OPINION | Journalism Should Spark Light, Not Rage Fires

by Marcus Harrison Green

(The following is the transcript of a speech given at the 2023 Washington Journalism Education Association's Emerald Awards.)

Thank you for having me today. I was talking to a journalist friend a few weeks ago, and I told him I'd be speaking to you all today about journalism. He straight up told me, "For the love of God … Please, please, please, please make sure you tell those kids what I wish someone had the courage and audacity to tell me before I dedicated 40 hard-lived years of my life to the craft of journalism: Run as far and as fast as you can from this business and don't look back! Become anything — a manure inspector, roadkill removal specialist, a sewage appraiser — anything!"

He was kidding, of course. At least, I'd like to hope he was kidding. But like most jokes, there's a subsurface of truth to it.

Over the course of my time in journalism, I think I might hear at least once a week that anyone pursuing journalism should give up. That it's a fool's errand to continue on this path. That all anyone can consume these days is bite-sized bits of news that are free of nuance and complexity.

Sometimes I'm tempted to give up and believe that what we do doesn't matter — or at least that it doesn't matter enough anymore in a world where people can choose their own reality, where people can label the truth "lies" without any seeming repercussions, and where people can choose which parts of our shared history they'd like to believe, la carte style.

Worse still, the future of journalism faces a precarious time, when it's unclear whether there will be enough places for aspiring journalists to have internships before and during college, let alone jobs when they exit college.

Over the last five years, more than 360 media outlets have closed, with new ones closing every day. The ones that are left unsurprisingly score low on ethnic and racial diversity.

I wish I could provide you with a rosier picture of the future of journalism, particularly because that future will one day be your present. I wish I could tell every single one of you that our society will get its act together and recognize the importance of journalism to a well-functioning democracy and ensure that a robust journalistic ecosystem is well-funded and supported so that years from now you can have a living salary, plenty of vacation time, and a great work-life balance.

I wish I could tell you that, should you continue developing your craft and pursuit of journalism, you'll never end up with a job that's beneath your skills, that you'll never face an unjustified onslaught of criticism even when you've done the right thing, or that you'll have an abundance of opportunities waiting for you at all times.

But I can't, with any certainty, tell you that. Because you're owed more than fairy tales. You're owed the truth.

And the truth is that despite the headwinds the craft of journalism faces, despite the attacks on journalists, despite the fact that there will always be higher-paid professions, I believe that journalism is the most important job and function in this country, in our state, and within your community.

It is the one thing that I know of that can still put the powerful on equal footing with those who have been treated as powerless. It is the one thing that can still elevate the voices of the poor to the same level as the rich. It is the one thing that can balance the concerns of our historically marginalized communities with those of historically dominant communities.

And look, that's not some simple platitude, that's a truism that I know from well-earned life experience. Before I took up journalism more than a decade ago, I worked in the financial sector, where I spent every single day figuring out ways to make extremely wealthy people even wealthier. I was taught that every single person I came across was to be treated as a commodity. They were only as valuable as how much money they could throw my way. While it was a lucrative profession that allowed me to drive Maseratis and charter Gulfstream jets to Vegas, the cost of it would ultimately have been my soul.

It was a pathway to dehumanizing people and to treating them as objects rather than wholly formed human beings, with flaws, virtues, and everything in between.

It was a pathway that was leading me to become an architect of the kind of damage that I'd seen done to my community in South Seattle during my early life.

You see, where I grew up, whenever they bothered to cover my community, the most diverse in the City of Seattle (populated by more than 60 different ethnicities), the media seemed to always distort the reality of our lives. Turning on the news was like peering at a funhouse mirror reflecting a warped image of what we lived every day, except the distortion we saw on the other end was horror.

It was a cascading narrative of crime, strife, and violence.

Instead of reading about a young woman dealing with mental health struggles, we'd witness her being called "mentally unstable" or "violently unhinged."

Instead of hearing about a father who'd been killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, we'd witness him being treated as "just another shooting" in a place where that type of stuff happens frequently.

Instead of learning about a young man booted out of our educational system, limited in opportunity, and having no options to survive, we'd witness him being labeled "super-predator."

Instead of a story about an 80-year-old grandmother struggling with dementia and attempting to work two different jobs in order to raise her four grandchildren with little to no outside assistance, we'd witness her…

Actually, we'd rarely witness her in the news. Because it didn't seem that people cared about the struggles of people like her — or the fact that they barely had enough food to subsist on.

