In The Tribune‘s Slack, ‘that’s great!’ doesn’t usually mean there’s good news.
Coming up with pitches for our paper requires a particular analytic perspective. Examining politics, social life, and culture through the lens of journalism can instill a habit of reading the news in search of something controversial; something sensationalizable. While not inherently problematic, an overemphasis on procuring a ‘newsworthy’ story risks flattening suffering into an opportunity for coverage.
Palestinian film director and journalist Basel Adra unpacks this tension with Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham in their documentary, No Other Land. In 2019, the two embarked on a mission to chronicle the Israel Defense Force (IDF)’s destruction of Adra’s agrarian community of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. In the 1980s, the Israeli government declared Masafer Yatta to be a military training zone, starting an offensive of forcible displacement that has since dispossessed several hundred Palestinians.
The documentary’s central feature is Adra and Abraham’s mutual commitment to exposing the IDF’s siege through journalism as a means of fostering public and international awareness. At one point, Adra tells Abraham, “I feel you’re a little enthusiastic [….] You want everything to happen quickly, as if you came to solve everything in 10 days and then go back home [….] [You say], ‘the article didn’t get enough views.’ You want it all fast.”
This moment highlighted an inherent tension between the desire—or need—to reach a wide audience as quickly as possible, and the necessary delicacy and patience with which the subject of their journalism must be explored. As Adra acknowledges, a single article will not end decades of conflict and destruction. Regardless, journalists still hope to stumble upon the story—the one that revolutionizes the conversation entirely.
Yet, sensationalism does not only operate at the level of the individual journalist—it is an institutionalized, extractive method of knowledge creation, shaped by historical and structural forces dating back to colonialism, under which the Other’s suffering was commodified for circulation among and consumption by white Western audiences.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes, “When a Western journalist interviews us, it is seldom done to render us service.”
When stories are written for the benefit of the individual reporter, the newspaper, or the ruling power instead of for the people whose experiences are being shared, journalistic exploration quickly becomes exploitation. In the late 19th century, Belgian King Leopold II used journalism antagonistically to sow division amongst revolutionary groups in the Congo, a key inciting incident in the initiation of the Congo Free State propaganda war.
Yet, it is because storytelling is so intrinsically shaped by power that the myth of the ‘objective’ journalist remains so appealing. This alleged neutrality obscures the unethical nature of extractive reporting, subconsciously allowing readers to forget the implication of power in the creation of news articles.
On objectivity, Fanon notes, “Even the most liberal of the French reporters never ceased to use ambiguous terms in describing our struggle [under colonization] [….] When we reproached them for this, they replied in all good faith that they were being objective. For the native, objectivity is always directed against [them].”
During the colonial era, objectivity was a tool that only the colonizer was allowed to possess, weaponized with the underlying intention of legitimizing the colonizer’s presence or challenging the validity of anti-colonial and liberatory movements. Today, the myth of objectivity persists in more subtle ways: The view from nowhere, bothsidesism, elite journalism—the list goes on.
Many journalists are now pushing for the abandonment of the objectivity fallacy, but sensationalism operates on a parallel logic. Both obscure the role of power in the production of knowledge: Where objectivity shrouds power by insisting the journalist holds none, sensationalism commodifies struggle for the benefit of the journalist’s narrative needs. Abandoning one without confronting the other leaves the underlying exploitative system intact.
These dynamics are not limited to large institutions. They live on in the practices of individual reporters, who will continue to capitalize upon others’ suffering for its narrative potential until sensationalism is decentred from journalism. This piece is no exception—it, too, was pitched and written with an audience in mind, making it subject to the very impulses it critiques.
Although unlearning the myth of objectivity is still an ongoing project, confronting these extractive inclinations must be the next one. As journalists, we must re-centre the subject instead of the story, resist the pull of virality, and embrace our positionality instead of insisting upon our objectivity.