Digest 10/19/2020

An interview with Texas Observer's Tristan Ahtone on covering Indigenous Affairs, the tyranny of "relevance," and more.

Q&A: TEXAS OBSERVER’S TRISTAN AHTONE ON COVERING INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS AND NEWSROOM DIVERSITY

The Texas Observer announced last week that it is launching an Indigenous Affairs Desk supported by funding from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, filling a glaring coverage gap that exists in the state despite it being home to six state and federally recognized tribes and formerly home to dozens of tribes that have been displaced. I spoke to the Observer’s editor-in-chief Tristan Ahtone, a member of the Kiowa Tribe, about the dearth of existing Indigenous affairs coverage in Texas and nationwide; how the journalism profession has failed to reconcile with its racist past; and the fight to diversity newsrooms. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Study Hall: I wanted to start by asking about the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the partnership that facilitated this new part of the observer – can you tell me a little about that and how this partnership came about?

Tristan Ahtone: We were talking with EHRP about what our plans were with the Indigenous Affairs Desk and they stepped up and said they wanted to be a part of it. We were planning to start with some other rounds of funding that we were raising, and them stepping in helped us to start early. They shared our desire to make sure we were doing this kind of reporting. It’s funding for a year, and we’re working to make that a sustainable thing for us.

It’s definitely one of my goals to make sure every newsroom has an Indigenous Affairs desk. Texas just seemed like the right place to do that because of frankly how bad the coverage has been over the years. It’s kind of the same story over and over again. 

SH: When you look at Indigenous Affairs coverage in Texas, but also nationwide, in whatever capacity that exists, what do those stories generally look like? What stories are generally reported and what stories are missing? 

TA: The one that I’m seeing here in Texas is basically the casinos. Since the ‘80s and ‘90s it looks like it’s just all casinos. I’m happy to be proven wrong if there’s anything else substantial out there, but just going through the major papers here and searching through their archives on their website using the names of the tribes, I’m not seeing much of anything except casino stuff. I think in Texas it’s actually a little bit odd compared to what we see for shoddy Indigenous coverage nationally. Those stories are typically looking at poverty or drug use or alcoholism — basically all the stereotypes. 

SH: Oftentimes when a newsroom that is not as diverse as it should be, which is most newsrooms, tries to cover marginalized communities, the coverage does tend to be a lot of stereotypes and negative coverage focusing on things like crime and poverty. It’s not a full or textured or accurate picture at all. Is that something you’ve noticed in Texas? 

TA: That’s something I’ve noticed nationally. With non-diverse newsrooms trying to cover more diverse stories, I see newsrooms tend to become more diverse in their storytelling but instead of hiring diverse writers they try to train their existing writers in how to do it. There’s obviously some problems with that. 

I’ll speak personally: In the past, I did not have the opportunity to really develop my writing in a way a lot of these established writers have. So not having the opportunity to establish your writing and work on your craft, I think editors often see you as a writer who needs a lot of help in the editing process A lot of editors don’t want to mess with that. For some reason, they think it’s easier to train a non-Indigenous writer on 500 years of Indigenous history and send them out instead of finding an Indigenous writer who has talent but may not have had access to editing in the past, and has all that knowledge. 

The talk about diversity isn’t just a numbers game here; it’s that it changes your coverage altogether. We work to hire Indigenous writers. Otherwise you just fall into the same old stories that folks produce. When it comes to coverage of underrepresented communities, most of the stuff folks are ever looking at are dysfunction, disparity, deprivation, disadvantage — this is what reporters tend to cover. It creates problems in the coverage overall. 

SH: You did bring in an Indigenous reporter, Pauly Denetclaw, formerly of the Navajo Times, to help guide this coverage. It seems like she’s helping guide the coverage but you’re also having them work with reporters and editors already in the newsroom to incorporate this into how the Texas Observer operates. How are you strategically approaching that collaboration and aiming to incorporate coverage of Indigenous Affairs into existing coverage? 

TA: There’s not a magic formula; it’s just that we’re trying to be more collaborative about everything we do. Diversity in a newsroom doesn’t make a difference if you don’t respect the skill those reporters bring, and I think everybody in our newsroom recognizes the need for something like this. [We] all work really well together in talking and sharing ideas. When it comes to infusing this through all of our reporting, even when there’s an opportunity to acknowledge tribes or Indigenous communities that were once in a particular area for instance — that’s something we can do in our coverage. We can make sure that we’re calling Indigenous sources. 

It’s really all the things newsrooms tend to think about doing or put together committees to think about doing. I think what I like about our newsroom is we just kind of do it, and we have a collaborative approach to stuff so we can all talk to each other and learn from each other.

SH: To what do you attribute the very noticeable gap in coverage of Indigenous Affairs that has persisted for so long?

TA: As always, it’s systemic racism in the media industry. You also have to look at the roots of a lot of these news organizations. The Los Angeles Times tried, and I would argue failed, at looking at their racist roots in their coverage and as an outlet. In Texas, I’m familiar with editors in the mid to late 1800s using newspapers and news outlets to call for the removal or extermination of Indigenous people from Texas. Those are the roots of this industry, and there’s absolutely no way you can disentangle yourself from that. 

Reporters cannot do that by sort of playing by the same rules and upholding these institutions and cherry-picking, ‘Well, we like some of what they do, and this is really important so we’ll keep this also.’ This is a situation where you’re either invested in the racist roots of your organization or profession or you’re taking active efforts to disrupt that and essentially burn those institutions to the ground and rebuild. 

