Introduction

In November 2024, just after the U.S. presidential election, we hosted a full-day conference on media mythmaking of punishment and safety. The day produced a series of timeless, generative conversations with perennial relevance about how media organizations, often working in concert with scholars, produce and reproduce damaging and false narratives about race and crime. The brilliant contributions from a diverse slate of speakers across journalism, academia, policy, organizing, and directly impacted communities surfaced a series of key questions, critiques, and ideas for progress. Dive into the resources collected on these pages to revisit the content from the conference, learn more about our speakers’ writing and other projects, and find a non-exhaustive repository of related research, events, and recordings. 

We need to know that y'all are working on [new research] while you're doing it. Because what happens is we get a press release of like this huge data dump that we're not expecting. Our editorial plan is already kind of mapped out. We have two reporters. Nobody can cover it. And then mainstream media is not going to do it because they don't care. So if you know that we care about this, let us know, when you're researching, that you're doing it. Give us a timeline. Allow us to be prepared. Give us the subjects. Maybe we can run some stories that align with the work that you're doing so that there can be some kind of momentum happening. - Morgan Elise Johnson, The TRiiBE

 

Key questions for the future:
 

  1. How can researchers and journalists work together better in mainstream and independent media? When researchers publish new social science studies, they often pitch big outlets to get coverage of their work. What would it look like for researchers to partner with journalists who are embedded in community and develop long-form reporting about research findings or a series of stories to make the research come alive for communities, rather than issuing a press release and sending the story only to mainstream and legacy outlets? How might that change who engages with the scholarship and what kinds of policies get proposed and implemented? How might it enable more accountability for policymakers and democratic engagement among disinvested communities?
     
  2. What are durable and creative models of funding local journalism and independent media? What other models exist that might be having impact too? How do you fund this work? 
     
    • This set of questions has only gotten more urgent in recent years, even after we hosted this conference, as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been defunded and shut down, and as across the world the undermining of independent media and the adoption of state media are linked to authoritarian creep.
       
    • As our panelist, Morgan Elise Johnson, from The TRiiBE illustrated, there are ways for local outlets to have influence even without having tremendous resources—finding a format that fits the desired audience, and not feeling constrained to report on the 24-hour news cycle, may be enough to have impact. The question should be: what resources and funding model do we need to sustain a place of truth-telling?
       
    • Our keynote speaker, Yohance Lacour, asked whether there are other ways of making money doing this kind of thing; how do you make an enterprise that doesn’t require grant funding? How do these businesses self-sustain? How much will journalists have to consider themselves community organizers and accept a life somewhat on the margins to do the work of telling the truth against the behemoth of white supremacy?
       
  3. What would it take to move crime coverage toward public safety journalism? How can there be disruptions to the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality in newsrooms? How do we address the major issue that people are not doing this work now? What are the impediments to broader adoption of public safety journalism? Who are the decisionmakers driving the values behind the news—news directors, editors, and newsroom leadership / advertisers / funders / broadcasters and the FCC / community members / social media companies?
     
  4. What impact can be made by diversifying the journalism workforce and the leadership of newsrooms? Can diversifying newsrooms change the kinds of stories that get produced, the relevance of those stories to communities, and the truth value of news? How does the business of news enable or impede diversification of newsrooms? What kind of reckoning with racist histories of news institutions or past coverage is needed to foster durable changes? Will diversifying newsrooms change the relationships of news institutions to the communities they are supposed to serve?

 

 

Five key takeaways – how can journalists, academics, and policymakers approach truth-telling about community safety differently:
 

  1. If the goal of news is to tell the truth, think differently about the role of “parity” in coverage and in sourcing. Journalism as a field is endemically concerned about the role of neutrality and bias in coverage. But a false or stilted neutrality, featuring quotes from opposing entities or treating law enforcement sources as neutral and unbiased reporters of fact, may not deliver to the public a better understanding of what is happening in their communities. Every source has a perspective, and there are multiple ways to find sources who are credible and knowledgeable. Think critically about expertise and about incentives, especially when it comes to elites and law enforcement sources.
     
  2. Build enduring relationships with directly affected communities. Developing relationships of trust with people whose stories almost never get told requires effort, time, and humility. Distrust may not be a result of ignorance but rather a result of decades of harm perpetuated at least in part by traditional journalistic approaches to reporting on crime. Understanding the source of distrust may lead to better relationship building.
     
  3. Cultivate your audience with intention and consider how you are accountable to your audience. The goal of journalists may be to tell stories that engage the broadest possible public, but that cannot come at the expense of the most directly affected communities. If your story is reaching elites but not the people on the block where the events happened, are you doing your job? In disempowered and divested communities most affected by crime and violence, news-making can be not only a tool of truth-telling but a tool of organizing and power-building.
     
    • Morgan Elise Johnson’s comments about accountability and feedback; even though conference organizers at Harvard found The TRiiBE, they want to make sure people on the block are reading it
       
    • Yohance Lacour’s podcast clip on Ron Carter talking about his newspaper as an organizing tool 
       
  4. Find creative angles – look for stories that offer a new lens on systemic problems. Invite your audience to find a new path to empathy and humanity for the people caught in the clutches of the criminal legal system. How can you change people’s minds? How can you diagnose and disrupt myths of criminal punishment? What would it take to devote resources to telling a story beyond mugshots and new arrests—to deeply report systemic issues and to highlight phenomena that are common rather than salacious outlier examples? How does that adjust what it means to report the news?
     
    • Nazgol Ghandnoosh talked about research out of Oklahoma on lengthy sentences for domestic violence survivors and how that campaign endeavored to change how people think about things that are baked into the criminal system through the portal of a particular community’s experience; recent reporting from Pamela Colloff at the New York Times shows human portraits rather than statistics, but also the slow grind from policy to implementation. Changing the law isn’t enough to change hearts and minds.
       
  5. Invest in public safety journalism. A shift from crime coverage to public safety journalism requires a different orientation to news coverage of harm in communities, a different pace of reporting, and also a different level of investment that may require creative funding streams that are not reliant on advertisers or foundations. Reporting from the police blotter every day is a light lift; by contrast, deeply reporting stories about patterns of harm, root causes, and systemic solutions will require more hours, more sources, and more resources—including financial investment, data journalists, and hours of time spent in directly affected communities.

[T]hese conferences could be used as a space to workshop some of these things. So instead of us having these panels like, we can be at the table together talking about okay, like, what is your editorial plan? What are you working on? What are you researching and actually ... working towards something and coming out of a conference with a pathway to something transformative. - Morgan Elise Johnson, The TRiiBE

 

Links to the Recordings of the Panels

Panel 1: Is Crime News?

Panel 2: Elite Media Capture: How Position and Power Shape Race and Crime Narratives

Panel 3: Reform and Retrenchment: Media, Fear, and Policy Rollbacks that Impede Safety

Keynote Address given by Yohance Lacour, Invisible Institute | Pulitzer Prize Winner for You Didn’t See Nothin

Panel 4: When Media Create the Story: Who Gets To Be a Victim, and Who Is Marked a Criminal?

Panel 5: Telling Our Own Stories: Media Accountability and Elevating Ignored Voices