When I spoke with Georgia Fort, vice president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, it was mere weeks before she would find federal agents at her door to arrest her amid President Donald Trump’s assault on the free press.
Fort, along with fellow independent journalist and former CNN host Don Lemon, was arrested Friday and charged by the Trump administration in connection with a protest she covered at a Minnesota church, where a leader of Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown serves as pastor.
Her recent warnings to me are echoing in my mind as the world processes harrowing footage she and a relative filmed prior to her arrest:
Last month, given that she was covering the immigration crackdown, I told her about the similarities I saw between her and Ida B. Wells, a Black independent journalist who famously covered lynchings in the early Jim Crow era, killings often carried out by masked thugs known as the Ku Klux Klan.
Our conversation was mostly about denial — and, as she explained, the sense among some Black journalists that it is pervasive in the media and beyond when it comes to addressing the Trump administration’s bigoted agenda. More specifically, we talked about the plight — both a historic plight and enduring one — of Black journalists who have felt as if their fact-based reports on racism in the United States are either outright denied in newsrooms; framed as an exaggeration; or, in the name of “objectivity,” presented as an opinion to be debated.
That’s Fort’s story as she tells it: one about an award-winning Black journalist who was essentially forced into independent work when she felt she was being inhibited by her corporate employers from telling stories that countered official narratives given by, say, federal or state law enforcement agencies.
She warned about news organizations embracing “a code of ethics that indoctrinates journalists to uphold officials’ narratives over community ones,” saying that “when you put that much credibility on government and official statements over community narratives, you end up with a bias.” That’s essentially why she co-founded the Center for Broadcast Journalism, an organization that seeks to ensure that the media “authentically reflects and serves Black & Brown communities.”
And there’s a need to normalize this kind of work across newsrooms — so it becomes commonplace, particularly given there’s evidence that the Trump administration’s assault on diversity has coincided with layoffs affecting Black and brown journalists. Maybe then, the work of exposing racism and its practitioners won’t be so easily labeled as activist work.
“I feel that the term activist has been weaponized against me to diminish my credibility as a journalist,” Fort told me.
We need more of the work Fort is doing — and not just from the people and places most vulnerable to the Trump administration’s attacks.
My MS NOW colleague Eugene Daniels aptly noted Friday that since Fort and Lemon are independent journalists, they don’t have some of the protections they may have had under a corporate entity, and that their being Black journalists in and of itself raises questions about the solidarity they can expect from the media writ large as they fight their charges.
The Black press is traditionally audacious in its truth-telling, as authors have attested in books such as “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media” by Juan Gonzáles and Joseph Torres, as well as Char Adams’ “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore.”
But independent Black media cannot go it alone in this regard, if democracy is to survive the Trump era. I think doing that will require the broader media ecosystem to be as unflinching in its coverage as Fort and Lemon were in their reporting of the Minnesota church protests.
And anything short of that, in these dire times, is arguably complicity.
