By Munachim Amah
For a few months between 2016 and 2017, I worked as a graduate intern and then a freelance digital journalist for CNN. This was back when I lived in Nigeria and had so much enthusiasm and optimism for journalism practice. I was one of four reporters covering West Africa for CNN’s international audience, and we had the freedom to write stories about anything, though my editor mostly wanted stories about politics, arts and culture in Africa. My editor was a middle-aged woman who had been educated in the United Kingdom and worked at the CNN bureau there. She often talked about “telling impactful stories” and about “doing meaningful work.” I remember one editorial meeting where she kept repeating the word “balance”: “You have to always balance the sources in your stories,” and as she said this, I thought of the Lady Justice, with her blindfold and weighing scale held out decidedly in front of her. It reminded me of my master’s program at a private university in Nigeria where my professors kept repeating journalists must be objective, journalists must be neutral, journalists must be detached.
Around the world, especially in western contexts, these concepts have come to define journalism. Neutrality and objectivity are treated as timeless principles, as though they emerged naturally from the act of reporting itself. Yet, as Michael Schudson and other press historians have shown, the norm of objectivity came into being in the early-to-mid 20th Century as a professionalization strategy. In response to the excesses of yellow journalism and to establish journalism as a credible institution, norms emerged that were oriented around a specific kind of relationship: the relationship between the journalist and a powerful source (such as a politician, a government official, a corporate executive, a celebrity). These norms, which stressed detachment, made sense in this context since they protected journalists from being captured by powerful actors and ensured that the public interest function of journalism would continue to be fulfilled by allowing journalists to seek the truth fiercely and to report it without worrying about whose ox was gored.
But today that norm of detachment, designed for a specific relational context, has been universalized to all other contexts. Journalism as an institution has not paused to ponder whether a framework built to manage relationships with the powerful is appropriate for relationships with the powerless. The assumption seems to be that detachment should be uniformly applied. Yet, that assumption deserves our scrutiny because detachment does different things depending on the context in which it is used: directed at power, detachment protects the journalist’s independence; directed at vulnerability, detachment protects the journalist’s convenience. This, really, is the crux of the matter: that a journalist is expected to adopt the same posture when pressing a senator for answers as they do when interviewing a struggling mother whose child has just died.
Why care?
Consider what happens when a journalist interviews a marginalized source. The source shares something costly: a harrowing experience, a private struggle, a recollection that might expose them to stigma or retraumatize them, a chapter of their life they would rather not open again. The majority of these sources share their stories with limited understanding of how their information will be used, or how the story will be framed once it makes its way into the production process. They don’t know what might happen after a story gets published. If something were indeed to happen, these sources would not have the resources to navigate the distress. Powerful actors have their media representatives. They have their legal counsel or public relations team. In most cases, they experience a boost in reputation for appearing in the media, compared to non-elite sources. Elite sources are also not recounting or re-living difficult experiences, neither do they occupy marginal positions relative to journalists.
This asymmetry in risk and reward is unfair. It reproduces social inequality. The journalist absorbs almost no risk in this interaction. He seeks out and interviews the source, transcribes and writes the story, edits and then publishes it and then he is off to the next assignment. The woman who lost her child almost forgotten, or pushed aside so the journalist can make space for producing other stories. The journalist accrues a byline, an entry in their portfolio, maybe even an award. The source tends a reopened wound, surrenders their story to be delivered to the public in whatever form or frame the journalist pleases.
Journalism ethics frameworks tell journalists to go into the world indifferently. They treat the journalist-source relationship as though it were symmetrical, as though both parties enter it on roughly equal terms.
The core argument for care-based journalism is that when power is distributed unequally in a relationship, the party with more power should have greater obligations. Not fewer, not equal. Greater obligations. A doctor does not treat a dying patient with detachment, neither does a teacher maintain neutrality toward a struggling student. In these professions, there’s a recognition that vulnerability creates obligation. Vulnerability creates unevenness, and journalism must acknowledge this and then re-evaluate how it works with vulnerable or marginalized communities.
In recent years, journalism has seen a welcome turn toward empathetic reporting, and while this is an important development, empathy, on its own, is not enough, as journalism scholar Anita Varma has repeatedly warned. A journalist can feel deep empathy for a source and still publish a story that harms them. A journalist can be empathetic and still fail to follow up with a source after a story is published. A journalist can feel empathy and still offer no recourse when the portrayal is wrong.
