Addressing Media Harm and Community Relationships through an Ethic of Love

Abstract

Ethical approaches to address media harm and build more idealized relationships between journalists and marginalized communities have relied heavily on prescriptions for unidirectional journalistic practices, often framed as an ethic of care. In this exploration of relationship development and maintenance through the perspectives of trusted journalists, we identify practices and exchanges that reflect a more reciprocal framework of an ethic of love. We present a case study derived from interviews with seventeen journalists named as trusted by Black community members in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where police murdered George Floyd in 2020. His murder reignited an international movement to address police brutality and systemic racism. Results show that communities and journalists rely on each other to achieve healthy relationships and exchanges. These relationships require both mutual agency and reciprocity, and many dimensions of their exchanges align with Black feminist scholar bell hooks’ ethic of love. Trusted journalists successfully addressed historic media harm through two prominent practices identified in this study: diligence and deference. Findings call upon scholars to craft a more inclusive and internationally relevant understanding of journalistic strategies that repair historic harms by centering vulnerable communities—for the ultimate benefit of all communities. Drawing on design justice principles, which posit that centering the most vulnerable communities creates more inclusive and universal systems, we discuss how the ethic of love framework can strengthen information pathways between journalists and communities.