—Michael Crichton, coining the concept of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

A few years ago, I designed and taught a course at Colorado College titled “The History and Future of American Journalism.” One of the underlying themes was that many contemporary media debates are just new versions of age-old ones.

For example, my students were tasked with debating whether Ben and James Franklin’s anti-inoculation newspaper should be allowed to publish, in the context of calls at the time for Joe Rogan to be removed from Spotify for spreading COVID misinformation. At a time when there was debate about what language about gender transition was potentially “dangerous,” we debated how journalists like Ida B. Wells should be handled given that the widely accepted conventional wisdom of her time was that her defenses of black men were societally corrosive and dangerous. It remains my favorite class I’ve ever taught.

On the first day of the course, I asked students to raise their hand if they’d ever had the experience of something that happened in a community they are a member of -- their childhood school, their neighborhood, their sports team, their place of worship -- covered by the press. Every hand shot up.

Next, I asked them what they, and other members of the community, had thought about the coverage. The negative experience was near universal. Coverage got basic details wrong. Articles were written that included facts, but missed context or understanding. Implications were made or malfeasance suggested only for there never to be any followup. Someone who had consumed the press coverage, my students said, was given an inaccurate understanding of their community, and in some cases even of the specific incident being covered.

For their final paper, each student was tasked with creating a proposal for a media outlet and detailing a plan for how it would create coverage that engenders broad trust -- a challenge facing the free press since its inception and a goal that very well may be impossible.

Back in 2020, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times explicitly endorsing the practice of journalistic objectivity. The lodestar of our journalism, I wrote, should be a devotion to being “fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts.”

These sentences may surprise you, given that in the last six years I’ve been made the poster child for “young internet journalists who don’t believe in objectivity.” Essays, book chapters, and academic reports have been written to rebut my supposed demand that objectivity be “replaced.”

But what if I told you that such a call never happened?

Let’s revisit what I wrote: Journalists “should devote ourselves to accuracy,” “diligently seek out the perspectives of those with whom we personally may be inclined to disagree” and “ask hard questions of those with whom we’re inclined to agree.” As I would later detail in a followup piece, objective journalism requires specific values be embedded in our reporting process, editing decisions, and final product: rigor, fairness, nuance, complexity and clarity.

“The best of our profession already does this,” I wrote in the Times. “But we need to be honest about the gulf that lies between the best and the bulk.”

That is not to say that the piece did not include critique. What I wrote then, and reiterate now, is that the journalistic establishment claims objectivity yet routinely abandons its own standards when the subject is race, power, or the legitimacy of journalists who are unlike themselves.

The term “objectivity” long ago became corrupted and often functions primarily as a marketing device and writing style used to signal “neutrality” -- which is not a requirement of objective journalism.

For example: As I write this essay it is raining in Washington D.C. where I live. My reader should not walk away feeling “neutrally” about what the factual evidence says about whether or not the ground outside my home is currently wet. Nor is the aim of my writing to earn favor from or approval of the politically powerful Anti-Precipitation Lobby. Objective journalism clearly communicates the best obtainable version of the truth, with all of its nuance and in all of its complexity (It has not been raining all day, this is one of those flash summer storms that shows up in a rush, falls hard and intense and then suddenly stops). We do so even if some of our readers do not like that truth, nuance or complexity.

Unfortunately, such deliberate and rigorous work is far from the norm. I wrote about the “professed objectivity” that has dominated mainstream American journalism for a century, and tied the failure of the media to match its marketing directly to its refusal to employ a staff diverse enough to result in journalism that reflects the fullness and complexity of objective reality.

As I had previously told Nieman back in 2015:

“A newsroom cannot tell stories…—at least they cannot tell them thoroughly and with nuance—if you don’t have people who look like the people who are being written about in these stories doing some of the reporting and making some of the coverage decisions from the newsroom. Media diversity is not some type of progressive ideal. It’s a journalistic imperative for any outlet devoted to fairness and accuracy.”

Instead of building diverse staffs that can produce a news report reflective of the full, messy, symphonic nature of objective reality, mainstream journalism has spent decades preoccupied with preferences of an audience it perceives as white, middle-to-upper class, politically moderate, sensibly establishmentarian and dispositionally suburban. Everyone else encounters coverage divorced from their experience of reality and thus deems it untrustworthy. Many of us constantly read articles that fundamentally misstate the facts and contexts of subjects and instances about which we have direct knowledge, insight or experience.

Because American newsrooms have refused to meaningfully racially integrate, the journalism termed “objective” is often drenched in the bias of American status quo whiteness. “The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral,” I wrote in the Times. “When black and brown reporters and editors challenge those conventions, it’s not uncommon for them to be pushed out, reprimanded or robbed of new opportunities.”

Race, of course, is a societal construct. That said, because we live in a racialized society, there is in fact such thing as “whiteness,” just as there are things such as “masculinity” or “Christianity” -- broad categories whose memberships include shared experiences, biases, and inclinations that can be discussed in the aggregate. This bias has been the starting point and stick against which the media’s Overton Window for what is considered “objective” has been measured.

In some cases, mainstream media outlets simultaneously brand themselves as “objective” while bending over backwards to avoid clearly communicating objective truths they imagine white people won’t like. This erodes trust.

My piece came in the context of a 2020 presidential campaign in which Donald Trump sought re-election in part by attacking a group of Black and immigrant congresswomen by telling them to “go back” to the “crime infested” countries where they came from. These attacks were definitionally nativist and racist, yet media organizations contorted themselves to refuse saying so because they imagined that doing so would possibly alienate Republican readers. I was among a number of black journalists to speak out early about this practice.

In my Times piece, I deployed another example, drawn from years covering police violence: noting that it is routine for media outlets to parrot the police public relations jargon-term “officer-involved shooting” rather than the more clear, more specific, and more accurate “police shooting.” Rather than engaging in a rigorous process to determine what happened in such cases, media organizations most often rush to publish accounts based solely on PR statements released by the police without any journalistic effort to obtain comment or perspective of the citizen who has been shot.

In both of these cases, media outlets display a lack of objectivity in both process and published product. Yet the offense runs deeper. When euphemism is knowingly deployed to shield from our readers that the President of the United States has issued a racist attack or that an armed government agent has killed someone, our journalistic failing is a moral one.

“Moral clarity (would) require both editors and reporters to stop doing things like reflexively hiding behind euphemisms that obfuscate the truth, simply because we’ve always done it that way. Deference to precedent is a poor excuse for continuing to make decisions that potentially let powerful bad actors off the hook and harm the public we serve,” I wrote. “Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes — however cleverly — be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence.”

It is clear, re-reading my Times column six years later, what I was arguing: the media’s failure to communicate clearly, from a place rooted in professed values (including clarity of language), is a failure to provide objective journalism. The media proclaims itself one thing but proves itself another. “We are brave truth-tellers” we self-proclaim even as we are unwilling to call racism by its name. “We hold the powerful accountable!” we declare while obfuscating how, exactly, the government officer was “involved” in the shooting that killed a citizen.

