The corporate media could learn a lot from a Sheffield-based project on journalism

Sheffield-based border abolition project Give Over has put together an abolitionist journalism toolkit for editors and journalists reporting on immigration. Crucially, it challenges Western legacy media outlets’ institutionally racist and colonial approach to journalism.

It provides a one-stop-shop style guide for approaching immigration reporting in a way that’s actively anti-racist, decolonial, and abolitionist. In following Give Over’s guide, journalists can contribute to dismantling the violent systems of oppression dehumanising and denigrating Black, Brown, and other racially minoritised communities.

In other words, it’s a vital new style guide that all newsrooms committed to this should take up.

Abolitionist journalism: a vital new toolkit

Give Over has published a vital report to hold an abolitionist lens over what it means to be a journalist in today’s grossly unjust, unequal world.

In October, the project published its work under the title:

JOURNALIST AS SUBJECT: Using an abolitionist lens to report on borders

It challenges the inherent assumption in traditional Western corporate media that journalists must always be neutral, unbiased, and objective. Moreover, it moves beyond a model of media that venerates reporters removed from the injustices they’re reporting on.

Instead, its report calls for a solidarity reporting approach, grounded in lived experience and active participatory citizenship. It explains that its toolkit is:

an exploration of the type of journalism that is possible when the journalist is considered as a subject; a live, heart-beating, trembling part of life as much as anybody else. To pretend otherwise is to close one’s journalism off from the history of critical approaches to anti-racism, colonialism, and abolition that define the Western project.

Writer and researcher on Islamophobia and former Canary journalist and editor Dr Maryam Jameela (she/he) lead the project and authored the report. Together with four other members of the Give Over team, she has worked for three years to examine racist reporting on immigration.

In that time, Give Over has hosted a series of community events, including workshops, panel discussions, art curation and exhibitions. These formed a key part of producing its vital new journalism toolkit. The Canary previously reported on one of these. This was its ‘Conditional Western Solidarity and Palestinian Journalism’ panel in March 2024. You can read more about it, and watch the full event here.

Lived experience and community voices

In fact, the report itself made a point of emphasising the crucial role these events played in building the toolkit. It underscored that:

Whilst it may seem unorthodox for a project about journalism to host discussion spaces for local community members this has been a core part of Give Over. Our work in commissioning guest authors, in compiling this report as a guide for journalists and editors would not have been possible without a sustained interest and passion for the communities we belong to. Journalists are as active members of society as anybody else. To pretend otherwise is to reduce journalists to stenographers of history and, frankly, such a thing is wildly unnecessary.

In other words, journalists’ own lived experience, and role in communities should not be relegated by traditional conventions of journalism committed to centring whiteness.

And this is a big part of what the toolkit calls on newsrooms to encourage and embed in their reporting too. It proposes that media outlets could also host workshops that bring together diverse groups to tackle envisioning solutions for the future.

A toolkit to take traditional media to task

Significantly, the report acts as a style guide for reporters. These guidelines aim to challenge the racist status quo the Western media routinely perpetuates on refugees and migration.

It advocates that to work towards border abolition, journalists should consider the following as key tenets of a more ethical media landscape. The report divides these into multiple categories for ease of use.

Firstly, it puts across key language and terminology considerations, which include:

• Using humanising language that respects migrants’ dignity and rights. By the same reasoning, this also means avoiding dehumanising language.
• Writing in active voice. Journalists should do so to “clearly identify the systems and policies responsible for border violence”.
• Make sure to acknowledge the diverse and complex identities of migrants with inclusive narratives that avoid homogenisation and oversimplification.

Next, it implores journalists to embed the following when thinking of the story focus and framing:

• Centre lived experiences – whether the journalist’s own or the communities’ they’re reporting on.
• Interrogate Western narratives that relegate refugees worth to their utility, and make solidarity conditional.
• Reframe the narrative from reactive to proactive storytelling.

