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Abstract

Following a wave of racial reckoning that set in after the global protests of the Black Lives Matter Movement, news organisations responded through a series of unambiguous public apologies, newsroom diversity policies, and even the payment of reparations. Attendant public and metajournalistic discourses have described these developments as operationalising ‘reparative journalism’, a reform agenda whose goal is to dismantle journalistic power structures that have promoted or enabled historical injustices in relation to colonisation, indigeneity, gender or race. While reparative journalism holds the promise of reconfiguring contemporary press accountability, there is a risk that its conceptualisation may conjure up a reductive view of the harms of journalism. This article ventilates on the reparative turn in journalism by exploring the intersections between journalistic harms/historical injustices, accountability and repair. The paper delineates ways to describe the press when implicated in harm in the age of reckoning.

Keywords

historical injustices journalistic harms press accountability racial reckoning reparative journalism

Introduction

In recent years, journalism scholars have focused attention on a wave of reparative practices that appear to chart a new agenda for historical revisionism into injustices associated with race, colonialism, indigeneity, citizenship and gender (see Callison and Young, 2020; Clark, 2022; Forde and Bedingfield, 2021; Hoecker, 2021; Ross, 2023; Sandra, 2012; Sridharan and Taylor, 2023; Thomas and Nolan, 2024; Usher and Carlson, 2022; Wenzel, 2023). While the recent discourses on ‘media reparations’ (Torres and Watson, 2023) do not necessarily reveal new insights into the historical harms and failures of the traditional press, we note a fresh scholarly interest in (re)contextualising journalistic harms and expanding traditional theories of repair and accountability. However, it is mostly the media reparative projects which have been marked by public apologies and ruminations of the press’s historical injustices and even substantial financial commitments (e.g., The Guardian’s $11 million ‘reparation’ to descendants of the enslaved) that we consider might have a significant impact on journalism today.

Through diverse reparative projects, organisations have initiated the following: a “second-draft” approach to news production (Usher and Carlson, 2022) through historiographical editorial projects like the New York Times’ 1619 Project; joined the wave of official institutional apologies by governments, corporations, churches, or universities (Hoecker, 2021; Sridharan and Taylor, 2023) through transparent accounts of historical injustices (The Guardian, UK); reformed media ethical principles through a charter that upends relations between (colonial) settlers and Indigenous communities (New Zealand’s Stuff newspaper), or; advocated for a new global media system that dismantles white power (Media 2070, a US-based non-profit).

What is unprecedented in the above developments is the way organisations are reshaping traditional press accountability. First, journalistic institutions bluntly admit being enablers of harm through their apologies, for example, Stuff’s 2020 declaration that it had been “outright racist” in its reporting (see Stevens, 2020). Such concessions defy autonomy defence theories that have explained the traditional journalistic responses to criticism or public scrutiny (see, among others, Zirugo and Cheruiyot, 2025; Klocke and McDevitt, 2013). Second, through apologia, self-investigations and editorial coverage of journalistic historiographical essays (Usher and Carlson, 2022; c.f. Forde and Bedingfield, 2021), the press is enacting transparency in ways that are not merely performative (Karlsson, 2022), but through disclosure of actual changes in newsrooms after apologies (Ross, 2023; cf. Thomas and Nolan, 2024). Third, while tempered by postcolonial debates, political discourse on the legacy of slavery, and a surge of institutional apologies and restitution (e.g., repatriation of stolen art), some journalistic institutions are keen to integrate justice mechanisms into their accountability projects.

Amid the ongoing media reforms into traditional accountability systems, for example, through ‘anti-racist journalism’ (see Wenzel, 2023), this article argues that the increasing media reparative projects (Awino and Cheruiyot, 2025) and the attendant public, metajournalistic and scholarly discourses (Zirugo and Cheruiyot, 2025) implicate the press as an offending institution and victimiser. In the new calls for reparative journalism, for example, the press is portrayed as an oppressive institution that requires a radical overhaul through an assessment of its structural racism (Clark, 2021; Torres and Watson, 2023). We argue that the perspective of the press as the oppressor is a necessary trigger for reckoning but risks narrowing perspectives about journalism’s societal function and transformational impact (Zelizer, 2017; Zelizer et al., 2022). While there is an urgent need to reconfigure journalism over its dark history in relation to colonisation, indigeneity, gender, or race (Callison and Young, 2020; Wenzel, 2023), the press is still one of the most significant pillars of democracy today. The press is also an institution that is critical for social change and justice, especially at a time when populism threatens democracy, the increased risks to journalistic safety, vagaries of global conflicts and saturation of mis/disinformation in digital spaces.