As if determined to prove my point, a set of journalistic gatekeepers have spent the last six years decrying not what I actually wrote on the NYT opinion page, but a version of it invented in their own heads. They have said, repeatedly, that I propose “replacing” objectivity with a “moral clarity model” -- a position in no way supported by what I’ve written. Their strongest piece of evidence is a single sentence from a multi-tweet 2020 thread (ripped, of course, out of context).

For months, I have awaited my pre-ordered copy of Canadian journalist Tara R. Henley’s forthcoming “The Trust Spiral: Why The Media Needs Objectivity,” so you can imagine my disappointment when I read her recent Substack post previewing the book, which refers to my supposed “moral clarity model.”

Here, again, positions detailed at length, repeatedly, are inaccurately caricatured. Henley writes that, “as far as she can tell,” this model consists of “(refusing) impartiality in the face of injustice.” Supposedly, I have championed “a move toward advocacy journalism.” These contentions are false.

Completely unreferenced are the thousands of words I published in 2023 specifically outlining my theory of journalism and the values that I believe should drive our practice, to which I would have referred to her had I been contacted during her research (I was not). When I pointed out to her that she was constructing a strawman without ever having spoken to me, Henley offered to allow me to write a short piece for her Substack. The result is this essay, which I’m publishing myself and have offered to her for republishing if she’d like.

While there are some who advocate what is called “movement journalism,” a more advocacy-based model, I have never been one of them and do not identify as a “movement journalist.” Outside of my small collection of op-eds on journalistic topics, none of my work can be reasonably or accurately characterized as advocacy journalism. That said, I believe advocacy journalism has a place in our ecosystem, and there is space for it inside of my Mosaic Theory, which is the only “model” of journalism I have ever “proposed.”

It is true that my work and arguments have been among those cited by those championing advocacy journalism. If historians and professors are interested in arguing with a young leftist who argues all journalism should be values-based progressive advocacy then they should. I, however, am not that person. In so much as Henley is arguing that quality of much of what gets published and labeled “journalism” are unacceptably low, I agree wholeheartedly.

But to attribute these failings to young journalists speaking out about their perceived mistreatment in newsrooms is silly. The woke era of 2020 didn’t invent the lazy hack reporter, the journalistic hitpiece or the rush-to-publish pace of the Internet. Far too many pieces are written and headlined without actually having been reported. Much of the “journalism” people encounter is unrigorous and untrustworthy. But that is not an innovation of the last six years. My Times column explicitly called for more rigorous reporting such as seeking the accounts of those harmed by police, not just reprinting police press releases.

Instead of engaging what I have actually written, Henley appears to have built her description off of my beliefs primarily atop the assessment of David Greenberg, a journalist and historian at Rutgers University, who in 2022 penned an essay titled “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism.” In it, Greenberg completely ignored the primary call to action of my Times op-ed -- that newsrooms hire and retain a diverse workforce in order to empower a more objective product -- and instead constructed a number of strawmen to attack.

Greenberg’s entire essay superimposed on me a series of arguments that I have never made. He wrote that I had “failed to expose the flaws in the objectivity ideal” -- which is something I never attempted to do, because I have never argued against aspiring toward the objectivity ideal. He proclaimed that I believe the idea of objectivity to be “inherently racist” -- an idea I’ve never expressed because it is something I do not believe. I emailed Greenberg at the time and alerted him to this. He refused to correct his errors, and has spent the years since continuing to knowingly misrepresent my beliefs.

“Determining the correct moral posture on a political or policy issue is almost always difficult and certainly beyond the capacity of a daily journalist working at digital speed,” Greenberg wrote in Liberties, critiquing a “disturbing” (as he characterized it on the podcast) argument that he attributes to me, but that I’ve never made. “Forsaking the studious detachment of the newsroom for the moral clarity of Twitter may be permissible for… a crusading TV journalist such as Lowery. Yet it is a terribly wrongheaded idea for straight reporters, whose job requires searching for truth, not virtue.”

I’ll own up to my lingering annoyance at this sneering description of me by Greenberg, whose work I often enjoy, which suggests that my body of work lacks the type of methodical inquiry that he advocates. It’s an odd, diminishing descriptor to write of someone who, by 35, was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “reporting” and twice honored as a finalist. My journalistic calling-card, across mediums, has been rigorous, nuanced examination of our most complicated issues. My work for 60 Minutes doesn’t make me Geraldo.

It’s almost as if Greenberg decided what his argument would be and then marshaled evidence to support it, as opposed to conducting an open inquiry into my beliefs and body of work in order to dispassionately present conclusions based on the weight of the evidence.

If professors and historians are going to spend thousands of words across essays and book chapters arguing against what they believe is my theory of journalism, shouldn’t they consider its result: my actual published journalism? At the very least, shouldn’t “objectivity” require its defenders to include the nuances and complications of my beliefs? Instead, they advocate a rigorous, methodical form of journalism that they themselves refuse to practice.

“What do journalists do to make sure that they are not letting their biases get the best of them? Well, part of it is you talked to multiple sources,” Greenberg told Henley on her podcast. “You get people on both sides, or many sides of an issue.”

These are remarkable words to hear spoken by a man who published thousands of words about me without contacting me for comment, on the podcast of a woman who wrote a book referencing me and my beliefs also without contacting me for comment.

The message is clear: Standards for thee, not for me; do as we say, not as we do.

In his podcast interview with Henley, Greenberg describes “objectivity” as containing two components -- 1. a methodical process, resulting in 2. a product that will be perceived as truthful by our audience.

The core of my critique has been and remains with the second component. In a racialized world, if the audience is imagined as white, and the journalists and editors doing the imagining are themselves white too, it is impossible for the end product to capture the complexity of the truth.

“Conversations about objectivity, rather than happening in a virtuous vacuum, habitually focus on predicting whether a given sentence, opening paragraph or entire article will appear objective to a theoretical reader, who is invariably assumed to be white,” I wrote back in 2020.

Greenberg is arguing that journalism is not objective unless it is perceived as neutral. My response to that is to note that the objective truth, very often, is unpopular with white audiences -- still, we shouldn’t pull our punches.

To his credit, on the podcast Greenberg acknowledges my call for diverse newsrooms and says he agrees. But then he proceeds to exemplify, again, his inability to properly hear and accurately characterize my arguments as he references a September 2022 panel discussion we participated in at Columbia University.

Here is the relevant section of the podcast discussion:

Henley: I want to ask you about something that Wesley Lowery said during the panel. He called newsrooms apartheid institutions and claimed that every single day mistakes get made because newsroom leadership lacks diversity…

Greenberg: Well first, (exasperated sigh), you know, I think it’s wrong to use words like apartheid. That’s sensationalistic. It’s hyperbolic. Apartheid was a legal regime that explicitly consigned blacks in South Africa to an inferior position in all walks of society. Now you could say at one point American newsrooms actively and openly discriminated against blacks. That is no longer the case…

Setting aside Greenberg’s contention that black journalists are no longer “actively” discriminated against in American newsrooms, Henley’s characterization of my remarks seemed off to me and so I went back and rewatched the panel discussion.

