FINDING THE BALANCE:

But this leap in content creation came at a price. Even as she saw images from the Middle East that a full news crew may not have been able to capture, Bélair-Gagnon began noticing something else: exhausted journalists. Not only did reporters maintain their usual responsibilities of compiling and writing up-to-date stories, but they also now had to sift through social media posts and content for hours.

BY REGAN CARTER

FEW GROUPS CAN CLAIM A LEVEL OF BRAVERY AND RELIABILITY COMPARABLE TO THAT HELD BY JOURNALISTS.

The public trusts reporters to dig into stories and unearth the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be. Investigative journalists and crisis reporters have fearlessly confronted corruption and unethical practices in countless corporate circles and political groups.

But in a news landscape increasingly dominated by internet access and interaction, today’s journalists find themselves facing a whole new kind of enemy: online trolls. How is a reporter expected to protect their image, mental health and well-being, while simultaneously refusing to compromise on their hard-hitting work?

This question stands at the forefront of Associate Professor Valérie Bélair-Gagnon’s research. Through her work, Bélair-Gagnon hopes to reprioritize the well-being of journalists in an ever-demanding news industry.

An External Crisis Becomes An Internal Crisis

While conducting her Ph.D. dissertation research for the BBC News in the early 2010s, Bélair-Gagnon gained a unique perspective on the Arab Spring protests and uprisings. With the eyes of the world turned to the uprisings in Tunisia, a new tool was brought to full use by reporting teams: user-generated content.

Suddenly, it was easier than ever for an evening news report to gain on-the-ground photographic and video footage via the internet, generated by people already there. Such content was often a much safer and reliable alternative to spending the time and logistical energy necessary to send a camera crew across the world.

This social media presence did not go unnoticed. In reaching out for content for stories, internet users could now reach back, and sometimes in less-than-kind ways. Journalists faced such harsh harassment and targeting across the web that some would find ways to subtly censor their own work. Without altering the facts of a story, reporters would try to find ways to soften up their work and make it less likely to receive backlash.

To Bélair-Gagnon, this compromise is not acceptable.

Helping Journalists Help Themselves

In their upcoming co-authored book with the University of Illinois Press, The Paradox of Connection: How Digital Media Transforms Journalistic Labor, Bélair-Gagnon, Diana Bossio, Avery E. Holton and Logan Molyneux dive into the ways in which journalists not only connect with other users, but also bring their entire unique selves online.

When offline stories and online content meet, Bélair-Gagnon said she believes that “we need to think about digital innovation and digital labor more critically.” In her experience, intersectionality plays a central role in labor. Everything from a reporter’s racial and gender identity to their street address can be a barrier to connection, as well as a potential target for would-be trolls.

Bélair-Gagnon is particularly interested in investigating the methods that journalists adapt to preserve their offline mental health and subjective well-being. Some common strategies of disconnection include setting strict working hours, blocking troublesome or malevolent accounts, or even deleting entire social media profiles in order to escape the barrage of digital attacks. However, these are often choices that individuals opt to integrate into their lives.

With this book, Bélair-Gagnon and her colleagues are shooting for something bigger. When speaking to the industry as a whole, they pose The Paradox of Connection, her second book, as “a plea to say, ‘How about you make these disconnective practices as part of journalism itself?’” Instead of putting the responsibility on individual journalists to carve out time prioritizing their mental health and well-being, she hopes news outlets will implement more system-wide methodologies that protect their most crucial employees.

Moving Ahead Step By Step

Bélair-Gagnon acknowledged that such a shift in prioritizing the well-being of journalists won’t be easy. She said “it is a series of microchanges” that will take the news industry from a rapid-fire content mill to a space in which reporters can always maintain their full humanity. In the end, it will take shifts in both large systems and small local operations to make lasting impacts.

And she’s not alone. In a forthcoming edited volume with Routledge, Happiness in Journalism, individuals who hold roles across the industry, including Bélair-Gagnon, provide possible concrete solutions to the mental health crisis taking hold among news professionals. Bélair-Gagnon said she hopes that work like this will spur further action toward providing infographics and other helpful materials for news agencies to begin using immediately.

Today, alongside her research and teaching work, Bélair-Gagnon takes pride in her role as a Mental Health Advocate for the University of Minnesota through Boynton Health. This collection of staff and faculty volunteers works to improve mental health for students and staff alike. In her assessment, “mental health is a public health problem.” It’s a problem that, she expects, will see real solutions in journalism in the years to come.

KIRTLEY ON DOMINION & FOX NEWS

As the Dominion v. Fox trial was set to begin in April, Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law, was published or interviewed by nearly 40 outlets around the world. Kirtley was reluctant to pile on Fox News, instead offering caution about what going to trial might actually mean. As she wrote for The Conversation in her article “Why Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is good news for all media outlets,” actual malice as the legal standard established by the Supreme Court in 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan will continue to live on. Here’s an excerpt of her article:

“Many people would like to ban disinformation. But who decides what is disinformation? Under U.S. law, we don’t ask government tribunals to decide “the truth.” I have written about how experiences in other countries show that it is dangerous to ask courts, or any instrumentality of government, to do so.

“If that sounds improbable, recall that it wasn’t that long ago that Donald Trump, while still a candidate, was calling news media like CNN and The New York Times “fake news.” He wanted to “open up the libel laws” and threatened to shut these outlets down. If the government decides which media sources are “real” or “fake,” a free press—and freedom of expression as we have known it—will cease to exist. As the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette in 1943, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” That means that the law tolerates errors in journalism—which are inevitable—as part of the search for truth.

“I hold no brief for Fox. But had the Dominion case gone to the jury, the inevitable appeal by whomever lost would give the Supreme Court the chance to reconsider and possibly eliminate The New York Times v. Sullivan standard that protects all news media of all political stripes. At least two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have indicated they are eager to do just that, even though it has been the constitutional standard for nearly 60 years. Given this court’s willingness to overturn precedent, as it did with abortion rights, there is no guarantee that another three justices might not join them.”

Find the full article on theconversation.com.