In this paper, therefore, we argue that broader perspectives of the ‘harm-prone’ press (Robinson and Johnson, 2024) are critical as reparative journalism begins to take shape. By exploring the intersections between the harms of journalism, accountability, and reparative justice, this paper sheds light on what reckoning (see Callison and Young, 2020; Clark, 2022; Torres and Watson, 2023) means for the press today. It proposes fresh ways of understanding reparative journalism through the following five perspectives of the press: perpetrator of harm, victim of harm, facilitator of justice, crusader of justice and repairer of harm. This paper contributes to the current conceptualisations of reparative journalism and subsequent re-evaluation of the theories of press accountability.

The evolution of reparative journalism

In the Nieman Labs’ ‘predictions for journalism 2021’, Meredith Clark coined the term ‘reparative journalism’ to describe a reform agenda that seeks to reorient institutional practices, journalistic ideology and media business to dismantle power structures within media systems that have promoted structural racism and white supremacy (Clark, 2021). In both practice and academia, reparative journalism has so far been associated with material and symbolic forms of repair that include official apologies, diversity hiring in newsrooms, investigations into previous links to slavery, and even monetary compensation (Sridharan and Taylor, 2023; Usher and Carlson, 2022). The term is slowly growing in its use, especially in anti-racist discourses and media reform projects that prescribe new forms of journalism to remodel journalistic structures and epistemologies that have historically promoted harm and injustice, e.g., movement or community-centred journalism(s) (Callison and Young, 2020; Wenzel, 2023).

While we do not seek to offer an alternative normative theory of reparative journalism, we mainly centre this concept within the attendant discourses surrounding journalistic harms, along with the imaginaries of repair and reparations mentioned earlier. This paper instead addresses the problematic nature in which institutional adoption of reparative journalism practices and discourses introduces a singular view of the press (see, for example, Clark, 2021; Forde and Bedingfield, 2021): the press as an enabler of harm/injustice. Further, the scholarly discourses on reparative journalism have not delineated the position of journalism as an institution that is founded on principles of traditional press accountability (Fengler et al., 2014; Pritchard, 2000) nor demystified its entanglements with justice (Santos and Ndlovu, 2022) amid the revisionist discourse into historical harms and failures of the press (Awino and Cheruiyot, 2025).

This paper, therefore, first explores the place of historical harm in journalism by examining perspectives on journalistic ethics and press accountability. We further seek to understand the nexuses between journalism and reparative justice and what this portends for the global reckoning of the press today. Finally, we propose ways to classify ‘the press that harms’ when positioned within the debates of reparative journalism.

Journalistic harm and repair

Journalistic harm has traditionally been discussed within the context of ethics and media accountability. Media ethicists identify different ways individuals would approach harm, for instance, the practitioner’s self-examination through the Kantian categorical imperative in which one sticks to established rules and norms to avoid harming others. However, scholars acknowledge that in media practice, “harm is unavoidable even with the noblest intentions” (Plaisance et al., 2012: 644). Thus, in utilitarian thinking, journalists would solve an ethical dilemma by considering how harm could be minimised against a balance of the greater societal good. The rationalisation of harm that the traditional ethical approaches conjure is often used to justify journalistic failures and intended (and unintended) harms through journalism. Such realist thinking in which the end (i.e., social good) justifies the means, e.g., the pragmatic need to report the news in ‘public interest’ but in the process violate privacy (Rafter and Knowlton, 2013), takes no cognisance of the irreparability of certain harms (see Scott, 2024). Such harms through journalistic products (for example, sensationalised news that objectifies women and promotes physical or psychological suffering; see (Carter et al., 2019) is tied to institutional practices that become embedded in journalistic structures and are reproduced through individual agency, often rationalising their impact (Young and Nussbaum, 2011).