Here is the relevant section of my remarks that day:

Lowery: This is an industry that until very recently had completely excluded people of color from its leadership…A lot of what we see playing out is the continued backlash to integration. When we talk about newsrooms and the quote unquote clashes inside of them: the vast majority of American newsrooms were explicitly racially segregated until the 1970s. Most of them did not take real efforts to begin desegregating until the 80s or early 90s at which point there was a massive backlash from the white people who worked in the newsrooms, and then we hit the economic downturns that then purged most of the people of color who had gotten into the newsrooms in the first place. So when we talk about dynamics that are happening within our newsrooms. We have to understand that these are still, essentially, apartheid institutions. These are all-white institutions with a sprinkling of other people who have managed to make their way in over time…

We know that there are almost no mainstream news organizations that reflect the diversity of the places that they ostensibly cover, much less of the nation that they ostensibly cover.

Much like contacting the people you are writing about for comment, accurately quoting people is a foundational building block of “objective journalism.” So is providing the relevant context that a reader or listener needs to have in order to understand the quotation in question.

Here, Henley and Greenberg sort-of pass the first test (“essentially,” a crucial qualifier, gets dropped from their version), but clearly fail the second.

The Jim Crow south and the segregated American north were by any reasonable definition forms of racial “apartheid.” If Henley and Greenberg are unaware of the frequent application of this term to post-Reconstruction American history, perhaps it is because this topic falls outside of their professional expertise.

“We have called it racial discrimination, legal segregation, in a very colorful way ‘Jim Crow.’ I and many others are beginning to prefer the term ‘American apartheid.’” historian Evelyn Hu-DeHart, the director of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, explained back in 2007. “We shouldn’t think of apartheid as something only South Africans did and we all protested. Because, in fact, we probably gave the South Africans the idea in the first place about compulsive racial segregation - this period of American history that lasted into the 1960s.”

The earliest it can be argued that American Apartheid came to an end would be 1968. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, an acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, was referring to “the ending of apartheid in the south” as early as interviews conducted in 1986. In recent decades a number of leading historians and researchers have also used the term to speak of the period that followed Civil Rights -- when black Americans were corralled via housing covenants and ordinances into substandard housing, provided substandard education and public accommodations, and patrolled by often discriminatory and violent policing. When sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton published their classic study on the creation of the American urban ghetto, they titled the project “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.”

What were American newsrooms like during this era of American Apartheid? They were almost all-white workplaces with just a handful of black journalists.

In the decades since the 1960s, newsrooms that were once explicitly segregated have systematically resisted racial integration. As a result, the staffs of many newsrooms today have statistically insignificant levels of racial diversity, especially at the highest levels of newsroom leadership. As I have written, the mainstream press is incapable of providing the journalism necessary to support a multiracial democracy because the mainstream press has never, itself, practiced multiracial democracy. On the day George Floyd died in 2020, the Philadelphia Inquirer -- one of our oldest newspapers, and the news outlet of record in a city that is nearly 40 percent black -- had just one black male on its metro staff. Its newsroom has never been led by a black editor.

The Inquirer is not the only newsroom whose number of black journalists remains at pre-Civil Rights Era levels. It is closer to the norm than the exception. One might therefore describe them, in the context of a conversation specifically about integration and newsroom diversity statistics, as remaining “essentially apartheid institutions.” It is not sensationalism. It is a historically grounded description of institutions that have never meaningfully integrated. The terminology is no less accurate just because some people might not like it.

The purpose of this essay is not to litigate a three-year-old reference to apartheid. Although, I will admit, listening back to this section of the Columbia conversation I was pleased to discover I’d extemporaneously invoked the term in a less glib and more properly caveated way than I feared I might have.

Similarly, I was happy to find that, for the most part, I expressed myself and my beliefs clearly and dispassionately. Henley told me she consulted the recording of this panel discussion in the writing of her forthcoming book. We’ll see if what I said that day, more of which I’ll quote in closing, is accurately represented in her book or if this will be yet another instance in which I am presented in an unrecognizable way incongruent with objective reality.

Lowery: I don’t actually think that, when properly defined, very many people disagree with the concept of journalistic objectivity -- because when properly defined it is completely anodyne…But…this journalistic, scientific style…even if we accept that premise, from its very inception that is not how it has been used…Objectivity has always been wielded to silence people who do not fit with the politics of the people who own and operate the newspapers. It has always been a censorious force, never an expansive force…Powerful white journalists have shown us for a century that they don’t believe anyone but themselves can be objective…It’s one of the reasons none of these newsrooms can integrate, because they keep running every person who is not them out.

All of those observations remain true. The argument I made that evening was not radical, or even original. Four years later, it remains unanswered.

Both Henley and Greenberg approvingly cite the research of Columbia University professor Michael S. Schudson. Perhaps they will hear him when he says the same thing that I have been saying for years.

“News organizations are increasingly committed to diversity and inclusion,” he explained in a 2023 speech. “That is as a matter social justice but it’s also an extension of the commitment to objectivity — making a newsroom encompassing in the perspectives represented inside the newsroom.”

I’m still looking forward to reading Henley’s book. And from what I can tell, it seems to be arguing for a return to more rigorous, methodical reporting -- which is what I’ve called for all along. Still, if she and others are going to appoint themselves the defenders of objective journalism, they should practice what they preach. Otherwise, they are just the latest set of journalistic gatekeepers proclaiming one thing, doing another, and pushing out of the industry anyone who dares disagree. That is a recipe for continued mistrust for years to come.

No one likes the sound of their own voice, but listening to interviews you conducted is a particular kind of misery. You want to interject and correct yourself. You hear your own awkwardness. You critique questions that could have been stronger, and note the follow-ups you failed to ask. You empathize with your interview subject.

I’d reached out to Russell after Sports Illustrated asked me to write a piece about him, Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in conjunction with the three of them receiving the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award. The focus of the piece was their work as activists, not just athletes—centered on the 1967 summit in Cleveland, where they and others met with Ali, initially hoping to talk him out of his Vietnam protest.

There’s a sweet spot in interviewing. If you come in too narrowly focused, over-prepared, you never voice questions whose answers might be revelatory. I often think about something my friend Robert Samuels once said to me, that too many reporters and writers, too often, construct their interviews and later their writing around quotations. They are too reliant on them. And thus, too often, reporters are so preoccupied listening for the specific soundbite they want for a piece they’ve already constructed in their head that they don’t actually hear the substance of the things the person seated across from them is saying. We record the literal words while missing the actual point. As a result, libraries of untold stories still sit in the unused portions of transcripts. That said, there’s equal risk in the other direction. If you come in too clueless, too freewheeling, too unprepared—especially when you’re speaking to someone who’s been interviewed often—you can walk away with nothing but reheated anecdotes.

