"Journalism, Done Well(s)" (Zoe Selig)
Journalism is often viewed as genre of writing that should only objective describe the "truth". In this essay, Zoe Selig challenges this idea by advocating that journalism not only speaks truth, but speaks truth to power. By evoking the work of journalist Ida B. Wells and her reporting on lynching in the US South, Selig argues that "in circumstances where those in power are stifling the facts... merely the act of speaking the truth is a tremendous act of protest", describing for the reader how Wells, in speaking truth to power, made white supremacy and its horrific effects visible to the country, and paved the way for contemporary journalism, such as Nikole Hannah-Jones' The1619 Project, to continue the critical work of speaking truth to power.
In the polarized, politicized climate of the US today, the complex history of the US carceral state is easily reduced to a narrative in which the mass incarceration of African-American men originated solely from Republican "law and order" polices of Nixon and Reagan. Braden Weese argues that this narrative misses the significant ways in which Democrats have also been complicit in the creation of this prison industrial complex, offering the reader abundant evidence of this complicity, from Bill Clinton's advocacy of the 1994 "Three Strikes" law to Joe Biden's role as a US Senator in passing the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which restricted judges' discretion in sentencing. Nevertheless, Weese in conclusion cautions his readers not to simply "disavow [all] politicians, including the current president, who contributed to mass incarceration", but rather to educate ourselves on the bipartisan origins of mass incarceration, so that "the significant criminal justice reform that can put the country on a path toward atonement for previous wrongs" may be achieved.