Breaking Media Bubbles: Join Journalist Laura Flanders and her Guests in Discussing Movement Journalism, Climate Crisis, and Advocacy. While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. The following is an episode from our monthly meet the biopic media series titled "BIPOC Press for the People: Bursting the Corporate Media Bubble," where we discussed the crisis in journalism and what journalists are doing to take matters into their own hands. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters. Become a member at https://LauraFlanders.org/donate Description: It is a cliché to say that the richest corporate media operate inside a bubble of their own making, but it's largely true. Today’s guests are breathing new life into the world of journalism by covering people, places and perspectives beyond the conventional enclaves of power. How do we break media bubbles? Join us for that conversation. Guests: •. Mary Annaïse Heglar: Author, Troubled Waters; Podcaster, Spill •. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Audio Journalist, Empire City, Uncivil & Seeing White; Assistant Professor Journalism, NYU •. Neesha Powell-Ingabire: Author, COME BY HERE: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast; Director Popular Education, Press On
Breaking Media Bubbles: Join Journalist Laura Flanders and her Guests in Discussing Movement Journalism, Climate Crisis, and Advocacy.
While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. The following is an episode from our monthly meet the biopic media series titled "BIPOC Press for the People: Bursting the Corporate Media Bubble," where we discussed the crisis in journalism and what journalists are doing to take matters into their own hands. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters. Become a member at https://LauraFlanders.org/donate.
Description: It is a cliché to say that the richest corporate media operate inside a bubble of their own making, but it's largely true. Today’s guests are breathing new life into the world of journalism by covering people, places and perspectives beyond the conventional enclaves of power. On this month’s Meet the BIPOC Press, Laura Flanders is joined by Chenjerai Kumanyika, a professor at NYU and prolific audio journalist, host of podcasts including “Empire City” and “Uncivil”. Neesha Powell-Ingabire is Director of Popular Education at Press On, a Southern media collective dedicated to movement journalism, and the author of a new memoir, “Come By Here”. And Mary Annaïse Heglar is an essayist covering climate, podcaster, and author of the novel “Troubled Waters” and a book for children, “The World Is Ours To Cherish”. Together they discuss the campus encampments in solidarity with Palestine, intergenerational work to stop the climate crisis, the question of objectivity and context, and how movement journalism is — or isn’t — traditional journalism. How do we break media bubbles? Join us for that conversation.
“Movement journalism is journalism that is in service of liberation . . . We are very intentional about historically oppressed communities. Folks from those communities should be doing reporting on those communities and building relationships with community members and organizers on the ground.” - Neesha Powell-Ingabire
“. . . Look at the history of the Black press. We didn't have the luxury to report and somehow separate that from advocacy. When you have people reporting while slavery is still legal, all kinds of Black people are being targeted in various kinds of violence. We have a long tradition of advocacy journalism.” - Chenjerai Kumanyika
“Nothing has made me feel less optimistic about climate change and our ability to stop it, to mitigate it, to deal with it than the genocide and Gaza. If we cannot come together to say that is wrong and that should stop, then I have so little faith in our ability to stop ecocide.” - Mary Annaïse Heglar
Guests:
•. Mary Annaïse Heglar: Author, Troubled Waters; Podcaster, Spill
•. Chenjerai Kumanyika: Audio Journalist, Empire City, Uncivil & Seeing White; Assistant Professor Journalism, NYU
•. Neesha Powell-Ingabire: Author, COME BY HERE: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast; Director Popular Education, Press On
Full Episode Notes are located HERE. They include related episodes, articles, and more.
LAURA FLANDERS: One, two, three.
JEANNIE HOPPER: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. The following is from our monthly “Meet the BIPOC Press” series in this episode of Laura Flanders and Friends titled “Bursting the Corporate Media Bubble.” We assembled a panel of journalists to discuss how BIPOC press are breathing new life into the world of journalism by covering people, places, and perspectives beyond the conventional enclaves of power. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters. Become a member today at lauraflanders.org/donate.