Listening back, I did better than I’d remembered with Russ, most crucially by shutting up and letting him talk. Take this exchange. I’m letting it run long on purpose.

Lowery: As a black player and then coach in Boston, you faced significant vitriol, and yet you continued your activism. In fact, you traveled to Mississippi and other Southern states to join demonstrations and assist Medgar Evers’ family. Can you tell me about those trips, and why you believed they were important to take?

Russell: Well, to me the most important thing was that I saw myself as my father’s son. And my father—the reason we moved from Louisiana to California, where I grew up—was because he wouldn’t take any crap from anybody, period. That was one of the things I was proud of. The most important thing to me was what my father thought. If he thought something was important, he relayed it to us, and that became our philosophy. And my father told me more than once during my career, “I’m proud of the fact that I’m your father and you’re my son.” And that’s the biggest compliment I ever received. So all of this stuff—it’s just part of the deal.

The reason we left Louisiana, and the reason we left the South, is my father did not like the way they were trying to treat him where he worked—so we left. My father was incensed. He never took any shit off anybody, and growing up black in Louisiana, that was difficult. He worked in a paper bag factory, making bags of different sizes and shapes. Well of course, it was the standard operating procedure of white society—even though he worked in that place for years, and he was a supervisor without being given the title or the money. And he resented that. So he asked for a raise. And they told him, “You’ll be making as much money as the white fellows, and we can’t have that…”

About two weeks later, he told the boss, “This is my last week. I’m going to leave. I’m going up North.” His first destination was Detroit, but it was too cold. Then he knew some guys who worked in a shipyard in California. He stayed in Detroit for a little while, then moved to California, and then he sent for us. I was 9 years old… I told him before he died that I had made All-American in basketball—and what pleased me most about that was that I had the chance to tell him I was proud that I was his son.

…Most people don’t have any idea what it’s like to grow up in a society that doesn’t respect anybody in your family. They want you to do things in a way that continues that disrespect for your family—and I couldn’t do that.

My question was a little narrow, but fortunately Russell took his response deep. What I’d asked was rooted in the best-known parts of Russ’ résumé—he was the NBA’s first black superstar, and its first black coach. It would’ve been easy to interrupt and steer him back there when he started on the long tangent about his father. None of what he was saying made for a quick, clean sound bite. But by shutting up and listening, I was able to hear Russ articulate a deeper truth: that it was impossible to separate his lived experience as a black man in America from the decisions he made about what to do with his fame and his success. Nearly every decision he made, every action he took, flowed from this ethos—this insistence that he would do everything in his power to ensure that he, and his people, finally got the respect they deserved.

“It is not easy for a white man to understand or totally accept the vision of a Black man; skin is the hardest boundary. The point is this: Bill Russell, or any other Black man like him, does not want the white man’s sympathy or, indeed, his friendship,” Gilbert Rogin observed in 1963. “What he wants is recognition and acceptance of himself as an individual, a Black individual, who can meet the world on equal terms and fare unequally, according to his merit.”

Or, as Russell himself put it three years later in a book of his own: “I can honestly say that I have never worked to be liked. I have worked to be respected.”

///

It’s easy to forget how good Russell was at basketball —11 NBA championships, 22.5 rebounds per game— and how much he had to put up with in order to do it. He is one of just four people inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. He did it all while living and working in the “flea market of racism” that was 1960s Boston. “I once described Boston as the most racist city in America. I had good reason,” Russell wrote in his 1966 book. “Shortly after the Celtics won a third title, a man walked up to me while I was sitting in a new Lincoln at a traffic light. ‘Hey, nigger, how many crap games did it take you to win that car?’ the man shouted.”

In a Washington Post essay earlier this year, Kevin Merida argued that Russell’s name should be included in the never-ending debate -- most often between Lebron James and Michael Jordan -- of who should be crowned the greatest basketball player of all time. “Rather than settle the GOAT debate (an impossibility), I would like to expand it to include non-basketball factors of greatness,” Merida writes.

“Bravery, perseverance, excellence amid loneliness and grand accomplishment under extreme pressure, including death threats,” he continues. “Yes, I’m talking about Bill Russell.”

We often debate the greatness of our athletes and the sincerity of their activism. Russell was best-in-class at a time where his excellence very literally placed his life on the line. He showed up on the front lines of fights not just in the black neighborhoods of Boston but also across the south, particularly in Mississippi. He lent air cover to other protesting black athletes, not just Ali, but also John Carlos and Tommie Smith, joking that he wished he’d thought of their raised glove protest first. He declined Martin Luther King Jr.’s offer to sit on stage during the March on Washington, and instead witnessed the “I Have A Dream” speech from his seat in the second row of the crowd. It’s easy to let Russell’s achievements, on and off the court, fade into the recesses of memory. But when you take the time to revisit them, it’s impossible to not be stunned by their breadth and depth. “I’m ashamed to say, I had pretty much stored Russell’s career on my bookshelf,” Merida writes. “Time will treat unfavorably even the best of the best. I don’t like that about time: how it inevitably looks at you with unimpressed eyes and a short memory.”

///

When Bill Russell was drafted in 1956, just a decade had passed since Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier. It had been six years since the NBA had welcomed its first three black players, and now, by the time Russell came along, there were 16. To that point, black basketball was primarily a sideshow. NBA owners openly discussed implementing a quota to keep the league’s roster’s majority white. The best black talent played for the Harlem Globetrotters. The ABA, where the kind of gameplay that we think of as stylistically “black” was born and then nurtured to adolescence, wouldn’t come around for another 11 years. There had never, to that point in history, been a black superstar basketball player in the NBA. “Until Bill Russell, professional basketball lacked a galvanizing emblem of African American excellence,” author Aram Goudsouzian wrote in his 2010 biography of Russell.

Russell had been acquired as the Celtics missing piece, a big-bodied rebounder whose inside game could compliment the team’s true star, Bob Cousy, who was then the best and best known basketball player in the country. But despite being home to the NBA’s most popular point guard, as well as the league’s most legendary coach in Red Auerbach, the team had repeatedly failed to win a championship. Russell changed that. Across a 13-year career, Russell captained a Celtics dynasty that made the franchise one of the most iconic in the history of American sports. At one point, they won eight straight NBA championships. “If it weren’t for Bill Russell winning all of them championships would anybody be talking about the Boston Celtics? No!” Larry Bird declares in filmmaker Sam Pollard’s documentary “Bill Russell: Legend.” By the time he retired, Russell had more championship rings than he did fingers upon which to wear them, 11 in total.

“More than any athlete of his era,” President Obama said as he presented Russell with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. “Bill Russell came to define the word winner.”

By doing so, Russell proved to the league, its owners and coaches, and white basketball fans, that the athletic prowess of a black man could be the tent post of the league. When sportswriters took a vote in 1980, Russell was crowned the best player in the history of the league to that point. The NBA never looked back.

