing to me in literally like 12 minutes segments, Nicole and a Jones like, oh my god, there's so many holes to my scholarship and like what y'all did in that one flight.
I came on that flight one way and I left that flight different and I I literally left that flight realizing like, oh, you have to dedicate yourself even more than you already had like there has to be a whole other level of purpose that you have to dedicate your voice, your platforms, your purpose to not just educating others, but educating yourself. And I think I had kind of lost my way in that.
And you got me back on track, so thank you. Thank you, just thank you, thank you for what you do. This is a black girl love moment. Hey, really is. Hey y'all, here's the latest T, America's number one and acid brand just released their latest innovation, Tums Plus, Upset, Stomach and Nodger support. These new soft and easy to chew gummy bites relieve occasional heartburn and help sell your stomach with soothing ginger. They're tasty and act fast, so stack up, use as directed.