Historical harms, for example, the establishment of media organisations through proceeds from the transatlantic slave trade (Taylor, 2023), may not be directly attributable to journalistic practice. They are however harms that result from power relations and individual agency, but implicate journalism as an institution, especially because it professes to the public fidelity to ethical values and the goal to minimise harm. And yet, the assumption in traditional theories of ethics in journalism is that individual agency is at play in journalistic practice and structures are neutral (Giddens, 1984). Some critical realists prefer to view structures as not neatly integrated with agency but influencing each other anyway, and this interdependence is essential in how the agency’s power could contribute to repair (McKeown, 2023). But then again, media ethics narrowly defines harm to suggest that it only results from the behaviour/conduct of journalists and institutional practices, e.g., phone hacking of sources to obtain scoops, as was the case with the defunct News of the World newspaper in the UK (Ogbebor, 2021). Existing studies have revealed how the press perpetually promotes structural harms, for example, the traditional marginalisation of communities in poor neighbourhoods in the news. While the potential harm to those in under-resourced communities is indirect, the established structures, e.g., the business models of the news industry, indirectly make these communities vulnerable to neglect, for instance, in the distribution of resources like law enforcement facilities and personnel, thus leading to increased crimes in poor neighbourhoods.

While there could be various ways of understanding journalistic harms to the audiences and generally the society that the press serves, in this paper, we place harms within the philosophical context of a social contract journalism establishes between itself and the public. We argue that journalistic harm marks the abrogation of the social contract that the press establishes with the public. The social contract perspective is useful in understanding how the press and the public have reciprocal rights and obligations (Sjøvaag, 2010). The reciprocity between journalistic institutions and the public explains journalism’s ideology in how it derives its authority and deploys its power, the rules and regulations it abides by in different national contexts, its mission for justice, and, ultimately, its role in democratic societies. For example, the public grants or facilitates access to journalists in public spaces, expecting the press to increase their audiences’ knowledge about risks in their society, such as that of a pandemic.

In most parts of the world, the press claims to be both defined and shaped by democratic principles, even though some scholars contest the democratic ideology of the practice and have revealed varied ways in which this thinking is applied in the practice of journalism (see Hanitzsch, 2007; Josephi, 2013). In the social contract framework, “journalism entails a contractual partner in its own right, not just a communicator between the public and the state” (Sjøvaag, 2010: 874). As the public’s contractual partner, the press then clearly defines its mission to society, e.g., to fully inform audiences so they are equipped to participate in their democracy productively (Strömbäck, 2005), but at the same time articulates its obligation to nurture a profession that abides by norms and rules such as objectivity and ethical values such as the goal to minimise harm. The press both defines its obligation to ‘good journalism’ (in a variety of ways) while also allowing internal and external oversight agents e.g., media accountability institutions, to set terms of service, on behalf of the citizenry.

The reciprocity between the press and the public is anchored in moral obligations and ‘non-binding’ or ‘self-imposed’ (Sjøvaag, 2018) responsibilities, legitimising journalistic practice and power in a liberal democracy. The public’s expectations are varied in scholarly interpretations of the rights and obligations of each party in the social contract, but they are mostly founded based on active citizenry (Sjøvaag, 2010). The obligations of an active citizen range from being engaged consumers of news, which is essential to their democracy (McQuail, 2003), to being a critic of institutions of power and journalism itself (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2014), to proactively raising their voice against injustice (Santos and Ndlovu, 2022). The reciprocal rights and obligations of both the news media and the public are critical for the optimal functioning of communication in a democracy (Sjøvaag, 2010: 882), but also for enabling the press to perform its function in a democracy. When reciprocity is placed within the context of journalistic harm, it therefore implies that both the press and the public can breach this contractual relationship. When this breach occurs, institutional remedies through accountability practices kick in, which are also reinforced by the state acting as an intermediary by virtue of itself being party to the social contract. To actualise its contractual terms, the press subscribes to and promotes various media accountability mechanisms such as media laws, code of ethics, media review, press clubs, etc (Bertrand 2000; Pritchard, 2000).