For the next six decades, the NBA would be ruled by black superstars. Players like Jerry West and Larry Bird are exceptions to the rule, drowned beneath an ocean of black names. When the NBA named the top 75 players of its first 75 years, 59 of those players were black. Of the 17 white players on the list, just 12 of them played after Russell’s retirement as a player in 1969.

That’s not to say that had it not been for Bill Russell that there never would have been a black superstar. That much was preordained. But someone had to be the first. And the thing about being the first, about truly innovating, is that all that comes after is derivative, one way or another. The first person over the top forges the path, taking the most bullets to their body so that those who run behind them can make it even further, can ascend to heights that that first never himself could have envisioned. All of the innovations that came after — the business acumen of Magic Johnson, the global superstardom of Michael Jordan, the game-bending talents of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, the cultural domination of Allen Iverson, the societal impact of Lebron James — must be counted among Bill Russell’s legacies.

And all of this, the act of being the best at the thing that he does, was, at the time, a dangerous form of activism. “Sports offered a particular potential for racial progress,” Goudsouzian wrote. “Despite such dramatic instances as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1957 Little Rock Crisis, the civil rights movement had not yet sustained public momentum.” But the integration of sports allowed for a new type of black humanization in the minds of white liberals. For the first time, white Americans could form parasocial relationships with black men (and later women) through the athletic prowess they displayed on the field or the court. “Television shows presented blacks only as stock characters. But televised sports, news programs, magazine features and newspaper articles could uphold black athletes as heroes.”

///

In October 1961, Bill Russell led an unplanned protest against segregation.

The Celtics had traveled to Lexington, Kentucky in order to play a game honoring their teammate Frank Ramsey, who had been an All-American at the University of Kentucky. But when two of the team’s black players, Sam Jones and Satch Sanders, attempted to order food at the hotel restaurant, they were denied service. When Russell was told, he refused to play in the game, ultimately resulting in him and six other players leaving Kentucky and not appearing in the game. “My attitude was: I’m going home because if I’m getting ready to play and I can’t get a pregame meal, why should I play?” he later explained.

It was an act of activism, the kind that was commonplace during Russell’s career. The kind he trafficked in not just when he, himself, was personally being disrespected and dehumanized. Russ was, unquestionably, “a race man,” as is compellingly depicted in director Lauren Stowell’s recent documentary series “Celtics City.”

After the assassination of Medgar Evers, Russell went to Mississippi, where his grandfather —the first person in his family ever born free— still lived, and held basketball camps for the children of civil rights workers. He began joining local protests in Boston, where school integration had bitterly divided the city. “I didn’t know that people didn’t grow up going to marches,” Russell’s daughter Karen Kenyatta Russell notes in Celtics City. He spoke publicly against the unspoken racial quotas that were being enforced by coaches and general managers in order to prevent NBA rosters from becoming too black, too quickly. Later, he became one of the leading, most outspoken black activists against the redevelopment of downtown Boston at a time when Roxbury, the heart of Black Boston, remained deeply underserved and impoverished.

All of this came at a price. Not a theoretical one. The risk was not to his bottom line, to his marketability, or to his popularity among white fans. With each act of activism, Russell was very literally risking his life. At one point, in 1963, Russell’s home in Redding was broken into, robbed, and viciously vandalized. “The house was in shambles. Someone had destroyed all of his trophies and when my parents went to go to bed, they pulled back the sheets and someone had defecated in their bed,” Kenyatta Russell recalls in the documentary. The n-word had been smeared on the walls in excrement.

“The racist violence of white people in Boston has been so intense in part because the Black community has taken forceful steps to secure its freedom,” legendary activist Mel King wrote in 1981. “The struggle by the community of color has been actively opposed by the cornerstones of white Boston society including the Catholic church, the Brahmin power structure and white politicians. As always, from Reconstruction to present, when people of color threaten to become too effective, violent retaliation is carried out.”

///

The most important thing Bill Russell ever did, as it relates to basketball, has nothing to do with his on-the-court play.

When Red Auerbach retired in 1966 the Celtics announced that Russell would take on a player-coach role, making him the first black coach in any major American sport. In three years as a player-coach, Russell led the Celtics to 162 wins, just 83 losses, and two NBA championships. “At that time, you didn’t think about anything like that,” Bernie Bickerstaff, who spent three decades as an NBA assistant and head coach beginning in the mid-1980s, told the New York Times after Russell’s death in 2022. “In fact, if you’re sitting back and you’re a young Black at that time, it seemed far-fetched.”

In 1968, Sports Illustrated named him sportsman of the year, putting Russell on its cover for the third time. “The career of Bill Russell is astonishing for its consistent brilliance. Still, in 1968, he brought to it a new dimension; as coach as well as star player of the Celtics—leading and doing—he drove his group of veterans to Boston’s 10th world championship since he joined the team 12 years ago,” wrote George Plimpton. “At a time when the host of superb Negro athletes commands esteem for performance, Russell has proved his ability to lead athletes of both races—and leadership has been an area of sport inaccessible to black men.”

For decades now, Americans, including the white ones, have been forced to cede that black athletes are equal (and often superior). But such acknowledgement is often accompanied with its own version of a slight. The acknowledgement of physical as a means of implying mental and emotional lacking. Sure, the thinking goes, black athletes are the beasts that drive the show — the tigers and elephants at the center of the circus — but it’s the white men, the coaches and general managers who serve as ringmaster. It’s the oppressive, prejudiced ideology of “shut up and dribble.” By topping and then replacing Bob Cousy as one of the defining faces of the league, Russell had launched the era of the black NBA superstar. Then, by taking the reins from Red Auerbach, and leading the Celtics to two more rings, Russell showed skeptical white basketball fans that the black mind can be as brilliant and exceptional as the black body. He proved that black men and women could not just dominate the sport, but that they could run it.

“If someone asked me to write my epitaph, I would keep it short and simple,” Russell wrote, two years before his death. “Bill Russell: He was a man.”

What could be more important?

“You’re not saying that we should automatically assume the police are lying about everything they are saying, are you?” he asked.

I would never say that. What I have said, though, is that, too often, members of the media automatically believe things that the police say, when in fact, the burden should remain on them to provide proof. Too often we assume they are telling the truth. Too rarely do we force them to provide evidence. Even when we do, we often don’t look at what they’ve provided skeptically enough.

“Oh,” he responded. “That makes sense.”

///

One of the reasons people distrust the media is because too often the media they encounter is fundamentally untrustworthy. Good journalism requires redundancies. It is by design, inefficient. It takes time and patience. It’s often narratively complicated.

None of those things are easy and they are especially difficult in newsrooms that seek to move more quickly than ever while employing fewer journalists overseen by fewer, less experienced, editors than ever. None of this is a recipe for a media that can create the type of rigorous journalism that engenders trust, especially not within a society that already distrusts major institutions.

And a world in which people not only distrust, but in many cases actively despise, their media, is a world in which people will condone acts of government censorship and coercion, making such acts more likely. Our current presidential administration, among other acts of press restriction and repression, has pressured a major television network to silence its late night comedian. In response, some have in essence shrugged and remarked: “well, but the joke he told was inaccurate in a predictably partisan way.”