LAURA FLANDERS: It is a cliche to say that the richest corporate media operate in a bubble, in their own specific reality and mostly out of touch with the majority of the country. A lot of the journalists went to the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods as the politicians and profiteers on whom they report. It's a cliché, but it is also largely true, and it has barely changed in the last 50 years. Still, there is hope. Today's guests are breathing new life into the world of commentary and journalism. Chenjerai Kumanyika is a professor at NYU and prolific audio journalist, including “Uncivil”, one of his podcasts, “Seeing White”, and a forthcoming series about the New York Police Department. From Georgia, Neesha Powell-Ingabire is a journalist and organizer, Director of Popular Education at Press On, a Southern media collective dedicated to movement journalism about which I want everybody to hear way more. She's finally joining us from New Orleans, Mary Annaïs Heglar is an essayist and podcaster who covers climate with two new books, one a novel titled “Troubled Waters" and the other a beautiful children's book that just now moved me to tears, really. Welcome Mary, Nisha, Chenjerai. It is a pleasure to have you all with me. I have to start with you, I think Chenjerai, with student protests happening all around the U. S. We got a lot of generational shift and conversation going on. You're in New York, what are you seeing on campus and what are you seeing amongst your peers?
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Well, you know, and as you said, you know, this has become a national movement. We've seen students across the country, not only speaking out against the country's, you know, support of Israel's, you know, Biden's support of Israel's, War on Gaza and on Palestine, but also questioning their universities investments and demanding divestment and specifically using an encampment strategy. And so we've seen that not only on our campus here at NYU, but also, you know, Columbia obviously has been very much in the headlines about this, but CUNY, Fashion Institute of Technology. The New School have now started a faculty encampment. And I think that one other thing I'll say is that I think one thing that makes this a little bit different from some other movements is the degree to which faculty have become involved. You know, in our, in our campus, we decided that, as faculty, we weren't going to simply let the NYPD come onto our campus and arrest our students that they would have to also engage with us. And we felt that while the students are in the lead, it was our role to share their vulnerability and, to, and to, you know, and, and, and the struggle. And so, you've also seen the, the growth of faculty for justice in Palestine, you know, over the, you know, essentially since October and, and now, you know, our chapter is faculty and staff for just, so just a lot going on. One thing I'll say also about this is that. As the semester ends, what we're now seeing is the university starting to unleash these, disciplinary sanctions on students, and so we seem to be moving into that phase of this struggle.
LAURA FLANDERS: The bubble effect has been super obvious. I think if you look at your, you know, commercial media coverage, you might think that the protests are only happening in New York, and maybe L.A., and maybe a few other places, but as you point out, Chenjarai, they are happening everywhere. Turn to social media and local media and you get a very different story. Mary, I know that you've been conscious of what's happening there in New Orleans. Tulane has seen its own encampment protests, right?
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: They have. It was cleared out pretty quickly before I was able to get down there. I'm not teaching this semester, but I did hear from a few of my students from last year about the, the repressive way that the, the university handled it. I mean, we, I think it's also important to remember that there were students at Vanderbilt who were taking big risks. Before a lot of these things got into the news, Vanderbilt's in Nashville. And so there was a quick moment here in New Orleans where there was a, what we, as far as we know, was the first encampment, that was not at a university down at Jackson Square in the French Quarter. So the, the, the movement for Free Palestine in New Orleans has been extraordinarily, extraordinarily strong and I think that has to do with the fact that there's a pretty big Palestinian community here. So yeah, it's, it's definitely not all contained in, in New York and California and not all contained on university campuses. I think it's important we keep that in mind.
LAURA FLANDERS: Coming to you, Nisha, this is, I'm imagining where ress On really comes into its own. I mean, you've got a lot of stories you're looking at. How are you prioritizing and where are you seeing the biggest contrast between what you're doing and what you're seeing in the commercial press?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Yeah, so it's so exciting to see what the student journalists are doing down south. We've seen at Emory University in Atlanta, University of Georgia, the student encampments happening there and at Press On, we've been talking about the differences between how the students are treated by the police and faculty, it seemed like they crack down super, super hard on students everywhere being brutalized, but it only took, you know, a matter of hours for the students at Emory to be cracked down on pepper spray violence at UGA, my own alma mater. I've seen that students of color have been, were targeted by police more than other groups of students. So, and that's what we're seeing. We're not seeing a lot of negotiations and things like that, like the schools up North. And so that's a market difference that we've seen, and we're just really impressed by what the student journalists are doing. They're doing movement journalism, even though they might not be calling that, and might not be calling it that. And we're really excited to support them because there's so many different safety and security issues, right? When a lot of these students, were seeing their faces, right? We're getting their identities and that puts them at harm. And there are certain practices within movement journalism that can reduce that harm. There are certain practices that journalists can do to make sure that we are not inadvertently putting these students at harm and so that's what we're thinking about, and how we want to work with students, but, this is movement journalism in action.