Caring is hard work
So, what is care? In the formulation by political philosopher Joan Tronto, care entails moral obligations, such as attentiveness to the needs of the other person, responsibility for the consequences of the relationship, competence in fulfilling that responsibility and responsiveness to how the other person experiences what you have done.
One way to think about it is to distinguish care-based journalism from a model that values detachment even when reporting on marginalized communities. Care means valuing the source and their story. It means recognizing the source’s story is not just some raw material to be extracted and processed, but something precious, something deeply meaningful. Under an extractive model of journalism, however, the source is a means to an end. The journalist shapes and delivers the story to an audience, and the source may not recognize themselves in the final product. They may feel misrepresented and flattened and, worse still, unable to do anything about it.
In a guide to less-extractive reporting, Natalie Yahr provides an extensive set of ideas that emphasize care: “Make sure your source knows what to expect.” “Look for ways to give the source some editorial control.” “Follow up.” “Give something back.”
I’m reminded of a journalist I interviewed in Nigeria for my doctoral research who covered poverty and health and once reported a story about a woman who sat on the streets of an affluent neighborhood everyday begging for money to get a tumor removed. The journalist’s real relationship with the woman commenced after the story was published. He collected some donations on behalf of this woman, helped pay her hospital bills and helped her manage the money after she was discharged. “We kept the money in the office,” the journalist told me, “and when she was discharged from the hospital we now used the money to buy clothes [for her]. We also bought a grinding machine for her. We did quite a lot, and then we gave her the balance of the money. We took her back to her home…took her back to the village…and she became part of my family also because she kept calling me.”
I often think about how much of a real difference this would have made in this woman’s life, but I’m aware also that this kind of care exacts a cost, and most journalists should not have to bear that cost alone.
Beyond individual caring
I am not alone in wanting to see a journalism that foregrounds care in journalists’ interactions with sources. Journalism scholars are already sounding the alarm. For example, Joseph P. Jones has asserted journalism should view itself as a care-based institution, drawing on the historical Black press as an exemplar. Sue Robinson and Patrick R. Johnson have advanced that care-based values might help newsrooms rebuild trust with communities that have disengaged from journalism.
In my own recent research with Rachel Young, Amanda Hinnant and María E. Len-Ríos, we learned that U.S. health journalists often develop informal care practices on their own, outside any institutional framework, and while these journalists were often thinking about care in their interactions with ordinary citizens, there was no systemic shift in recognizing and naming care as a foundational norm.
But caring requires institutional support. Explaining the reporting process thoroughly, allowing sources to review quotations and change their portrayals, following up after publication and maintaining meaningful relationships with sources is not possible without changes to dominant journalistic norms and practices.
Across the world, journalists are working under increasingly precarious conditions. They’re underpaid, overworked, freelancing without institutional backing, juggling multiple assignments. My doctoral research, in which I interviewed 36 Nigerian journalists, shows precarity estranges journalists from the profession, from themselves and from the public. Precarity is exhausting and soul-sapping. When your salary barely covers your basic living expenses and your organization expects you to turn in stories in such short time while changing priorities quickly, you have less patience with stories. Care-based journalism asks reporters to maintain relationships with their sources beyond publication, but maintaining a relationship requires resources that precarious working conditions simply do not provide.
One journalist I interviewed in Nigeria had traveled at her own expense to report on a cholera outbreak in a remote village in southern Nigeria with no road, water, electricity or health center. Her story went viral and attracted an NGO that drilled public boreholes for the village. She wanted to return and follow up with her sources, see how they were doing and if their needs had been met, but she told me she was waiting for when she had the time and money.
Nobody told me to care about the people I encountered in my reporting at CNN. Nobody told me not to, either. Prioritizing care in journalism means the institution must break the silence around care. Newsrooms must give journalists enough time and resources to practice care, must teach them how to do so. Already, many journalists care at their own personal cost and with no support. The question is whether journalism as an institution is willing to care with them.
Munachim Amah is a doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. A former digital journalist for CNN covering West Africa, his doctoral research examines precarity and journalism practice in Nigeria. His research on media representations of poverty has been published in Journalism, Journalism Practice, and African Journalism Studies. His recent co-authored study on care-based practices among U.S. health journalists was published in Journalism Studies.
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