Everyone has biases. It’s part of the human condition. Where a person grew up, the makeup of their neighborhood, their gender, their cultural identity, all of this contributes to how a person sees the world and, as a result, their conscious and subconscious biases. Unfortunately, we might not see our individual biases as clouding our judgment, a problem that can result in tension in newsrooms.
The Maynard Institute, one of the oldest journalism training nonprofit, wants to help make reporters, editors and managers more aware of these biases and their foundations in order to help see past them and provide better coverage for their readers, listeners and audience.
The Institute was founded by a group of nine diverse journalists after the media was blamed, in part, for civil upset and disorders of the late 1960s. The report “castigated the media for its lack of diversity and for really perpetuating the tensions of the time and the lack of diversity was cited. One of the excuses used was we can’t find anyone qualified — do we still hear that now?” says Martin Reynolds, co-executive director for external affairs and funding at the Maynard Institute and a trainer in the organization’s Fault Lines program.
The training was created by Bob Maynard, one of the institute’s founders, by acknowledging up-front that a person may not see a lapse in coverage because of a personal blindspot.
“The problem isn’t that this conditioning exists, the problem is if you act like it doesn’t affect you,” Reynolds says.
Pointing back to the summer of 2020 and the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movements and others, Reynolds says there was a “racial awakening and reckoning” that might not have been as prevalent before. In particular, there was a Washington Post article suggesting the 2020 census overlooked and undercounted people of color in order to preserve a white majority overall. But that was in the service of a bias and the fault line of race, creating more tension when the numbers were released.
“The demographic shift they’d been hailing, they’re going to need to make media far more diverse and welcoming this and embracing this not only morally but from a business perspective,” he says. “If we don’t get with it, particularly the mainstream media, how are we going to inform a populace that is increasingly diverse?”
Reynolds is optimistic that the training provided by the Maynard Institute is helpful, but he also gives credit to a generational shift, adding that generation is among the most interesting fault lines covered in the training.
“One thing that was really powerful about 2020, we were beginning to use the words that needed to be used,” he says. “When we did Fault Lines training, it felt like a downstream mitigation from the upstream and deeper waves of systemic racism and social conditioning that exists in this country and we’re all steeped in. We were reticent to use the words. Now I think we’re using the words. As journalists, the words matter.”
But there is, of course, concern about the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction, especially following the recent Supreme Court decision dialing back protections provided by affirmative action.
“My concern now is the retrenchment we are seeing. The economy happened and people go, ‘Oh, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) efforts are nice to have,” Reynolds says. “This is going to have a chilling effect. It’s an outright attack, to say nothing of the social conversations happening among various candidates. I’m concerned about that, I’m concerned about journalists and certain sectors of journalism not pushing as hard as we need to push back against these forces.”
The tension-causing pressure points of Fault Lines training are often things outside a person’s control, but can include self-selected lenses like religion and politics. A person’s perspective on the world is formed by the intersection of those lines.
“Fault lines tend to endure and not shift,” Reynolds says. “If you ask the question about how this question or this topic looks across the fault line, how does our organization look, then you’re going to ask questions you wouldn’t otherwise ask. It’s a protection against our own blindspots and biases.”
To help diffuse any supposition that Fault Lines training is there to lay blame, Reynolds says he will start by talking about his own biases and the work he needs to do. As a man, his work pertains to patriarchal biases and how he’s “showing up as a man. The notion being, let’s give each other some grace. It helps to explain why people’s behavior might be a certain sort of way. It doesn’t absolve people, but it can explain. We all have our work to do.”