LAURA FLANDERS: As you say that for people that aren't familiar with the term, when you say movement journalism, how would you define it? How do you define it there at Press On?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Yeah. So movement journalism is journalism that is in service of liberation. We, I often say that we are almost the exact opposite of traditional journalism because we are pushing back against the tradition of extractation and exploitation that mainstream media has been. So, that's what we know about mainstream media, right? We see them coming into communities of color and oppressed communities and parachuting into these communities and causing harm, even if it's not intentional, right? And so we are very intentional about historically oppressed communities, folks from those communities should be doing reporting on those communities and building authentic, genuine relationships, building relationships with community, community members and organizers on the ground. So that is what movement journalism means to us. It is engaging with communities and making sure that folks from oppressed communities are able to become journalists. And we don't believe that you have to go to a traditional journalism school to be a journalist. I did, but there was, there's, I had to do a lot of re-education right? To really learn how to work with communities and an authentic, genuine way.
LAURA FLANDERS: You did, I didn't. Chenjerai, coming to you. How are you using this moment with your students to teach about these questions? I mean, this objectivity idea has never, in my view, been true or accurate, has always been deployed with certain particular political motivation. And now you've got, as, as Neesha was just saying, students reporting on what is happening on their very own campuses and sometimes being the only people with the access to do so. I imagine it's bringing up some really interesting teaching and learning moments there among the students.
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Absolutely. And I just want to co-sign what Neesha said about movement journalism. You know, one thing about, you know, you look at the history of the Black press, we didn't have the luxury of being able to report and to sort of somehow separate that from advocacy, when you have people reporting while slavery is still legal in the country, while all kinds of Black people are being targeted in various kinds of violence, you know. So, that's a, so we have a long tradition of advocacy journalism, and, you know, you know, what I teach my students is that the, the, you know, I say objectivity is important. And the reason why I say it's important is because we, when we say that, you know, someone has been killed by police, that there's been sexual assault, that there's climate emergency, those are, we're saying that as facts, we're not saying that somebody's opinion. So in that respect, objectivity is important. But what I tell them is that the definitions of objectivity we've been getting there's been so much violence done under the claim of objectivity. And I'm that, you know, that somehow that means that you can't have an analysis, you know, that if, that if your, government is, is endorsing a war, you can't say that somehow you're, you have to kind of walk the middle line. And to me, that's not objectivity. That's just poor analysis and poor journalism. And these young people are right at the cutting edge of that, both in, you know, Neesha talked about extraction. I mean, I remember the first day of the journalism course I taught this semester, the students said, we have a problem with how journalism is extractive in our communities, right? And some of that they're learning even from, I know we're going to talk about the climate change, but even that metaphor of extraction is based on their sensitivity to climate issues. So it's a really exciting moment. And they're on the cutting edge, I would say, you know, the universities broadly, while there are some faculty who are in solidarity, it does sometimes seem that the student journalists are even up against their own universities in their ability to cover this stuff. While administrators want to be silent and kind of punish them and those things. So that's an interesting component.
LAURA FLANDERS: Yeah. I mean, I should be more careful in my speech. I mean, obviously we want to be fair and we want to be accurate as much as possible. We want to avoid though, I think the sense of objectivity, the way that objectivity has been used as a kind of stick to beat activists, journalists with, and also the way that it shows up as kind of two sides-ism, you know, for and against the slaughter of 34,000 people. Lost count in, in, among Palestinians, in Gaza, I think that that is pushing it, also with respect to climate and that's, I'm coming to you, Mary, I mean, your book is, your, your book, “Troubled Waters”, is all about this kind of generational shift between the civil rights generation and the climate generation. It features a young person who is motivated and mobilized and takes very personally, both the death of a relative and the fear of a dying planet. How do you think about objectivity as an essayist, as a writer, as the polemicist, perhaps?