When you grow up seeing the community you love dismissed and the people within it disregarded, it impresses upon you the sacred responsibility of seeing, witnessing, and telling someone's story in its entirety — not diminishing it through the lens of stereotypes and clichs and not turning away from those stories when they challenge what we've been conditioned to accept about others.

When you grow up seeing the narrative harm done to your community, it becomes hard to do it to other people no matter how lucrative and financially rewarding your job might be.

I'm reminded of that every day someone talks about the demise of journalism and says that it's not worth pursuing. I'm reminded of that whenever I think of a young Black teenager who I'll call Andre.

I met him early on in my journalism career.

I was tasked with asking people in South Seattle what they loved about their community. I happened to see him on the street corner and approached him with the question.

"Nothing," he said.

When I asked him to elaborate, his reason was that people like me (meaning journalists) had told him, via their broadcasts and their articles, that he was a "savage" and that this was all his community produced: a "pack of savages." I thanked him for his response and thought very little of it at the time as I went on to interview other people.

Two weeks later, Andre was found dead not too far from where I had interviewed him. He had a bullet in his chest and a gun in his hand. He was no older than many of you in this auditorium.

To this day, I think about what things might have been like for Andre if he'd seen stories that affirmed his life, showed him what he could become, and presented his community not as a series of stereotypes but as the living, breathing, complex formation of humanity that it was.

What if instead of a constant drum beat of pain, and trauma, and violence, and grief, and misery, and suffering … what if he had seen a consistency of stories of healing, and hope, and inspiration, and ambitions fulfilled, goals achieved?

What if there were stories that simply told him the truth: that he was worthy of love, that he was worthy of our attention, that his life had value, that his grievances were as justified as anyone else's?

I don't know if Andre would still be alive today or if things would've turned out any different for him. But I do know that there are consequences — sometimes dire — when we ignore stories that need to be told.

When we say that journalism doesn't matter for people or communities who can't afford it, whose lives are we sacrificing? When we say we should just give up because young people don't value journalism, don't care about it, and think it no longer has any relevance, who are we dehumanizing and abandoning?

I was told every one of those things when I founded the South Seattle Emerald nearly 10 years ago, along with being called a fool (and a couple other things, but I'm trying to keep it PG up here today).

I will tell you that it was not easy in those 10 years. Running the Emerald was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life. When I first started, I barely had any money. At 30-something, I'd had to move back in with my parents just to pay what was basically a semi-volunteer staff.

In the Emerald's third year, my family lost our home, and I was homeless for years, sleeping on a friend's couch at times, and at other times on an air mattress in a one-bedroom apartment with five other people. I found myself doubting what I'd done by giving up my one-time cushy job with all of its gilded trappings.

What gave me resolve was seeing the impact the Emerald was having on people in my community.

I witnessed mothers who'd lost sons to gun violence — mothers who had watched other media outlets effectively paint their children as "deserving of their death" — find a space and a voice to honor the life's work of their loved one.

I witnessed people who had at one time been scared to participate as full members of their community start to embrace their community members across race, class, gender, and orientation.

I saw people on the verge of subsistence receive help from community members who read their stories and took action to provide people with housing, food, shelter, and medical care.

And like anything of great success, this was not the work of one person, but the effort of people working collectively, meeting deadlines, setting goals, and seeing their energy and labor multiplied together to tell stories that truly reflected the worth and reality of our community.

It was the collective work that our team did that empowered people who'd been told their entire lives that they were powerless. It reminded them that they weren't. It was the work that our team did that provoked action by elected leadership in a place that had been the victim of way too much inaction.

And because of that, the Emerald sheds light where other media just sets fires … at least it aims to.

It's light that this world and so many communities need to reflect on them — what they truly are when you strip away all the hyperbole, exaggeration, and sensationalism.

No matter how vast the surrounding darkness, even a speck of light reminds us that it is something to challenge despair and hopelessness.

Every single one of you is a light-bringer, for however long you persist in the practice of journalism. And with that choice comes another: Do you keep a community in darkness or do you choose to bring it light?

Do you choose to tell the truth about the community and its people, or do you choose to perpetuate a convenient fiction?

And that choice and that practice of journalism is going to be filled with obstacles. It's going to be filled with the need to evolve and adapt to new technologies and new habits. But at the core of everything will also be that choice: to do what is right or to do what is convenient.

I can't make that choice for you. All I can tell you is that bringing light to a community may not be lucrative, may not be popular at times, but it is priceless, it is life-affirming, and it is life-saving. And it is a power that all of you have.

The future of our shared community is dependent on all of you. Let it be in good hands.

Thank you.

The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.

📸 Featured Image: Photo via Billion Photos/Shutterstock.com