Central to building the world we want, a world in which the populace believes in the value of a robust free press — and thus finances and defends a robust free press — is the task of building a world in which the average American believes the press that they have is actually worth financing and defending. That, of course, requires having a press actually worth financing and defending.

Which brings us to the case of Jussie Smollett.

Most people believe they know everything they will ever need to know about the case of Jussie Smollett. The consensus proffered by the police and prosecutors, spread by a near entirety of the press and deeply-hardened into the public consciousness as “fact” is the following:

Smollett, a gay, black actor and outspoken social justice activist fabricated a hate crime, claiming to have been assaulted by a masked white man who invoked then-candidate Donald Trump’s “MAGA” movement and placed a noose around his neck. To do so, Smollett first mailed himself a fake threat. He then wrote a personal check to a Nigerian-American man who had been an extra on Smollett’s hit TV show Empire and who was sometimes his personal trainer. That man and his brother then purchased the rope and masks, went to Smollett’s apartment (using both Uber and a taxi) and then carried out the fake attack themselves. When confronted by police, the brothers confessed to colluding with Smollett, who they said had masterminded the entire plot.

That is more or less what everyone believes to be true. You are convinced of it. It would take some type of irrefutable evidence to un-convince you. But humor me, if not for this whole piece, just for the next paragraph. For two minutes, let’s imagine another narrative:

Smollett, hoping to lose weight, enlisted the help of his sometimes personal trainer Abel Osundairo and his brother, Ola, to get ahold of a steroid illegal in the U.S. but available in Nigeria. He paid for the trip with a personal check which he labeled as being payment for training. Unbeknownst to Smollett, Ola Osundairo happened to be a homophobe and convicted felon who had previously been charged with, among other things, attempted murder. Seeing an opportunity to put more of Smollett’s money in their own pockets, the brothers concocted a hair-brained plan: they paid a white man to help them attack the actor, making the assumption that if Smollett (who’d recently gotten a racist death threat) got hate-crimed, he would be easier to upsell on additional personal training, self-defense and drug procurement services. Because of the insanity of the details — noose-wielding MAGA-members in downtown Chicago targeting the star of a television show that no white person has ever watched — the Chicago police quickly deduced privately, and then announced publicly, that they believed Smollett was lying to them and proceeded to interpret everything to follow through the lens of that preconceived notion. Having concluded Smollett was the mastermind of a hoax, the police never pursued any other theory of the case. Provided an opportunity to punch left at annoying woke protesters, the press gleefully parroted the police. The Nigerians turned state's witness and got invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner. Nobody ever really listened to Smollett’s story.

I want to be clear about three things: 1. I am not saying that I believe that the second narrative is what happened 2. However, there is significant evidence to support that counter narrative, even if you haven’t ever encountered it 3. And, as of this writing, despite believing it’s unlikely we will ever know definitively what happened, I am willing to say publicly that I believe the second scenario is at least as likely as the version we’ve all accepted as fact.

Well, two more things:

4. That these are controversial things to say and that you are unlikely to believe them no matter how compellingly I craft the paragraphs to follow, speak to the dysfunction of our news-and-information ecosystem, and 5. Such dysfunction has dire consequences for our democracy.

///

I am, very famously, a critic of the establishment, “traditional,” understanding of journalistic objectivity. While my critique has often been mischaracterized as a call for the concept of objectivity to be “replaced,” it’s always been a critique not of the textbook principle but of real-world practice. The journalistic ideal is fair, open inquiry in which every party is given a full hearing, in which all claims are subject to strict scrutiny, and in which the end product is written with humility and absent any unsupported implications. The problem is that the media, like all institutions, proclaims lofty standards that it comes nowhere close to meeting.

Generations have looked at our media and observed, as Ike and Tina Turner sang: “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”

We don’t live up to our aspirational values because — like politicians, policewomen, lawyers, and even you, dear reader — journalists are hopelessly biased. We are human beings, creatures who, in the main, are biologically-disinclined against imagining reality beyond the limitations of our non-objective perceptions of our own experience. In order to create anything resembling objective journalism, the reporters and editors must possess clarity about their own biases and proactively report against the narratives they are most predisposed to believe. Earned “expertise” can easily give way to narrative stereotyping — the assumption that because a certain fact pattern existed in a previous story it must also be true of the current story.

In that spirit, here are some of my relevant biases: I’ve spent many years covering American police departments. I’ve covered street crime and police budgets and mass shootings and terror attacks. One of the first major stories of my career involved providing what was, initially, the only skeptical reporting about the police shooting of a Hispanic man: locating a direct eyewitness who had been too scared to speak to police and revealing that the autopsy contradicted the officers’ story. (That family was ultimately paid $5.3 million).

I know and have interviewed virtually every leading reform and abolitionist activist, and many police officers, prosecutors and prison officials. Like most black people, I have loved ones who are police and prison guards, and I have loved ones who have been and who are incarcerated.

One more thing.

I know Jussie Smollett. Not in any real way, but in the way all black people living public lives in America sort of know each other. We’ve been in the same rooms. I have good friends who are his friends. His sister starred in a movie made by one of my friends. Smollett played my third favorite character in Empire. After his incident, it took me exactly one text message to get Jussie’s phone number from someone.

Back then, I sent Smollett a message expressing my sorrow at what he had claimed happened. When he circled back years later, looking for journalists willing to hear him out, I didn’t return the message. He was still proclaiming innocence and I had decided I was unwilling to write about him unless he was willing to admit it was all a hoax.

Having decided he was the bad guy, I self-righteously refused to hear anything else.

///

Fortunately for all of us, there are better, more fair-minded journalists than me out there, including the team behind “The Truth About Jussie Smollett?” a 90-minute documentary that began streaming on Netflix in late August. The documentary, provides the full police narrative — highlighting plenty of Smollett’s questionable behavior and the evidence against him — and also provides the first major platform for the actor’s version of things to be fully heard.

Among details the film highlights: there were at least two independent witnesses who gave police stories similar to Smollett’s — specifically that they saw a white man attacker that night. That detail is key, as it is one of the major points of departure between Smollett’s story and that of the Osundairo brothers. Smollett has said, consistently, that at least one of his attackers was white. The brothers continue to insist that they — two dark skinned Nigerians — are the two men in the video.

Rebecca Bell, a tenant in the same building as Smollett, said she took her dogs out that night and saw a masked white man standing outside, with a rope hanging out from under his jacket. Anthony Moore, a security guard at the Sheraton Grand in Chicago, said he saw a masked white man run past the entrance to his hotel on the night of the attack.

Curiously, as independent journalist Chelli Stanley uncovered, Chicago Police collected surveillance footage from the Sheraton but the crucial 10 seconds that could have captured the face of the attacker was missing from the video files that the department released publicly. Despite having consistently insisted he witnessed a white attacker, Moore tells the documentarians that Chicago Police presented him a photo lineup solely of black men and forced him to pick one.