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: Yeah. So, the, the way I would best describe the novel, I think, is that it's about the climate change generation and the civil rights generation and the things that go unsaid between them. And I think, so in writing this novel is based a lot on, the civil rights narrative is based a lot on my family's history with school desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee. And to do that, I had to do a great deal of, of research, going into the archives, and, and learning what that story really was, because of the members of my family who participated are too traumatized to actually tell me the stories. I had to go learn them on my own and in doing that I found so many parallels to the way that we talk about climate change or fail to talk about climate change rather. So it was, I would see people saying like, well, this is what the segregationists say, this is what the black people say, and this is what the moderate says. And nobody's there to say like, but that's crazy though. Like, so you have segregationists saying like, it's a mental disorder that black people want integration or want equal rights, right? Like that, that was an actual argument that was treated as though it was valid and it looks just as, as what as insane as, somebody says, you know, there is no climate change. And then here's all these scientists saying that there is, let's just put them on TV and let them argue it out, right? And kind of similar to so-and-so says it's a not a genocide and then all of these genocide experts say that it is a genocide and like you were saying with with Palestine that we've lost count. We've literally lost count. We've lost the counters in Palestine. And so I don't know what, what more evidence these folks need and the truth is that they actually don't need or want evidence. People want to believe what they want to believe sometimes and so this sort of arguing toward the lowest denominator does not serve us.
LAURA FLANDERS: Talking about extraction in your civil rights generation, grandparents, sticking with you, Mary, for a minute. When we say extractive journalism, extractive reporting, is that part of what they're talking about, that they feel their stories have been so used by others, that it's hurtful for them even to just talk about it, even to you? And did you worry about somehow putting being extractive in your, your writing of stories based on their experience?
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: I did not worry about being extractive. No, they want this story told. There's just too painful to them to tell it. I don't think that, I, I've never heard them talk about journalists being extractive necessarily. I never used that term. My aunt did talk a lot. So the, the difference is, in the novel, this is Corinne's grandparents generation. I'm older than Corinne. This is my parents’ generation that I'm talking about. And a little bit of my, my grandparents generation because they were the parents of the children integrating the school. So, the generations are off by one between me and the main character. But essentially, not necessarily extractive was the way that they talked about it because, journalism and having these stories covered in the news at the time of having these images in the news was actually incredibly helpful to their cause because you can't argue with a picture of, you know, grown white men spitting on a small six, five year old child. So in that way, it was helpful, but in another way it was, you know, it's a little bit traumatizing cause my aunt's like five years old. She didn't know what's going on. And like, here's all these strange people with giant cameras in her face. So, but that, but then it also becomes more dangerous when they go away. So, but no, I, I didn't feel extractive, honestly.
LAURA FLANDERS: I think you might have heard from your relatives if they had, if they had thought that. I imagine they're celebrating this book with whole hearts.
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: They were very happy that, that I wrote about it because they felt like this is going to be lost to history. Nashville integrated, as far as I know, it was the first elementary school to integrate after Brown v. Board of Education decision. It integrated in 1957, which happened to be the same year as Little Rock, which was more violent because the kids are bigger, you know, Nashville is first graders. So it kind of got lost to history because people remember Little Rock and not Nashville.
LAURA FLANDERS: Neesha, coming to you, unfortunately, your hometown became the subject of a lot of national news a few years back, 2020, with the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the jogger out on the streets, in Georgia, in that part where you grew up. You must have felt that, clearly you do, in your memoir you talk about it, what would be your reflections to journalists today who covered that story, about the way that they covered it, and how does it inform the work that you do today?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Yes, I definitely deeply, I felt a lot of things when that happened. I actually went to school with the man who actually pulled the trigger and killed Ahmaud Arbery and I just have never been so close to such a international event and knowing that I literally went to school, literally was in the same Spanish class with someone who could do something so, so horrible. But I actually wasn't surprised because he was one of the, the, the kids at our school who, you know, wore the Confederate flag and you kind of knew what he was about. So it wasn't super surprising, but it was still disgusting all the same. I think what we saw, and I, I, I think the, the, the media did a good job in, showing, the resistance, because I think there was a lot of organizing happening after, the murder, Ahmaud's family, community members, fighting to get justice for Ahmaud. There was also other things happening, like the Confederate monument that was in a public park downtown. There was a long fight to get that taken down because it's symbolic of the racial climate in Brunswick and how, how we, of Brunswick, Georgia and how it was kind of overlooked and that Confederate monument, did eventually get taken down. And so I think the media did a good job in covering that resistance. What they did not know and what I found out through like researching for my book is there's a long history of black resistance in coastal Georgia. And I feel like the journalist didn't necessarily know that, you know, they're like, this is a quiet, sleepy town. Black people have kind of always just been docile, but there's actually a long history of black resistance. And in my book, I'm able to talk about some of those different moments. There is, in St. Simon's Island, which is, in the same county as Brunswick, Georgia, there's a story of in the early 1800s when, a group of Igbo, enslaved Africans drowned themselves after committing mutiny on the captains of their boat that, you know, brought them over here. They committed mutiny and then they drowned themselves because they, they said, we would rather be, we would rather drown ourselves than become enslaved. That's a huge act of resistance. And that's something we didn't learn about in school. And I, you know, talk about in my book, how all of all of that was kind of intentionally, I feel like hidden from us, because they didn't want us to know about, black resistance. They didn't want us to have pride in that history. So the resistance we saw after, Ahmaud's murder, I would have liked journalists to dig deeper and to, this is not the first time that, black folks in coastal Georgia have, resisted and fought back.