Press accountability is grounded in the principle of answerability (responses to public scrutiny and criticism) and liability (potential harms and attendant sanctions) (McQuail, 2003). Answerability is closely tied to repair – the actions and discourses that aim to restore, improve or reform journalism in situations of breach of the social contract. Scholars have explained ‘paradigm repair’ as signifying ways in which news organisations correct their public image through reaffirming norms/rules of journalism, pinpointing ‘bad apples’ within the profession or discursively reconstructing perceptions of themselves and their harms or rationalising mistakes and failures (Blach-Ørsten et al., 2018; Klocke and McDevitt, 2013; Zirugo and Cheruiyot, 2025). On the other hand, liability is a mode of accountability that aligns more with how to enforce reparations – the acts or methods in which the media make amends to the public for the breach of the social contract. This could be in the form of sanctions or fines by the complaints commission of a press council when the press fails to observe the code of conduct, court awards of damages over libel or defamation suits, the cancellation of broadcast licenses by the state or newspaper apologies over errors in news reports. In the case of damages over libel, the monetary compensation points to a form of redress or repair that arises from the reciprocal relationship between the public and the press. If repair and reparations are strongly embedded within traditional press accountability, then it means, therefore, that journalistic institutions engage in reparative justice, which we discuss in the next section.

Journalism and reparative justice

While there are still limited studies on the theoretical links between accountability and justice in journalism studies, in this section, we sketch out the interlinkages between the two within the context of journalistic harms. We argue that based on the social contract, the society, journalists, and other institutions in a democracy, such as the state or civil society, collectively formulate what fits within a model of just practice. Journalistic harms and failures breach this social contract and thus activate a reciprocal measure to remedy these failures and harms through reparations.

Often, the democratic function of the press is associated with its critical role towards promoting various forms of justice, e.g. distributive, social or racial justice (Santos and Ndlovu, 2022). In Rawls’ theory of justice, any social institution has an obligation towards society to act/operate in just ways a liberal democracy (Rawls, 1999). Within the bounds of social contract and justice theory, often in journalism studies, scholars assess situations where the press fits or fails to fit within the principles of fairness. The central role of the press over history has been to both operationalise and defend individuals’ right to free speech; thus, scholars acknowledge journalism’s informational role but also its defiance of powers that cripple citizens’ rights and civil liberties.

Scholars lament the lack of a substantive theory of reparative justice (Walker, 2015). Literature on reparations draws from works on political remedial actions to atrocities and human rights violations resulting from wars and conflicts. In contrast, the justice aspects have mostly been drawn from legal/justice studies on corrective, distributive or restorative forms. There is contention among legal and justice scholars as to whether reparations represent ‘real’ justice and whether material or symbolic reparations deliver justice to victims of harm (Bass, 2012; Elster, 2012; Walker, 2015). Based on the theory of victimology, for example, scholars argue that the victimisers (individuals and institutions alike) often hold immense power and capital that compensatory reparations would effectively counterbalance or reduce this power (particularly the potential for its misuse) and, simultaneously, distribute resources they hold (Hall, 2017; Wenar, 2006). Such is what scholars perceive as a step towards achieving ‘real’ justice. In political normative theory, scholars argue that principles of reparation that are forward-looking—anticipating repair or society relations now and distributive justice—are more acceptable in society than ‘backwards-looking’ forms, i.e., those that look to the past to repair it (McKeown, 2021a; Wenar, 2006). When the goal is justice, reparations are symbolic, corrective, or restorative, aiming to take the victim to the position they were before the harm happened (Walker, 2015). Scholars therefore view reparations as transformational when they cultivate “new relationships of recognition, trust, equality, respect, atonement, or reconciliation” (Walker, 2015: 217). In essence, then, reparative justice, in the case of historical harms like slavery or racism, does not create but only signify the “possibility of a relationship of accountability and reciprocity where there has been none, or where it has been dangerously unreliable” (Walker, 2015: 218, emphasis in original).

Within the liability perspective of press accountability, harms such as those inflicted on individual reputations are calculable (e.g., in cases of libel before courts), and damages awarded are material reparations. In the case of historical harms, such as the perpetual historical stereotyping of minority groups through the news, these might prove incalculable and symbolic forms of reparations, such as the restructuring of the editorial system and the diverse representation of minorities in newsrooms might be the alternative form of redress.

The iterations of the ‘harmful’ press

As revisionist debates into past historical injustices associated with the press have recently elicited renewed calls for reparations, the attendant media reparative projects perhaps represent what has been lacking in societal efforts towards reparative justice, that of structured and unstructured ways to deliberate on historical harms, while simultaneously contemplating ways of providing redress (Walker, 2015; Winter, 2006). The press is built for a public sphere which has increasingly become participatory in recent times, allowing for an engagement between the global society and institutions of power, empowering citizens to access new (digital) platforms in reinstituting their own ways of doing journalism better (see Callison and Young, 2020; Wenzel, 2023). We consider reparative journalism as stimulating discourses and actions aimed at reforms evaluating harms, establishing reciprocity between the press and the public, and instigating a need for (renewed) participatory accountability.

