Issue 15: Food Insecurity and Journalism
How reporting on rising rates of food insecurity on campuses reminded me about the journalist-activist debate
Hello friends,
I’m thrilled to share this feature I wrote recently for University Affairs Magazine about efforts to address food insecurity at universities: Searching for sustainable solutions to food insecurity on campus.
When this feature was assigned to me in December, I was excited to be able to write about a small part of such an important issue. But as I began to do the reporting, I realized it was bringing up my own experiences of food insecurity both as the child of students and as a student myself. This didn’t dampen my interest, but it did make the reporting process rather intense, and that made me think about the place of lived experience in journalism.
When I was a kid, my family often needed support from the food bank. I clearly remember my mom coming home with a big box full of generic label goods that she magically transformed into our Thanksgiving dinner one year. In undergrad, I struggled (and sometimes failed) to scrape together enough money to pay for basics like rent, food and bus fare. Do you know what happens when a rent cheque bounces? Your bank and your landlord both charge fees, meaning the rent you already couldn’t pay is now much higher. Being broke is expensive. None of this is in the article, but I’m sharing it with you now to illustrate a point.
Though I’m not currently living with that level of precariousness, it will always be part of how I see the world. It affects my underlying assumptions about what it means to live in a just society and I come back to it again and again in my writing. Yet there’s a certain way of thinking about journalism that would argue these very experiences disqualify me from writing an article like this one because I’m too close to the issue. My experience of food insecurity means I can’t be objective.
I think that’s a false dichotomy. When someone without experience of food insecurity writes about the topic, they still do so with underlying assumptions. Those assumptions are invisible to people on the outside. I’m not saying it would be bad reporting necessarily—there are just things a person can’t know unless they lived them, and that can be hard to explain.
At the beginning of my career, the journalists I knew came from comfortably middle class or higher backgrounds (or if they didn’t, they hid it pretty well). When I tried to talk about poverty from an insider’s perspective, it often felt like I was speaking a language no one really understood. That disparity would appear in subtle ways—in the direction an editor wanted me to take with an article or in an exploitative or jokey headline. None of that was the case with this current article—the editors at University Affairs were great—but I did wonder as I went through the editing process whether I would have to defend my reporting in unexpected ways.
There are so many more perspectives available today, but there are still issues where the reporting is done largely by those without lived experience, which becomes obvious in how the people from within that community respond to the reporting. Most recently, this question arose in relation to an open letter to the New York Times signed by thousands of contributors, media workers, and readers (including myself) criticizing the paper’s coverage of trans issues. Other contributors fired back against the union’s support of the letter arguing that journalists should not be activists.
The thing is, with lived experience comes feelings that may lead a person to want to work to change the injustices they are reporting about. Those who are most capable of keeping a clear line between journalist and activist are always going to be those who already benefit from the systems in place.
I certainly don’t think journalists should only be allowed to engage with topics from their lives. I feel a great sense of honour and responsibility when someone unlike me trusts me with their story, and I think doing that work has made me a better writer. But when all your reporting is done by people without direct lived experience of the subject they’re writing about, you end up with a very different view of the world than you would otherwise. That’s not objectivity, it’s cloaked subjectivity.
Thanks again for reading these poorly edited notes about things I find interesting. If you liked what you read, please hit the heart button below, leave a comment and feel free to share widely. You can also usually find me on Twitter. If you'd like to read more or subscribe, you can do so here.
~Erika