LAURA FLANDERS: Oh, this is such an important point.
JEANNIE HOPPER: Laura Flanders and Friends asks the questions we need to be asking to move forward. While the commercial media is centered on what sells advertising, which is too often fear, we're centered on change makers, imagining a better world and creating the solutions to get us there. That's thanks to the generous support of viewers and listeners like you. While we are independent media, we do depend on you. Please contribute by making a one time donation or make it monthly. Go to lauraflanders.org forward/donate. As Angela Davis says, when vast numbers of people come together, this is how change happens. Please come together with us now. Thanks for listening. And thanks for your continued support. Now back to our conversation.
LAURA FLANDERS: And Chenjerai, I come to you and you're teaching, I mean whether you’re talking the Geechee Islands, or whether you're talking Black experience in America, or whether you're talking Gaza, October 7th. Where you start the clock in your story really matters. And I wonder how you help your students think about this, because obviously our two colleagues here have written book-length that address these long histories, journalists are often told you just got to cut to the chase.
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Well, one thing is I try to offer them examples with my own journalism. So, while I do write some essays and do some coverage of current events, you know, my most widely spread work is my podcast, you know, is my podcast on Uncivil, my podcast Seeing White, which is a history of whiteness that certainly goes beyond America begins in, you know, in Europe. We talk about the, this, the history of the civil war, the people's history, and we tap into some of those struggles of resistance that Neesha was just talking about. And, really, and, you know, I've, I've made the case that to cover effectively, the events of today, you have to have that historical context and, you know, often in these conversations about diversity and journalism, that kind of thing is like, oh, well, yeah, we want to bring different perspectives in. And I'm like, no, this isn't different perspectives. What this is, is if you don't know this history, then you don't know the real facts. If you don't know the feminist history of this country and you don't know the black history, if you don't know the queer history, then actually you're less informed and ill equipped to cover those beats in the newsroom. Sadly, a lot of people in power in newsrooms are ill informed, and the kind of work that Mary is doing, that Neesha is doing, and that I'm doing. So I give examples. I, you know, sometimes I assign my own work, but other documentary work where someone took history, rendered it as compelling, helped people understand both the individual characters. But also that these things were collective struggle and then how that, and how those continuities can help you understand, you know, policing today.
LAURA FLANDERS: But so what's your tip to the journalist who very often is being told you have 1,800 words, if you're lucky, more like 800.
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Right? Yeah, no, it's tricky. It is a, it is a really tricky thing. I mean, the conditions in the newsroom produce this. And so I don't want to, certainly don't want to seem like I'm pinning this on individual journalists that they just don't care. But I do, I do, I would say, you know, you know, you can't, we can't sort of tell the time only by, what is it like the minute hand, you know, or the second hand, you know, we have to know where we're at in the historical story, in the story of struggle. And I think that even, you know, you'd be amazed what you can do with 800 words if you know how to write, you know, so we have to, we have to, you know, tell them the, I think the, the key is one thing I've seen happen with journalists, and I've seen this even in some of my editorial writing with various institutions is that when you try to zoom out too much from the immediate facts that you're, they'll say, oh, that's a big idea story, or we're not covering that. And there'll be all kinds of mechanisms to sort of frown out the history and render it as not relevant. And you do have to make choices. But to me, I'm always making an argument to put it back into context, because this is part of how we get to the situation we are here, where, for example, if you take the issue of policing, right, whether it's extra, extra judicial policing, like Ahmaud Arbery, Or people who are being killed by police in general. It's, you know, it's policing is a thing where we've been seeing the same cycles play out for over 200 years. And part of that is because people aren't telling the story. They're not connecting the dots in the way that we need to.