“Why would Jussie hire two Nigerian guys to do an attack that he was going to say was perpetrated by white guys, if it was going to be caught on tape?” Tina Glandian, Smollett’s attorney, asks in the film. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

///

The documentary falls well short of proving that Smollett is telling the truth. But that we even expect it to be able to reveals the ways in which we’ve stacked the deck against the actor. He’s forced to prove a negative — to demonstrate that he did not fake a hate crime — when the burden of proof should be on the police to prove their contention that he did.

If you start by looking to see if Smollett’s version is possible, as opposed to starting by demanding he disprove the theory you already have of what happened, it becomes clear that most of the “evidence” against Smollett is implication and not, in fact, “evidence.” Even some of his more seemingly odd behaviors can, in fact, easily fit into another theory of the case.

For example: My own identity and experiences probably make me more inclined to look for reasons to believe Smollett. I’m also a mixed race black man, who is a public figure with connections to prominent parts of the racial justice movement. And also, because I am a very professionally successful man-child, I’ve done silly things like not eat during a travel day and, because I do not keep food in my house because I do not know how to cook, then went outside in weather so ridiculous that no delivery is available in order to procure a deeply unsatisfying late night meal. The idea that I would find myself venturing out into a polar vortex for a 1 a.m. sandwich is remarkably realistic.

Similarly, much continues to be made of Smollett grabbing his Subway sandwich after the alleged hate crime occurred.

Let me ask you something: Have you ever been jumped? I have. What did I do afterward? I immediately collected my various belongings.

People who’ve been violently assaulted don’t abandon their things in the snow. People so hungry that they’ll brave subzero temperatures to get a Chicken-Bacon-Ranch footlong don’t leave their food behind.

But once again, once we’ve decided that Smollett is lying, our brains begin looking for evidence to support that theory, fitting whatever new facts we encountered into slots that reaffirm our belief that he must be misleading us.

Yes, Smollett still had the noose around his neck when police arrived half an hour after the attack (He says he put it back on to show the arriving officers where it had been) and yes he didn’t want to give his cell phone to the police (Would you?). Once again, while these actions may strike you as weird, they are factually inconclusive and do not actually contradict Smollett’s story.

The strongest real, tangible evidence in favor of the police narrative is the combined video and records that show the two masked men involved in the attack Smollett fled back to the neighborhood of Ola Osundario’s apartment and called their car using his Uber account. But none of that proves that both masked men were the Osundairo brothers (the video does not show their faces). In fact, it doesn’t prove that either of the men was one of the brothers, who easily could have hired someone to carry out the attack and called them an Uber to and from the apartment where they met up to debrief.

///

As a means of making public amends, let me say that I should have been willing to provide Smollett the courtesy of listening to his story long before now. He was right that all of this is, at the least, more complicated than we’ve believed. The documentary, while far from providing definitive proof that Smollett is right — the filmmakers deliberately structure the film without drawing a conclusion — raises some important points that require further clarification.

Fortunately, there’s a way to sort this all out. We could get to the bottom of a lot of this with answers to the following questions.

1. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson declared, publicly and definitively, that Smollett “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career.”

   Johnson continued: “Smollett attempted to gain attention by sending a false letter that relied on racial, homophobic and political language. When that didn’t work, concocted a story about being attacked.”

   What is the evidence for this sweeping, definitive declaration that Smollett faked the threat letter? Is it just the claims of the Osundairo brothers? What investigation did Chicago Police conduct into the letter itself, who sent it, and what role or connection it may have had to the later incident? This is a very basic factual claim, fundamental to the Chicago PD’s version of what happened. Where is the evidence to support it?

2. Smollett claims he paid the Osundairo brothers to travel to Nigeria to purchase a drug for him. Police arrested the brothers as they arrived back in the United States after the trip. Did the brothers have the drug with them when they arrived back in America? How did they spend their time in Nigeria? What if anything did police find when they searched the brothers’ luggage. They searched the luggage, right? And investigated the Nigeria trip?

3. The Chicago Police Department and the Osundairo brothers, and their attorney are insistent that there was no deal cut to secure the brothers’ cooperation in prosecuting Smollett. If that is the case: what if any investigation did the Chicago PD or other law enforcement conduct into the trove of illegal firearms they recovered from Ola Osundairo’s home? Why did he not face charges?

4. What investigatory steps did the Chicago PD take to confirm the story that the Osundairo brothers told them and rule out Smollett’s version of events? Did they subpoena phone records? Did they look into whether or not either brother had communicated with anyone else about the incident either before or after? Did they look at the brothers’ bank statements, Paypal records or Venmo transactions to see if they paid anyone else in the period around the attack? Does either brother have known associates who match the description that Smollett provided to police of his white male attacker?

5. What happened to the missing video clip that, if the hotel security guard is correct, should show a white attacker fleeing the scene? Can Chicago PD track down and release the unedited clip, without the crucial gap?

That’s it. Five questions. There are more that could be asked. But the answers to just these would go a long way to either definitively disproving Smollett’s story that the police railroaded him or to documenting that there may, in fact, be a there, there to his version of events.

This case cost the American taxpayers millions of dollars, and resulted in a man who claimed to be the victim of a hate crime being nationally and internationally ridiculed. It should be worth it to all of us to ascertain the truth.

///

While I tried to be transparent about my assumptions, and biases, it is unquestionably true that I decided on the broad outlines of my perspective and then began looking for evidence to assemble to support it. It is fully possible that resulted in inadvertent cherry-picking or the overlooking of important counter evidence on my part. Based on my years of expertise — my lived experience both as a black person and a professional critical thinker about police investigations and media coverage — I cited and linked to academic studies to support my analysis. Someone starting from the opposite conclusion, that the possibilities raised in the documentary and advanced here are not what happened, could marshal a similar set of studies to support their rebuttal.

Listing all of my credentials or a bunch of reasons why I want you to believe you should trust what I’ve written does not, in fact, mean that any conclusion I’ve drawn will end up being the accurate one.

I’m not immune to narrative stereotyping. Unlike many of you, I came into this piece aware of the reality that there are countless documented cases in which the police manipulate, destroy and plant evidence in order to put their foot on the scale in support of the conviction of someone they have prejudged as guilty. But just because it is a pattern, just because it has been true many, many times prior, that does not mean it is true in this case. My job is to report against those biases, but there is no guarantee, no matter how I believe that I have tried, that the final product will overcome them and amount to something approaching the highest of standards. There is no ensuring I have not excluded some piece or pieces of relevant information that is vital to weighing the narrative that has been presented here or my credibility as a teller of this story.

It is fully possible that the image I’ve painted in this piece ultimately will not, if we ever get the full facts, correspond with objective reality. This is a piece of media criticism. It is not an investigation. I wrote most of it in one sitting, immediately after watching the documentary.