However, when the press is cast only as an enabler of harm and society as victim, there is a tendency to narrowly view its imbrication with accountability or justice, thus foreclosing a discourse of the press’s double bind within its social contract with the public. We therefore seek to correct such a blind spot by explicating the different forms the press takes when it is placed as an institution whose harms coexist with its alternative activities of repair as well as its institutional commitments to accountability. These are: the press as the perpetrator of harm; the press as the victim of harm; the press as the facilitator of justice; the press as a crusader of/for justice, and the press as the repairer of harm. These categories that we describe in the next section are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, but we consider them collectively as a starting point for a future critical examination of reparative journalism. They provide the foundations through which to critically examine ways to reconfigure journalism in the age of racial/cultural reckoning and historical revisionism (Callison and Young, 2020; Wenzel, 2023). Indeed, scholars have argued that recent concerns over the existential crisis of journalism and calls for how to ‘save’ journalism are unhelpful if the press fails to reckon with the media’s structural harms (Callison and Young, 2020).

The press as a perpetrator of harm

In the recent wave of racial reckoning, news organisations have admitted to structural discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender and class that has become a springboard for white supremacy and anti-black hatred or xenophobia and ultimately leading to the denial of basic rights or the institutionalisation of unjust laws (Forde and Bedingfield, 2021; Torres and Watson, 2023). There are many studies that examine the harms of journalism and thus often project the press as an enabler of injustices.

Numerous studies of ‘media harms’ (suffering linked to media products), reveal trauma from negative reporting (Hall, 2017), news fatigue following saturation of news coverage (Gurr, 2022) or even psychological effects of violent content on TV, especially on children (Livingstone, 2007). Some harms that are linked to the press can be measured, while others can prove difficult to measure, for example, ‘Afrophobia’ or racial misrepresentation and stereotyping (Workneh, 2022). Scholars have shown that negative reporting on minorities has potential costs to the physical and psychological safety of individuals (Armoudian, 2015) and further demonises and dehumanises these groups, potentially instigating hatred, violence or abuse against them (Bandura et al., 1975).

While the new media has historically enjoyed an impactful position in shaping social relations, they have also been subservient to structural forces that shape the competing demands of democracy and keep them in the crosshairs of power wrangles. Siebert et al. (1956), argued that in authoritarian press systems, “the truth was thought to be centered near the center of power”, a reckoning that journalism reproduced the “truth” of powerful actors (2). Consequently, such repressive press systems succumb to the side of the powerful majority, even if this leads to harms that go against their normative functions (Nyamnjoh, 2005) and breach their social contract with the public. Studies show that the inconsistency in advancing democratic values—through empowering the citizenry to challenge the centres of power—has eroded public trust in the news in Western countries such as the US (Hanitzsch et al., 2018). Although the decline in trust is not universal, in many journalistic cultures, the political elite often create public animosity or scrutiny of the press over real or imagined harms.

At the same time, the press has, alongside other social institutions, been deployed by the ruling elite as an ideological apparatus to legitimise dominant, repressive ideologies or white supremacy (Althusser, 1971; Forde and Bedingfield, 2021). As such, the ideological purchase of official truth has contributed to journalism’s shortcomings through the (intended or unintended) reproduction or amplification of injustices such as racial terrorism. Relatedly, amidst pluralistic journalistic cultures, studies show that complicit journalism replaces accountability journalism when media corporations bow to political and economic pressures in pro-market democracies (see Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Wasserman and Maweu, 2014). Such subservience to market fundamentalism is not without influence in journalistic work. The capitalist ideology adopted in the media through framing and agenda-setting is reflected in the representation of values and beliefs, including who deserves to be heard. In less capitalistic and/or authoritarian systems, the media are often still ‘captured’ to justify the hegemonic order. For instance, there are cases where the press has been implicated in human rights abuses, bearing the dual role of reporting on injustices while at the same time enabling them (Awino, 2021; Shaw, 2012; Stremlau, 2020). There are many instances where journalists have colluded with powerful state and non-state actors to commit gross violations of human rights, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, murder and even genocide. For instance, the genocide in Rwanda was facilitated by radio broadcasts against Tutsi minorities. Similarly, in other cases (such as in Kenya’s post-election crisis of 2007/08 and in apartheid South Africa), the press has been accused of abetting gross human rights violations. This category, therefore, reaffirms the role of the press in contributing to harms, sometimes in dangerous departure from its normative civic role as the ‘fourth estate’.