LAURA FLANDERS: We are coming to hurricane season and Mary, I want to come to you. You're there in New Orleans and often journalists' idea of history is that there was a storm called Katrina. So if we maybe mentioned that, that will do it. You go way further back in, in your, in your gorgeous book. How do you recommend we think about this season? Maybe some new questions, some new stories to be told as another hurricane season heads our way.
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: Well, I think it's important to keep in mind that today's hurricanes are not like yesterday's hurricanes. Now we face the thing called rapid intensification, where it used to be that if you heard about two or three days out that there was a Category One heading your way, you wouldn't leave. Nobody leaves for a Category One. And, but now you can hear that there's a Category One when you go to bed, and you wake up and it's a Category Four. So people need to move differently. And, you know, we always say that, like, you can rest on the wisdom of, of a community. But now, some, everything is unpredictable now. What we're losing with climate change really is a world in which things are more predictable. So yes, there was a storm named Katrina and there's a lot we can learn from Katrina. There's also a lot we can learn from a storm named Ida, who got, who came ashore about six weeks after I moved here, so that felt a little bit personal, but that was a storm that about three days before she made landfall was just some weird group of clouds out in the Gulf of Mexico, and then comes ashore as the strongest storm to hit New Orleans since the 1870s. So I think we need to, put that into context and sort of, I think there needs to be, you know, not necessarily a reeducation campaign around it, because I think people living here, even even in a world where the storms are different, have a lot of cultural knowledge that needs to be applied to this and not thrown out of the window. But there does need to be more understanding of how these storms are different and also more understanding of how these storms intersect with all of these other existing systems of oppression that we already have. And I think Katrina is a really powerful example of how these storms intersect with all of these other issues. If you look at what happened in prisons or what happened in old folks homes and things like that, then those are things that we need to be more aware of as well.
LAURA FLANDERS: Yeah, I think journalists are getting smarter about what stories may be there beneath the surface. Neesha, coming to you, your book is about not just memory getting lost, but it relates also to people getting lost. And the struggle of the Geechee people, the island people there to, to survive on their islands, to survive with their language, with their culture. How's that going?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Yes, the Gullah Geechee folks are resilient because they've had to be and, climate change is really a threat to their way of life and to their culture. Subsistent fishing, living off, off, off the water, you know, getting, getting their food from their spiritual practices. Just so much of Gullah Geechee life revolves around water and a lot of Gullah Geechee territory which goes from about Jacksonville, North Carolina to St. Augustine, it's in danger of being flooded out, right? And there are folks like Maurice Bailey in Sapelo Island, which is one of the last intact Gullah Geechee communities, Sapelo Island, Georgia. He's working with folks, to work on living shorelines to help with the erosion and that's happening all along the Gullah Geechee coast. And so, Gullah Geechee folks see it coming and they're working actively toward solutions because, once again, the, the ocean and water is such a huge part of Gullah Geechee culture, Gullah Geechee life. And so I, I'm, it makes me feel glad to see that people are working on solutions.
LAURA FLANDERS: Not to say that elections are necessarily solutions, but there are some big ones coming up, including, of course, the presidential election. Georgia is a swing state. How are you thinking about that, Neesha, and how is Press On going to be reporting on it? Is reporting on it?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Yeah, Georgia. Yes, wow. 2020 was so interesting to see how that all went down. And we are now officially, I guess, a purple state. At Press On, we are trying to get journalists ready, as far as knowing their rights and how to report on elections from a movement journalism perspective. We just did a FOIA 101 training for movement journalists.
LAURA FLANDERS: So Freedom of Information Act Request?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: And so that's all all around open records request. And so that's a really important part of reporting on elections. We're about to do a media law 101. We are going to do “how to report on elections through a movement journalism lens.” And so, of course, we're not going to be like lobbying for particular candidates or anything like that, but rather training up movement journalists, so they know their rights, and they know different frameworks on how to report on these elections because we know that a lot of the reporting is going to come from mainstream outlets. And so we, we want to make sure that our folks are reporting on it too. And, and we really encourage, we want people to collaborate on reporting and things like that. So, we're really just, making sure that folks have the tools to be able to report on these elections effectively, safely, and ethically.
LAURA FLANDERS: And we should say, Press On is not just in Georgia, it's all across the South and the Gulf Coast region, right?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Yes, that is correct. We are all across the South and also Puerto Rico. We support folks in Puerto Rico as well.
