Considering the journalist as both expert and audience

Working as a journalist while being a gender studies student has been conflicting. While I originally thought that journalism could be a way to use my writing skills to depict things I cared about and needed “visibility” (gender studies things), the last couple of years have proved that it is much harder than it seemed to do this without partially enacting the “double bind” described by Alcoff — even impossible, I’d argue. 

I’m critical of people’s tendencies to talk about The Media as a big, bad dominating force (i.e. “THE MEDIA makes girls have bad body image”). What we see on the news or read online isn’t curated by a private group of scheming people, but rather a reflection of real people’s/societal unconscious biases and beliefs — it’s unbalanced to critique the media without understanding it as a representation, and also incubator and disseminator, of larger societal beliefs. Alcoff tends to cast the media in this light, arguing that certain media outlets use the “presence of survivors for its shock value and to pander to a sadistic voyeurism among viewers.”

Still, I’d like to nuance this discussion by reflecting on my own experiences of journalism, to consider how the role of media structures and the audience problematize the concept of survivor discourse in media. Even while attempting journalism with the best intentions in depicting sexual violence, the journalist operates as both the audience and the expert, thus illustrating the double-bind Alcoff speaks of. Journalists, as some people like to forget, are people too. They watch narratives of survivor discourse (like, the Oprah episode we watched in class), and these narratives inform which survivor stories are worth telling, or what makes a "good" and "bad" survivor. 

But I also want to think about how the journalist may be an expert. A psychologist doesn’t have to be present in an article to have the image Alcoff depicts as the expert be present, where “a white man or woman with a middle-class and professional appearance, who, with a sympathetic but dispassionate air, explains to the audience the nature, symptoms, and possible therapies for such crimes of violence.” Though the journalist is not linguistically present in the article, they are responsible for “translating” the experiences of the survivor learned through an interview. More often than not, these writers are white, middle-class and professional, both sympathetic (they have to care marginally to write the story) while dispassionate (to uphold the facade of objectivity). This translation is of course influenced by the journalists’ role as an audience member. 

Every time I have tried to centre an individual's nuanced voice in a story (one example is trying to talk about a student’s experience with depression without centring the dominance of diagnoses and medication), I have been urged by editors to connect the individual experience with a larger conversation that’s relevant to the readership. People are unlikely to read a story about someone they don’t know, the premise stands, unless it is actively connected to more universal topics or tropes. Learning how to craft an “angle” (the focus or thesis of the article), is one of the first things you learn as a journalist — creating a tight angle will inevitably leave out the nuances that make that individual’s story individual. Plus, I should critique my own good intentions here: how can I expect a total stranger to give me the whole nuanced story of their experience in an interview, anyway?

Maybe I’m over-exposed because of my women's studies degree and tightly curated feminist social media bubble, but I guess I don’t think that survivors “breaking their silence” is as disruptive as it was in, say, the ‘70s. I think the “disruptive potential” Alcoff mentions of survivors speaking out is lost in most media due to the authoritative position of the journalist, as survivor stories tend to fill pieces in a homogenous puzzle instead of truly disrupting narratives of survivor hood. To create this disruption, I think we must eliminate the expert, as Alcoff suggests. In many cases, that would be the journalist. 

I don’t think representing survivor stories through the written word is a total lost cause. There are ways to centre survivor voices, in unedited survivor-written blogs, for example. But still, what role does the audience play there, but conversely, what’s the point if there’s no audience?