The press as a victim of harm

Dominant media institutions often assert their ability to check on the excesses of power – even winning awards for investigative and inspiring stories – but such efforts that seek to disrupt power relations have sometimes come at a heavy price. On the one hand, the traditional press has historically enabled structural harm, while on the other, it has been the ‘enemy’ of powerful forces that strike back when their interests are threatened (see, among other examples, the case of the Black Press in the US in Forde and Bedingfield, 2021). Journalists then become primary targets of retribution and, thus, victims of harm themselves. Journalists participate in an apparatus for social ordering (Callison and Young, 2020: 49). In a capitalist ecosystem, journalistic institutions are businesses with a prioritised profit orientation. In media systems where markets control social and political relations, such as in the US, the media are vulnerable to economic capture, a structural form of harm where economic and financial forces impinge on media work. Through consolidated ownership of dominant media organizations, the power to shape narratives and ‘manufacture consent’ is aligned with political, state and market forces (Herman and Chomsky, 1988).

Even with the digital technologies that ushered in a participatory turn in journalism, the press still caters to powerful actors, eroding their independence with grave consequences of media capture (Schiffrin, 2021). Journalists face many stressors in their coverage of conflict, environmental degradation, wars, terrorism, protests, human rights violations and electoral disputes. Some have paid the ultimate price for political risk reporting as press freedom continues to decline worldwide (as documented by organisations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists). Many more have suffered physical harm, been demoted and disenfranchised for their work, resulting in a culture of fear and silence. With increased and advanced forms of state surveillance, some journalists have been forced into exile, resorting to independent media operations abroad (See Free Press Unlimited, 2022). For their work, journalists have suffered from trauma, mental distress and depression, they have lost property and family or witnessed pain and harm in huge proportions (Underwood, 2011). While there have been efforts in several countries to mitigate mental trauma, there are calls both within academia and the industry for more institutional support for journalists at risk (see Deuze, 2023; Higuera, 2024).

This category therefore shows journalism’s double bind, one that can be overlooked when assessing reparative journalism i.e., where the press is an agent of harm but is also a victim of harm. These two overlapping categories reveal that the standard perspective of the press as the offender is confining, particularly if the goal is to encapsulate institutional harms fully.

The press as a facilitator of justice

There is an assumed interdependence between journalism and justice within public and academic discourses, even though this relationship is rarely defined. The assumption emerges from the belief that journalism is a critical pillar of democracy, to the point that some scholars insist the two are inseparable (Carey, 1989; Josephi, 2013). Journalism empowers society with knowledge about resources, rights, power or principles of social/political morality, all of which are necessary for citizens to make informed decisions and act e.g., to exercise their right to vote (Park, 1940). It is however important to note that journalism can be detrimental to the functioning of democracy (McChesney, 1999).

The justice function most often ascribed to journalism derives from its capacity to provide the public with a platform to exercise free speech in both political and everyday life. The Habermasian public sphere, for example, sees journalism as critical in the operationalisation of free speech in a democracy through the spaces of deliberation that it creates and nurtures. Deliberation in the public sphere, for example, through political radio talk shows like Ekimeeza in Uganda, ensures citizens participate in public life and are engaged in scrutinising governments and those in power (Nassanga, 2008). When the political class abuses power and governments suppress citizens’ rights, such as the right to free speech, the press is expected to check those in power and mobilise citizens to participate in activities to promote public accountability. Even in advanced democracies where free speech and press freedom are respected, the press is still expected to support causes to expose bad governance, misuse of power or poor policies through, for example, civic journalism.