LAURA FLANDERS: Absolutely. You did a podcast, as you mentioned, on the history of democracy, or lack thereof, in this country. Aspiration, too, as we like to say. How are you approaching election coverage this year, and how are you feeling about the coverage so far?
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Well, you know, I think that, you know, what I, what I think from, you know, for journalists who are thinking about some of these critical issues, you know, there's a, there's a sort of deluge of horse race style journalism that's already underway and headed our way that doesn't really invite us to ask the kind of questions that we want to add, that we need to ask about where the people really stand on the issues, what are the issues, who's impacted by them. One thing is to kind of cut through that, that sort of noise of the, of the sort of election journalism machine with real questions. And I think that's one thing, you know, that myself and even some of my other colleagues in my department are trying to prepare for. One thing I've really been focused on with younger journalists is they're coming into this information environment where there's all kinds of disinformation, misinformation. There is, now we have the prospect of deep fakes, like you can't, you know, voice, it's hard to tell, is this actually someone's voice with AI? So there's all these dangers. And I think that for, you know, younger journalists might be coming up in a world where some of this stuff is actually quite normal to them. To really just get to some basic journalistic values, like what is the truth? How do you get to it? How do you figure out what, where's a document that sort of, you know, what are the ways you can verify that something happened? Discipline of verification, they may sound like nerdy things, but I think that younger journalists are actually quite excited to realize that there is a way through. And for me, just to assert, like, yes, it's confusing, but ultimately, we got to figure out what's true. I mean, one of the things that I think, in particular, conservatives have done, but I don't know, I mean, I, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to sugarcoat how, how particularly even how Democrats are functioning at this moment. But one thing that they've been able to do is to sort of call basic truth into question, into question facts and all those things. So I think a lot of it is me, learning also from younger people, right? I mean, it's not, we're not dealing with the sort of bank deposit model. Some of it is me talking to younger folks and saying, how do you actually sort through and figure out what's true? What platforms are relevant to you and how, and how are you disseminating information? And often I learn a lot of stuff and I tell a lot of journalists, you might want to listen to what my students are saying, like what a 20 year old person is saying about how they consume news and navigate it. So that's kind of how we're going into this.
LAURA FLANDERS: Yeah, I have to say, I have to come up with something better than screaming at my television set as I watch the reporters who have so many resources at their disposal never leave the studio. It does seem to me one surefire way to know whether something actually happened is to be present where it's happening and that gets to your point about not just covering the horses racing around the track, but actually looking at the people in the stands. Unfortunately, we usually have a bake sale to be able to afford it, but hey.
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Reading a Google, I realized Google just released their AI features. So now, there's all this information that's going to come just when you type the Google search in, you don't even have to click the link. And to your point, like, just Google searching is not enough. We got to actually go report.
LAURA FLANDERS: Hey, maybe some old techniques will come back into play or the ones that those of us who couldn't afford anything else have been doing all along. Coming to you, Mary, I have to say, Mary Annaïse, your book, the children's book, that is not the focus of our conversation here today. I, the novel “Troubled Waters,” I know is the focus, but this book, “The World is Ours to Cherish,” is really beautiful. And you made, a very clear decision to emphasize the beauty that's still here, not just the horror that may be coming along or hitting some of us already now, and to lift up the beauty and the, the possibilities of this moment and that, it seems to me, is your strategy for the next generation, but also an indication of your belief in the next generation. So, could you share a little bit about that and about what you think is coming? The good, the bad, the ugly, the people?
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: I'll say I, I do believe in the next generation, but I also believe in all generations. So part of what I was trying to do with both the, the novel and the children's book is to dispel this idea of like the generations are against one another and climate change is the fault of the previous generation and next generation is going to fix it all, right? I think we have this overinflated idea that Gen Z, which is doing amazing things if we look at college campuses, they're, they're doing great. But if you look at people like Kyle Rittenhouse, who is also Gen Z, then you get a different picture, right? And I think we've had this idea of the next generation is just going to fix it all and us old folks need to get out of the way for quite some time. And if that were true, then we wouldn't have all the problems that we have, right? Like once upon a time, people talked about the Baby Boomers the same way that we talk about Gen Z. And so I think that all of these fights are fights that, that all of us need to, to be involved in. And so, yeah, I, I think that's what both of them are getting into. But I, I very intentionally wrote the book in such a way that children would be left with a sense of wonder about the world that we have because the world that we have today is very beautiful and the world that we're all mourning these children have never known that world. So I wanted to imbue them with a sense of wonder about the world that they're in. And I also very intentionally, you know, when I have the call to action, as I call it in the book, to say that they will change the world too. I wanted to make it very clear that they won't do it alone and that they're, I think children feel the sense of abandonment, especially when it comes to climate change when we say that this is your fight, young people, you're, we, each generation has their own, you know, sort of turning point. You know, my parents' generation was the Civil Rights Movement, ours was the Iraq War, now yours is climate change. See how it works, right? That is a terrible message to send to a child and to place the weight of the world onto their shoulders. So yeah, that, that was my, my goal with the, with the children's book.
