Nicole: Hello everyone and welcome to the Journal of American Studies strand “The Talk.” Our guest, this instalment, is Gary Younge.
Gary is one of the most incisive voices in contemporary journalism and political thought. A writer, broadcaster, and academic, his work has consistently interrogated power, race, democracy, and social justice with clarity, depth, and moral urgency. Over the course of his career – including many years as an award-winning columnist and editor at The Guardian – he has reported from around the world, bringing global context to issues often framed as local and human texture to debates that are too easily abstracted. He is the author of several influential books, including Another Day in the Death of America and Dispatches from the Diaspora, and currently serves as a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester.
Welcome, Gary. I am here with my colleague at the Journal of American Studies and, more importantly, my friend, Ahmed Honeini. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your latest lecture publication, social media, the legacy media, AI, and a few other topics.
I’d like to begin this “Breakfast Club” discussion with a look at the current militarized occupation of Minneapolis and other targeted American cities. I want to pull out of the weeds of our justified outrage and grief for a moment and talk about the shift from legacy media to more independent forms of journalism and those practicing it, such as “Johnny-on-the-spotters” like Don Lemon, Giorgia Fort, and W. Kamau Bell; the use of Substacks; alternative social media platforms like Bluesky; and political blogs. How has the profession of journalism developed, or perhaps devolved, since the pandemic? What does it mean to be a journalist today?
Gary Younge: That’s a good question, and I think that the role, the role is always changing, and it’s been, it’s … I would say largely with the advent of social media, we saw, you know, the journalist would never be the first person on the scene. Usually, there would be people on the scene, right? It’s a bit like, well, we discovered America. Well, you didn’t. There were people there. But now those people get to amplify their witness and that puts a journalist, any kind of journalist, in a collaborative state, that you are, of the many sources that you have, there is now the source of the electronic crowd. I would argue that that’s been accelerating since the beginning of the century. And the end of the last century with blogs and then social media. And one of the things that that can do is force journalists to account.
I’ll give you an example. At the very beginning of my reporting state period in America. There was, oh God, now I’m blanking on his name. He was a Senator from Mississippi, Trent Lott. And Trent Lott spoke at a commemoration for Strom Thurmond, at which he said something to the tune of, we’d have all been better off if people had listened to him then. Meaning in Strom Thurmond’s segregationist run of President, which I think were in’48, I think, and maybe there was another one, I don’t know. And the legacy media, the New York Times and Washington Post, all the people, they wrote this thing up, but they didn’t include that. And [it] … took a blogger to say, but you know, what the hell has he just said? And then to kind of run with it. And outside of the legacy media, then people were like, yeah, that’s kind of, that is crazy. And it ends up with Trent Lott resigning. And that wasn’t the legacy media’s doing. And the reality is that kind of for the longest time, and we’re seeing this in Britain now with Peter Mandelson, and we are seeing it in the kind of the way that some of these press conferences are going at the White House, where the legacy media may not be on top of it. Ideologically, may not actually … Because they’re so close to power, because they feel the need to be close to power to get access, because quite often journalists actually think they are part of the power structure, almost like civil servants, or even the term the “Fourth Estate,” this notion that you are, you know, you also are a power structure. And that they have other interests apart from or some may have other interests apart from just saying what happened and weeding out what happened, providing the context of what happened. And this kind of provides … because journalists, legacy journalists in particular, are most likely to come from a certain socioeconomic and racial demographic, then that translates into the kind of things that they see as being urgent or not.
When I studied journalism, we were told, you know, when a dog bites a man, that’s not a story. There are no women in these aphorisms. But when a man bites a dog, it’s a story. And sooner or later, you have to ask yourself, who owns these dogs? Like the fact that when George Floyd was murdered, the Minneapolis Police Department put out a statement that no journalist would have followed up. “Yeah, we were rescuing a guy, and he got testy and, you know, unfortunately he died of a heart attack.” It took the video of the, as you call them, I think it was a Jane-on-the-spot, not a Johnny-on-the-spot.
Nicole: Yes.
Gary: But if you think about it, George Floyd’s murder was not news in a conventional sense. It wasn’t rare. It wasn’t particular. It wasn’t new. What was new was that people paid attention. And one may say, well, there was a video, but there have been other videos that haven’t done that. We don’t quite know why these things go viral, or the alchemies that make them go viral. But it was actually precisely the fact that a Black man being murdered by the state wasn’t news that made it go viral. “They’re doing this again.” This is part of our experience …
To view the rest of the interview go to the BAAS YouTube channel for Top of FormBottom of FormThe Talk Interview – Gary Younge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DX7y1odV7g.