SH: The LA Times recently did that mea culpa addressing the paper’s history of racist, inflammatory coverage — I’m guessing they were prompted to do so by internal problems at their paper. (Their guild has also formed caucuses for Black and Latino employees which are making recommendations for the future.) In what ways did you think they fell short? As other outlets attempt to replicate that in different ways, how do you think they should go about that, if at all?

TA: With the LA Times situation, where I come down on that is the glaring part of their apology was, ‘Well, Mexico used to own California and that’s where our history begins.’ As an Indigenous person you say, that’s not true; that is outright factually inaccurate, and the fact you can’t even recognize the land that you’re on is a huge problem. We’ve got the receipts for whose land it was. There are unratified treaties signed with the tribes for the land that the LA Times sits on. 

The fact the LA Times refused to even recognize that speaks to this idea that maybe they’ll get some more readers if they admit they were racist, but that doesn’t make any changes to what their coverage looks like. I think this is a thing with all of these apologies — the apologies are there to sort of jump on this bandwagon of racial reckoning, to say we have done wrong in the past and we will do better, while doing absolutely nothing.

SH: It’s like how all these brands during the Black Lives Matter protests started putting out statements and condemning things they had done in the past. It was very obvious they were just trying to cover their asses, while it was unclear how they were changing how they operate day to day.

TA: Yeah, and a lot of folks point to the Kerner Report from the ‘60s. It’s been almost 60 years that there has been this call to make sure journalism was equitable and diverse; they just haven’t done it. It’s not in their interest to diversify at all. As it is, I don’t think a lot of these legacy outlets are capable of thinking of diversity in anything broader than a numbers game. You’re absolutely right, it’s just woke-washing.

SH: Are you hoping to see other outlets in Texas and national outlets establish Indigenous Affairs desks or make attempts to better cover Indigenous communities? It also sounds like you’re saying if newsrooms attempt to diversify but in the wrong way and not thoughtfully it’s kind of counterproductive anyway. What’s your hope for other outlets attempting to take these steps?

TA: I hope that they do. Obviously there are a lot of caveats with that. The first Indigenous Affairs desk was at High Country News and now I think there are 30 of these things. Usually it’s small papers or public radio, but it’s a significant number to know there are that many outlets and individuals dedicated to covering Indigenous Affairs. As for whether all of them are doing it in the quote-unquote right way, it’s definitely a case-by-case basis there, but I think we’re heartened to see folks are taking it seriously. It’s a grassroots groundwell. 

It’s the large and legacy outlets we’d love to see doing more of this, but we also know that we can’t rely on them for a whole hell of a lot. I’m going to try and take an optimistic note here and say we see more places trying, sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong, but the bottom line is they’re trying, and I think that is an important step. 

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK: AGAINST “RELEVANCE”  

For Harper’s, the poet and novelist Garth Greenwell wrote a pinpointed essay on the idea of “relevance” as it exists in 2020. The word has so many different valences right now: important, significant, astute, aware. To be relevant is to be on the right wavelength, taking on subjects that matter, illuminating new perspectives. “Irrelevance” is just as prevalent in the collective vocabulary, used to deride an inconvenient fact or demand that someone or something be ignored: Trump’s COVID-19 infection is somehow cast as irrelevant to the election.

Greenwell makes a more subtle argument that art can’t be made or judged based on relevance alone. By prioritizing content — the right ideas, the right subjects — we lose out on form, the evolution of artistic creativity that oftentimes has little to do with the outside world. To me, the essay calls for a goal of art that’s separate from the goal of, say, journalism, which is rightly judged on relevance. “Artists feel the anxiety of relevance during every season of fellowship applications, those rituals of supplication, when we have to make a case for ourselves in a way that feels entirely foreign, for me at least, to the real motivations of art,” Greenwell writes. “Why is this the right project for this moment? these applications often ask. If I had a question like that on my mind as I tried to make art, I would never write another word.” — Kyle Chayka

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Curbed has now re-launched as part of New York Magazine (it was previously part of Vox Media, which merged with New York Media last year). The new site is New York City-based and while trends in other cities will be covered, the local Curbed sites that served cities outside New York were shuttered as part of the transition. 

— Floyd Press managing editor and reporter Ashley Spinks spoke to WVTF (Virginia public radio) about running what was essentially a one-woman newsroom for the salary of $36,000 amid parent company Lee Enterprise’s aggressive cuts. Spinks was then fired for having done the interview, because she made “disparaging” comments about Lee. WTF?? Without her the newspaper… doesn’t exist.

— A new Vulture profile of former Bon Appetit star Sohla El-Waylly, who now has her own show on YouTube, includes details about the racist hiring practices at Conde Nast. According to El-Waylly, the company claimed they couldn’t find a Black person experienced enough to work in the Test Kitchen, even though they were bringing in highly qualified Black talent to work in lower-level positions.

— The Atlantic has launched Planet, a vertical and newsletter dedicated to climate coverage that the magazine hopes will reinforce the very real, material impacts climate change is having on the planet and on our lives.— The New York Times Media Equation columnist Ben Smith spoke to Medium’s OneZero about tech regulation and internal politics at the Times, and how Slack and Twitter have impacted those politics: “…We live in this incredibly intense political moment, and that’s not fundamentally because of Slack. But the same forces that are playing out everywhere else in the culture and the same arguments that are playing out everywhere else in the culture are playing out in the New York Times, which is just another institution full of human beings.” Is the institution a bit less of an ivory tower now?