Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2017

This note introduces the concept of inclusive journalism in a bid to encourage a critical dialogue of the press’s ability to challenge hegemonic notions of inequality under the rubric of social diversity. Over the last century journalism’s authority in fast processing of information has moved from the privileged position of reporting life to the more privileged position of reporting life that matters. Its capacity to separate individual lives from the life of society has enabled it to turn persons into representative of the groups. By forming and un-forming groups and by constructing a sense of who we are in relation to others, the journalistic sector of the media participates in the larger process of inclusion and exclusion.

This article addresses the challenge of becoming an inclusive journalist. Starting from the structural location of journalism the argument seeks to outline a viable basis for inclusive journalism; which starts with two generic aspirations that inclusive journalists might seek to address. These are that: inclusive journalists must be reflexively aware of their own political framing of diversity, and the limitations of their imagination; and that they must have the critical tools to be able to identify, and critically expose, the partisan discourses used by politicians and others to frame any understanding of coexistence and inter-group competition. In the pursuit of this ambition three competencies are outlined: An appropriate affective moral stance; A critical and self-conscious personal conceptualization of the political basis of an equitable good life; A social science based capacity to interrogate the hegemonic reproduction of violence, brute nastiness and collusion with inequity.

The World Indigenous Television Broadcasting Network (WITBN) consists of Indigenous broadcasters from around the world. During the WITBN Conference WITBC 2012 in Guovdageaidnu, Sámiland (Norway), a number of interviews were conducted with Indigenous media workers from within the broadcast network. Based upon a selection of these interviews, this article aims to present an analysis of approaches to Indigenous (television) journalism drawing upon data from Australia, Canada, Finland, Hawaii, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Taiwan and Wales. This analysis will be framed in relation to the wider context of Indigenous peoples’ rights and politics. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks on racism and exclusion vs democracy and inclusion based on self-determination, this article aims to highlight the role of Indigenous media and journalism in making the public sphere more diverse and creating new global networks between previously silenced voices with the help of new technical solutions. The article will demonstrate how, while presenting an Indigenous perspective of the world, these Indigenous broadcasters do ‘real journalism’ just as any majority broadcasting company and while perceiving their own Indigenous communities as their core audience, they aim to reach wider audiences with their programming, thus providing a window for majority audiences into Indigenous realities. The article also highlights how the international movement of indigeneity as a political process impacts upon Indigenous broadcasters in ways that are different from their autochthonous professional colleagues.

The information, events and voices that receive media attention are highly dependent on their linguistic form – when the language is accessible to journalists, the news is more likely to enter public discourse. If the voices are in languages other than that of the region the journalist is writing for, then translation strategies can influence not only the news style but also the selection and perspectivation of the information presented. In this article, we discuss how working between languages inside the newsroom can endanger the flow of accurate information. Among other stakeholders, we focus on journalists as key gatekeepers in global and local newsflows who need to cope with cross-linguistic communication in their processes of news production. Initial analyses show that translation matters in the newsroom, but it is far from being part of systematic professional socialization or subject to quality measures.

Journalism faces new and serious challenges against a backdrop of attacks on the political notion of an inclusive and pluralist society, an idea based on internationally and locally accepted fundamental rights frameworks. These frameworks build on recognition, respect and inclusion of difference, based on individual or collective rights and a critical stand towards the construction of difference. The immediacy and potentially global reach of digital communication has dramatically changed the information order and given the concept of inclusiveness new meanings. Journalists will have to cope in new ways with extended networks feeding into their understanding of inclusive society. In 2013, four journalism schools in New Zealand and the Nordic countries launched a joint project linked to the EU initiative ‘Promoting the drivers for inclusive & sustainable growth’. This article offers a policy centred elaboration of inclusiveness and university teaching aimed to raise awareness and sensitivity towards diversities, power and reporting. Collaborative forms of inclusive pedagogy with multimodal qualities are presented. Perspectives of combining personal mobility and net-based pedagogical tools that establish a genuinely interactive relation between the teacher-as-student and student-as-teacher in online learning environments for education of journalists are discussed against our first experiences from this joint development work.

This article examines media diversity and inclusiveness of the coverage in Egypt through a content analysis of Egyptian media during the first Presidential elections following the 25 January revolution of 2011. Diversity is defined as the inclusiveness of different groups in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, age, income-based discrimination, gender and any other factors that make individuals or groups different from, but equal to, each other. The author used quantitative content analysis of four popular state and private newspapers and a critical analysis of the main television news bulletin and several talk shows. Overall, the coders analysed a total of 5308 stories that were published on the elections in the four newspapers. They also analysed the main news bulletin and three talk shows on state and private satellite channels. Analysis started a week before and ended a week after each round of the Presidential elections for a total of 32 monitoring days. The research addressed diversity both in terms of the agents featured in the media and the topics mentioned/discussed. The results indicate that, even though the journalistic standards were sometimes reasonable, coverage ignored important issues of substance and all issues related to inclusiveness and diversity as they relate to women, children, the elderly, religious minorities and ethnic minorities. The study concludes that diversity issues are still largely ignored in the Egyptian media.

