COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 09/07/2020
Mathew Ingram
The fallout from recent protests over the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have reignited long-standing concerns on the part of many Black journalists about their roles in the newsrooms they work in, and the value they are given (or not given) by the media companies they work for. In one particularly egregious case, Alexis Johnson, a Black journalist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was prevented from covering the protests because of a single innocuous, joking tweet. Others have also been silenced in a variety of ways, or had their work tokenized by largely white newsrooms. Journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other leading publications have expressed their experiences of racism in those companies.