In a world replete with human rights violations, journalists are always normatively positioned as the arbiters of truth in their objective reporting as ‘first drafters of history’ (Usher and Carlson, 2022). However, journalistic reporting of human rights abuses tends to focus on physical abuses, in what Shaw (2012) calls ‘human wrongs journalism’. At the macro level, emphasis has been on journalistic coverage of human rights violations in “faraway lands” and the factors that shape news framing of human rights violations, mostly in war/conflict/humanitarian contexts (Chouliaraki, 2006). Normative perspectives in the field argue that journalism should deconstruct human rights abuses as structural (Galtung, 1969; Shaw, 2012). Journalistic focus on structural violence proactively addresses social, cultural, economic and political factors that contribute to societal harms, rather than solely highlighting the pain of victims. Through such a structural inequality paradigm, human rights journalism disrupts the normative reporting of abuses by underscoring the oppression and subjugation of individuals or social groups within a broader context of social systems (McKeown, 2021b; Shaw, 2012). Conventional analyses of journalistic rights, on the other hand, have trained sights on physical violence against journalists and political obstacles to their freedoms as the main themes (Pollock, 2015; Shaw, 2012). Shaw (2012) advocates for the reconceptualisation of human rights journalism to include race, class, gender, nationality, and religion in its treatment of injustices. However, these frameworks for understanding human rights journalism are insufficient in their attempts to address ways in which the press interacts with power in the perpetuation of historical structural injustices.

The press as a crusader of/for justice

Closely related to the role of journalism as a facilitator of justice, is the classification of journalism as a crusader of/for justice. Citizens consider the press as both a partner and a driving force towards achieving forms of justice such as social, environmental, legal or reparative justice – all of which are appreciated as necessary in building stronger democratic values and human rights (Santos and Ndlovu, 2022). When journalism is deployed as a tool to inform and mobilise the public to act against state oppression or bad governance, it then becomes central towards social change.

There are variations of journalistic practice towards social change. When news journalism inspires the public to play active roles as citizens such as criticising those in power, it is exercising its social responsibility role. An ‘advocate-journalist’ defends the authority of journalism (its norms and values) against the influences of powerful interests, and this is critical to ensuring that the press serves public interests (Janowitz, 1975; McQuail, 2003). Throughout its history, the press has been ascribed a social responsibility role – that of spurring the public to hold to account those in power through serving as a reliable information agent. However, when journalistic actors take up and promote social causes, public grievances or policies, this practice becomes referred to as advocacy journalism. The civic orientations of advocacy journalism implies that organised groups acquire platforms to mobilise the public, spark debates and deliberation or directly promote certain policies on social or political matters (Ostertag, 2006; Waisbord, 2009), for example, in the struggles for political change such as colonialism, authoritarianism or fascism. Scholars have, for example, documented how social movements have constructively deployed journalism or how the mainstream news media become “a tactical ally” in crusading against injustices based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation and the promotion of among others, sexual, environmental, labour or voting rights (Waisbord, 2009: 375). However, advocacy journalism has in the history of journalism acquired a different form when mainstream news organisations have actively promoted political ideologies, extreme political views or sensationalism, for example the popularity of right-wing commentary on conservative media like America’s Fox News or the coverage of scandals by tabloids in the UK. In the democratisation processes of the 20^th Century in most parts of the Global South, advocacy journalism became a channel through which to circumvent restrictions to civic rights and free speech to push for labour, health, environmental or political rights.

The press as the repairer of harm

The final dimension of the press is that of the repairer of harm. ‘Repair’ in journalism is best displayed through press accountability systems by which it holds itself answerable and liable for abrogating the terms of social contract with the public. Press accountability is a norm and practice and is manifested and operationalised through a variety of mechanisms such as press councils, media reviews, ombudspersons, media regulatory laws, codes of ethics, among others (see Bertrand, 2000). In many press systems, press councils outline these mechanisms, and journalists are expected to abide by the ethical codes which guide the practice. For example, the National Union of Journalists of the UK, which crafted its code of ethics in 1936 states that journalists must do their “utmost to correct harmful inaccuracies” (NUJ, 2024).

Traditionally, press accountability theory is rooted in the notion of answerability and liability, i.e., how well the press will consistently respond to its users in explaining its faults and failures, but also the ways it offers remedies for its harms (McIntyre, 1987; McQuail, 2003; Pritchard, 2000). Recent reforms to media accountability have focussed on citizen-oriented approaches (Fengler et al., 2014), for example through active criticism of the traditional press in digital spaces (Cheruiyot, 2018). However, in most global media systems, press accountability has limited itself to traditional media (and hardly to non-journalistic or non-human actors involved in news production) and instead reinforced a reductive relationship between journalism and the public.