LAURA FLANDERS: Well, it's beautiful. And I thank you for it. And it leads me to our closing question. The question I ask all of our guests on these shows, and that is what they believe the story will be that the future tells of this moment. And Chenjerai, I think I'd come to you first. What do you think is the story the future will tell of now?
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Well, I, I am going to come back to, you know, the campus protests. And I think that, you know, this is a moment where it, you know, on one hand, it's very depressing to see, you know, how some of these universities administrators have doubled down, how I think the president has doubled down on a, on a, on a war, which really he can't explain and no one can explain. But what's also really inspiring is that in these communities and in these encampments and in, you know, on and off campus, the way that they're growing, the way that they draw people in, educate, build community. You're actually seeing really tremendous possibilities, the way that this particular movement of folks has kind of really is engaging with and doing a lot better when it comes to some of the issues around gender and, and, and, you know, intersectional struggle that we've seen from, you know, struggles we've seen in the past. So I think there's a lot of inspiration to be drawn and I don't want to minimize the horror that Palestinian people are enduring and to somehow romanticize all of this because we want to keep the focus there. But I think that as a way to actually draw those connections, right? We're really getting lessons from these young folks, and I think that that's what's going to be the, the, the lesson that people look from, from this period of tremendous uprising.
LAURA FLANDERS: Neesha, what about you?
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: I feel like we're seeing like the old, and new come together in really powerful ways. A lot of the organizers are using, you know, traditional tactics of community organizing but we have Twitter now, we have TikTok now, we have Instagram, we are more connected than ever. And so I feel like we are more tapped into what is happening in these movements than ever before.
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: So I feel like this is an era where we're seeing the new and the old come together. And this is just a moment of such powerful connection and it's, it feels like we're on the brink of something.
LAURA FLANDERS: Sounds like everyone's reading from your book, Mary.
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: Yeah, I hate that I'm last because I actually don't feel as optimistic as our two guests.
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: So, you know, I get this question a lot of someone who engages with with climate change of, you know, is, are we going to be okay? Is the world ending? Yeah, that's how that's a conversation starter with me sometimes. And, I got to say, nothing has made me feel less optimistic about climate change and our ability to stop it, to mitigate it, to, to deal with it than the genocide in Gaza. Because if we cannot come together to say that is wrong and that should stop, then I, I have so, so little faith in our ability to stop ecocide. So I'll, I'll, I will couch that because I feel the pressure to leave with something a little bit hopeful to say that I've been wrong before. You know, and also none of us know the future and I don't know if the world is ending, but I know something is ending. I know that it's becoming more and more obvious that capitalism is untenable. It's becoming more and more obvious that this is not a democracy that we live in and that the systems and the ways that we have been living our lives and consuming and living off of this planet have to end and so I think we are being more and more backed into a corner and have to make some very, very tough decisions.
LAURA FLANDERS: Have to end, have to change. I want to thank you all for the work that you are doing, change making, and also I think cultivating love. I mean, as Che Guevara said. True revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love. First you have to love a thing in order to save it. And I think all of your work is helping us have more love in our media. So thank you for joining us.
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR: Thank you, thank you for having me.
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: Thanks for having me. Looking forward to next time.
NEESHA POWELL-INGABIRE: Thank you for this opportunity.
JEANNIE HOPPER: We hope you enjoyed listening to the full uncut conversation from our “Meet the BIPOC Press” monthly series. Please join our members now by making a one time donation or by making it monthly. Go to patreon.com/lauraflandersandfriends. That's also where you'll find more information on this conversation in an episode notes post. That's patreon.com/lauraflandersandfriends. And thanks again to all of our member supporters.