Abolitionist journalism: a style guide for a just and equitable future

Besides these, the abolitionist journalism toolkit challenges journalists to think critically on where and who it’s sourcing its stories from. Alongside this, it emphasises the importance of ensuring appropriate contributor attribution. With all that in mind, it says that journalists should:

• Elevate marginalised voices of people the border regime is impacting, and “particularly those from the global majority.”
• Make sure to fact-check with care by consulting trusted sources and experts.
• Acknowledge all contributors collaborating, and credit appropriately.

The style guide also brings up key visual and multimedia considerations that put dignity and rights at the heart of journalism, including:

• Using respectful imagery that “respect the dignity and agency of those depicted” and avoid reductive stereotypes.
• Captioning and context for images.
• Wherever possible, use creative approaches that involves commissioning artwork to help contest “traditional visual narratives of migration”.

Give Over’s abolitionist journalism framework also centres on journalists contributing to the work imagining more just and equitable futures too. It means recognising that future migration and border scenarios are interconnected with other global crises, such as the climate crisis for instance.

What’s more, in envisioning future narratives, journalists should ensure these are inclusive. This means giving over space to historically marginalised communities and:

ensuring that their lived experiences shape the story of what is possible.

The toolkit offers other vital guidance for journalists around crafting intersectional, multi-layered, and nuanced narratives and scenarios.

Gaza: a case and point of media complicity

Of course, Give Over constructed its toolkit in the midst of Israel’s unending brutal genocide in Gaza. It therefore couldn’t facilitate journalists engaging in meaningful introspection without drawing attention to how Western media’s purposeful failure to do the above is perpetuating this abhorrent violence towards Palestinians.

Specifically, Western media reporting on this is exemplar of the way in which this journalistic approach denigrates the freedoms, journalism, and lived realities of Black, Brown, and other racially minoritised people.

That is, Western corporate media has failed to call out Israel as it intentionally, unconscionably, murders Palestinian journalists. It has shown that its ideals of journalistic freedom doesn’t apply equally, or in fact, at all to Palestinian reporters. In short, Western media solidarity with Palestine is conditional.

Unsurprisingly then, Western media reporting on Gaza has flouted every rule in the Give Over handbook.

For instance, passive voice persistently rears its head. Who did the killing? As Give Over points out, news outlets have repeatedly omitted Israel from the headlines. Meanwhile, Western media whiteness is on full display in its rank double standards. Russia for instance, regularly features as the perpetrator in attacks on Ukraine in sharp contrast.

It also regularly uses language to dehumanise Palestinians. In one example, it shows a Guardian news piece that calls young Israeli hostages “children”. In the same sentence, it describes young Palestinian hostages as:

people aged 18 and younger

Instead of amplifying Palestinian voices, news outlets also regularly act as propagandist mouthpieces for Israeli officials. Or in other words, the very people perpetrating the genocide.

A lens to challenge Western media white supremacy

When Give Over speaks of abolition, this isn’t solely the physical borders in and of themselves. In reality, structures of white supremacy, institutional racism, and colonialism maintain borders in many aspects of society. In other words, it’s concerned with the violent impulses and practices of the state. For instance, examples of this it identifies would be detention and deportation, disappearing people to maintain borders, overseas wars, and militarisation.

Moreover, the report draws on the idea of borders involving the state manufacturing consent for the borderisation of societal spaces. It unpacks how the state expropriates everyday people in professional public service roles as willing, complicit agents of this. Of course, this invariably applies to journalists too.

Now, Give Over’s unflinching project is calling on reporters to take up its tools of anti-racist, decolonial, and abolitionist liberation in their own work. It subverts the legacy media notions of impartiality and objectivity. Instead, it offers up a journalism lens that serves racially minoritised and other marginalised communities. Specifically, those that these tired traditional media notions have consistently sidelined.

And crucially, it’s a powerful, poignant reminder to reporters that journalism should always challenge the oppressors, while centring and amplifying the voices that it has traditionally marginalised. Because ultimately, what is journalism for, if not precisely that?

Every journalist that cares about building a better world should read it, and put its principles at the heart of all they do.

Featured image supplied