And also: readers impressions of this piece will have nothing to do with whether or not what I am arguing is objectively correct. It will much more be based on their biases, stereotypes and the general vibes they perceive it to give off. Some who agree with it will do so because they were pre-inclined to: because they trust me or my work, or distrust the police, or think Smollett is cute, or any number of other reasons. Many of the people who will later say they read this piece and disagree with its conclusion will have not actually read it. They already decided Smollett is a shifty liar. Or that I am. Untrustworthy mulattos, the both of us.

Some, including those who agree, will confidently misstate the things I’ve written. Some will voice counterarguments directly pre-rebutted, because even if they read they did not comprehend. As humans we are very bad at processing information that challenges the things we already believe. This essay is particularly detail-oriented and, admittedly, tedious. There are long paragraphs and complex clauses and lots of commas. Telling messy complicated stories that endeavor to be fair and empathetic to everyone involved are remarkably hard to pull off within a clean, cogent narrative structure. It takes years of very specific devotion to a very specific subsection of our craft. I’ve been doing it for years and am far from a master.

Most practitioners would object to the suggestion that the average news piece, or even in-depth investigation could ever reflect this level of nuance. But why should anyone trust us if we cover complex cases while refusing to articulate their complications? To have the media we need for a functioning multicultural society we have to be willing to write long pieces, about complicated things, that require being read all the way through to the end in order to fully comprehend.

Although, judging by the early press response to the documentary, it seems unlikely Smollett’s case will get the type of rigorous hearing it deserves. A Guardian reviewer dismissed any new review of the case out of hand, describing the documentary as “icky, irresponsible television.” A more-substantive review of the case in Slate, still opens with a clear bias against Smollett: “The documentary retells the erratic epic from two perspectives: that of those who maintain, like the Chicago courts decided, that Smollett definitely lied about being attacked by white men in the streets of Chicago, and those who have found so-called evidence that may prove the contrary.”

Hold up. Courts do not “decide” whether or not someone “definitively lied.” They decide what the available evidence, as presented in court, suggests is most likely to have happened. This is, definitionally, a subjective process that very often gets things wrong.

To be clear, I’m not saying that more investigation won’t prove that the police and prosecutors got this right. I am saying that, years and years into this saga, the fact that such basic questions remain, on a case that received sustained, international press coverage, is evidence of massive media failure.

I’m not saying Jussie Smollett is telling the truth. What I am saying is that someone more objective than me should get to the bottom of it.

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Maybe it is because I'm a black journalist who was raised by a black journalist father, but…

I've never had particularly rose-colored view of the press.

The people themselves are hard working, mostly well-intentioned, humans. But the product (and process by which it is produced) is often a mess. We often paint pictures with big holes in the scenery. We publicly fret about declining trust without truly grappling with how often what we produce is untrustworthy.

Too often people look at the version of the world we’ve painted and see something incongruent with their reality. The more you or your areas of expertise are covered by the press, the more you learn to distrust it.1

Anyone who has read me over the years is familiar with these views. All of it is what, in the roughly 15 years I've reported for and published in major news outlets, I've attempted to counteract through my work: by telling stories that would otherwise have gone untold. It is a point of pride that when I left the Washington Post in 2020 that my editor toasted me as having been the reason the paper's pages had included stories it would have otherwise missed.

That, more than five years ago, was the last time that the primary form of my journalism was writing. It's not that I haven't written since then -- I have written a whole lot -- but I've also spent a fair amount of time in broadcast, audio journalism, teaching and working within various parts of the non-profit journalism world. At the moment, most of my time goes toward a handful of longer term projects I've been working on for the last few years. Still, I get a fair number of phone calls and emails from people hoping I might tell their story.

While often I’ve directed would-be sources to trusted colleagues and friends, the number of journalists doing this work, much less doing it well, are fewer, and the places willing to publish it vanishing. We're in a moment where the types of stories I most often tell -- at the intersection of race, politics, justice, and culture -- are not what most of our media is prioritizing. To be fair, most media organizations are struggling to survive. And also, to be honest: they were never that good at telling these stories well, even during the best of times.

None of that changes the essential nature of such stories and perspectives, though. I wrote this a few years ago, as part of a larger piece articulating my beliefs about the role of media in a multicultural democracy:

Journalists are often taught to go after “the story.” But that terminology can be misleading. Every story is, in fact, many stories. Despite our best efforts, very rarely does any one journalist or media organization tell any of them completely. The same question, asked several times, can yield different answers. Some sources eager to speak with you will refuse to talk to me. Our eyes are connected to our bodies, which often shape the way we experience the world and how the world experiences us. My eyes will see some things that yours never will.

The “story” we seek to tell is in fact a mosaic that must be filled in piece by piece. While one journalist may supply many tiles, seeing the entire scene requires others to fill in the rest. Thus, understanding objective reality requires a diversity of contributors. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar observed: truth is symphonic—the only way to hear its totality is if each instrument contributes its distinct part.

In short, my theory of media has always been of a mosaic: more storytellers, telling more stories that collide and crash into each other in ways that allow us to see more clearly a sum greater than their individual parts. Stories that seek out all of the relevant actors and grapple honestly with how doing so challenges simple narratives. A world in which we proactively seek out underrepresented stories and perspectives. Not because theirs are the only legitimate ones, but as a means of broadening our ability to see the totality of the truth.

This isn't intended as a manifesto about what does and does not work about our media (I've already written that piece). Neither is it an announcement of a major venture. One of the reasons that the media fails to tell such stories is because doing so is both unpopular and not profitable. When Substack and other newsletter platforms exploded in popularity a few years ago, I decided I couldn’t see it as a sustainable means of paying my bills while writing what I write about, the way that I write about it. That view hasn’t changed.

But it is fun. A decade and a half ago, as a college student, I published a blog that was a mixture of reported analysis, media criticism, cultural writing, and whatever else I was interested in at the time but that didn't fit squarely within my early newspaper jobs. I see this space as a return to that. Late-stage digital media has brought us all back to our humble blogging roots.

I may publish some more personal writing here. To be honest I haven't decided. As someone who has lived, relatively publicly, at least at the media industry level, since I was 18 -- and who has always been relatively unpopular among its most powerful people, institutions and gatekeepers -- I've got complex and contradictory feelings about how much of that I owe and to whom I owe it. Maybe I'll end up working some of that out in these pages. All of that TBD.

No promises at this point of how often I'll be in this space, other than that my intention is for it to be somewhat regular, with a few things lined up for the coming weeks. In the meantime, let me point you to two pieces I published earlier this year with Contraband Camp, which is one of my favorite places on the internet at the moment. The first, marking the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby, was a full-throated articulation of the theory that, if you've interacted with me in person anytime in the last decade you've likely heard: that Jay Gatsby was supposed to be read as a passing black man. Going with the theme of writing about things that I am obsessed with, I went long on Luther Vandross (and Kendrick Lamar, and SZA and black artistry, etc). Truly, I would have been happy to have that Luther essay be the last thing I ever published!

Alas, there will be more soon.

Wesley

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