The Case for Movement Journalism

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A column from The Objective from Lewis Raven Wallace, author of View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity.

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THE CASE FOR

MOVEMENT JOURNALISM

A linocut-style illustration of Ida B. Wells. To her right is the quote: The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.

Illustration by Billy Dee.

The current corporate model of journalism is falling short. Disinformation is running rampant. Journalists showing solidarity to their counterparts in Palestine are censored and targeted. Those controlling our news sources are increasingly aligned with authoritarianism.

It’s easy to feel disillusioned and disengaged. But we still need news to help us navigate the world, stay safe, and take action. What if the news we took in every day inspired us, helped us connect to one another, and gave us hope and vision for another world?

Movement journalism offers that possibility. It’s not apathetic: it’s journalism grounded in explicit pushback against systemic oppression, meant to encourage action and agency and help communities come together in resistance and archive collective memory. Movement journalism is a tradition with deep roots in the U.S. South and the Global South.

In my new limited-run column for The Objective, I’ll break down what I believe are the ten primary purposes of movement journalism, offering a kind of draft theory of change and an argument for why movement journalism matters so much right now.

I’ve researched the history of activist journalism for the last ten years and been an activist-journalist for twenty. This column is deeply influenced and inspired by the hundreds of people and organizations who have been doggedly building movement journalism infrastructure for decades — including Press On, the members of the Movement Media Alliance, and legacy-building reporters like Marvel Cooke, Ruben Salazar, and Ida B. Wells. 

Subscribe to receive my thoughts every couple of weeks about why movement journalism matters and how we can all be a part of supporting and building the media we need to resist authoritarianism and keep trustworthy news media alive.  

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Lewis Raven Wallace is the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization and the author of The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and the forthcoming title Radical Unlearning. They serve as an advisory board member of The Objective and currently live in North Carolina.

From this series…
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