Despite the claim by the press to repair harms and/or injustice, it also emerges as a denialist when pushed to account for its harms and failures. Indeed, the press’s capacity to establish and reinforce its authority in society is exceptional. Over history, the press has cemented its institutional power through: cultural influence (the informational power in its news framing capacities); capital (industrial dominance, e.g., through ownership of large conglomerates like the Rupert Murdoch empire), or; even political power when it has asserted itself as the ‘fourth estate’ and a critical pillar of governance, for example, because of its unique place in the democratic constitutions in comparison to other professions.

However, perhaps its most remarkable capacity in acquisition of power is how it discursively constructs its authority as a knowledge producer that then gives it moral force in society. The press has done this through the way it has developed a profession – a community of news workers who, in their news-making activity, aspire for truth-telling and adhere to ethical values, norms and rules of practice. To preserve this authority, journalism engages boundary control measures (e.g., the claim that it abides by ethical values such as fairness) and invokes its claim to independence from agendas or interests of sources, owners of news organisations, or governments. At the same time, the press constantly renounces criticism or any incursions into its fields, for example, when peripheral media producers with no training in news journalism, such as bloggers in the 2000s, engage in news production.

Conclusion

This article has sought to explore what reparative journalism portends as the discourses into historical harms and repair intensify in the age of racial/political reckoning. We have argued that we consider the positioning of the press as the perpetrator of harm as the most likely definer of policy debates and even reforms in the press-public relations today. Thus, we have provided alternative iterations – the perpetrator, victim, facilitator, crusader and repairer – as ways to understand the press when implicated in historical injustice. We consider these overlapping categories as a starting point for clarifying what reparative journalism could be, but we are also careful not to assume that these categories are universal. The categories are in many ways linked to different media systems that exist in relation to various political systems, which have unique histories of colonialism, social inequalities, the marketization of journalism, media regulation, among others.

We have examined the harms of the press narrowly through an assumption that the mainstream media has historically accumulated power that has had an enormous influence on society. There are, however, other important considerations at this point in history when the global press is experiencing digital disruptions, a crisis of trust, and threats to press freedom and the safety of journalists. News as a cultural form is increasingly being produced outside the traditional newsroom (Steensen and Westlund, 2020), but also in a variety of forms that inflict harm to audiences, e.g., through the weaponization of the news by far-right media (Figenschou and Ihlebæk, 2018). Moreover, research is still limited on what happens when various actors participate in news production, and mostly today, how they are accountable to the public. Recent studies show that these diverse actors in media production increasingly serve narrow interests and constitute new harms of their own. For instance, in the case of alt-right media like America’s Breitbart, they instigate the public into ‘culture wars’ (Davis 2019).

Finally, while global social justice movements (Black Lives Matter and MeToo) have ushered in a fresh political reckoning that has pressured institutions, including the press, to re-examine its past injustices, institutions have evaluated other harms of a global scale. Following recent political polarisation worldwide and the rise of mis/disinformation, scholars and social commentators’ interest has turned to the possible costs of the antecedent harms to economies, communities and even individuals (Donovan et al., 2022). It is, therefore, our contention that press harms and reparations should, in future research, be viewed within a broader context of institutional harms.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

David Cheruiyot

Author biographies

David Cheruiyot is an Assistant Professor in Journalism Studies at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies (CMJS) at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has a specific interest in critics of the mainstream media and peripheral actors involved in news production. David’s research has appeared in several international journals and addresses various areas, including popular and digital media criticism, data journalism, fact-checking, and media representation, among others.

Irene Awino is an Assistant Professor of Communication (Media Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Dr Awino’s research and teaching interests span interdisciplinary fields of critical journalism, global media and technology, human rights, gender and development.

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Untangling reparative journalism: Iterations of the ‘harmful’ press

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The evolution of reparative journalism

Journalistic harm and repair

Journalism and reparative justice

The iterations of the ‘harmful’ press

The press as a perpetrator of harm

The press as a victim of harm

The press as a facilitator of justice

The press as a crusader of/for justice

The press as the repairer of harm

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biographies

References