Covering
Environmental
Racism

A virtual workshop for editors

March 3, 2021


America’s racial reckoning has not overlooked legacy media: Newsrooms across the country are re-evaluating how their coverage has historically ignored or even exacerbated racist policies and practices. Some, like the Kansas City Star, have taken the extraordinary step of apologizing to that city’s Black community for years of oversight and neglect.

Yet even as news outlets have struggled to improve diversity within, newsroom leadership to this day is predominantly white, creating blind spots and gaps in understanding that leave many community members – particularly in communities of color – on the outside looking in. Inequities abound in justice and education systems, but they’re also prevalent in the environment, where stories of racism are also stories of poverty, public health, policy, business and more.

To rise to the moment, newsroom leaders need to understand what has gone wrong, and how to fix it. To that end, the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources held a five-hour workshop for editors on March 3, 2021, to explore questions of environmental racism, social equity and the problematic lenses through which these stories get told.

Editors had the opportunity to:

  • Talk with researchers and activists about the ways editorial decisions, word choices and story framing have exacerbated inequities.

  • Learn how historic race-based housing discrimination shaped U.S. cities and led to many of our current environmental injustices.

  • Explore what coverage of the Flint Water Crisis revealed about journalism’s strengths and weaknesses.

  • Hear from the editorial team of the Kansas City Star the genesis of the paper’s unprecedented apology to the city’s Black citizens, and how that apology has informed changes in the newsroom.

  • Meet citizen activists who have been working for decades to push for equity and protect public health.

  • Explore journalism’s role in perpetuating stereotypes about and minimizing the voices of communities of color - and how to change that role.

Participating Editors

Itinerary

Please see our Resources page for session recordings.