This article provides a discursive analysis of content published in the Berwick Leader, a local newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria, on a proposed and approved mosque in the suburb of Doveton. The mosque development was instigated by the Afghan Mosque Project Committee in 2012 and approved by Casey Council in 2013. Catch the Fire Ministries, led by politician Daniel Nalliah from the Rise Up Australia Party led opposition to the mosque project, appealing to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). The opposition centred on the mosque’s physical location next to Catch the Fire Ministries’ proposed church, however the formal appeal was dropped when the church purchased land elsewhere. Database research returned 23 published items from the Berwick Leader relating to the mosque in Green Street, Doveton. Part of the discourse analysis reveals inclusive publishing decisions in terms of community input, with thirteen letters to the editor about the controversial project being selected for publication. Significantly though, the voices identified as being excluded from news reports are those of the Afghan Mosque Project Committee, the representative body for the local Muslim community. It may be argued this form of social exclusion, embedded in journalistic practice, reflects discourses of Orientalism, whereby the Muslim community is relegated to an inferior, strange and threatening ‘other’ in local media reporting. By being denied a voice and right of reply in the reporting on the proposed mosque, the authors posit that the Berwick Leader denied the Muslim community of Doveton recognition and validation as social subjects.

Digital technology, the Internet and mobile media are transforming the journalism and media landscape by influencing the news-gathering and sourcing process. The empowering capacities of social media applications may constitute a key element for more balanced news access and ‘inclusive journalism’. We will build on two contrasting views that dominate the social media sourcing debate. On the one hand, the literature shows that journalists of legacy media make use of social media sources to diversify their sourcing network including bottom-up sources such as ordinary citizens. On the other, various authors conclude that journalists stick with their old sourcing routines and continue to privilege top-down elite sources such as experts and government officials. In order to contribute towards this academic debate we want to clarify the Twitter practices of professional Belgian health journalists in terms of how they use the platform to monitor potential sources. Therefore, we examined the 1146 Twitter ‘followings’ of six Belgian health journalists by means of digital methods and social network analysis. Results show that top-down actors are overrepresented in the ‘following’ networks and that Twitter’s ‘following’ function is not used to reach out to bottom-up actors. In the overall network, we found that the health journalists mainly use Twitter as a ‘press club’ to monitor media actors. If we zoom in specifically on the ‘following’ network of the health-related actors, we found that media actors are still important, but experts become the most followed group. Our findings also underwrite the ‘power law’ or the ‘long tail’ distribution of social network sites as very few actors take a central position in the ‘following’ lists while the large majority of actors are not systematically monitored by the journalists.

The influence of social media on promoting an inclusive journalism remains unclear but raises great interest and debate. A total of 22 interviews were run with Swiss media professionals to shed light on journalists and their perception of social media to promote inclusive journalism and, more broadly, an inclusive society during the pre and post Arab revolutions. As a result of these interviews, an analysis is done of how social media helps journalists extend beyond dominant sources and narratives when reporting conflicts and thus promote an inclusive journalism. Findings show that even though social media creates a space where diverse voices can have their say, social media remains an uncertain terrain for journalists to apply judgements whether they are extending on dominant sources and narratives. On social media, journalists must negotiate new professional methods, skills and practices for reporting war and conflict to disrupt effectively dominant voices and narratives.

The media is often said to be a weapon of war. It can contribute to fuel violence and spur ethnic hatred. It is, however, a double edged sword: it can also help de-escalate tensions and restore peace. In order to do so, journalism has to be not only balanced and independent, but it should also have an inclusive approach, giving space to marginalized voices and being sensitive to the needs of the whole community. Analysing different media initiatives in conflict and post-conflict zones (South Sudan, Burundi, Central African Republic and Georgia), this article will explore the following question: can inclusive journalism be a tool to rebuild divided communities? While acknowledging how difficult it is to operate in conflict zones and recognizing the limited impact that inclusive journalism can have, this study will mainly focus on the positive role that media can play and the opportunities it can create.

Media Diversity Institute, a London-based charity, is one of the oldest NGOs working in the field of media and diversity. Its Executive Director Milica Pesic writes about MDI’s experience in getting inclusive journalism practiced, taught and promoted.