Belle de Jong: "We have to be radical in our criticism and our scrutinising."
A conversation with a fellow journalist.
For this week’s feature, I wanted to do something a little bit different. After I wrote “The Future of Journalism Isn’t Neutral”, many of my colleagues reached out to express their thoughts, but most of all, their grievances with the field. It turns out, many journalists are equally worried about the media landscape and where it’s headed. This gave me hope.
So I sat down with my colleague Belle de Jong, who I work with at The European Correspondent, a European media startup that has shown me the power of true independent media fostered by the passion of young journalists.
Belle is a fellow Dutchie who moved to Malta, a step that accidentally fueled her journalism career. She recently wrote an article for Unbias the News, on why journalists are speaking out against Western media bias in reporting on Israel-Palestine. She spoke to me about what drives her work, her visions for the future of media, and why it’s important to remember that journalists are people too.
How did you initially enter the field of journalism?
I moved to Malta to study communications two weeks before a car bomb assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia because of her journalistic investigations. Coming from the Netherlands, it felt surreal. People in my course responded that she “had it coming”, and I thought - what do you mean? I always knew I wanted to write, but in the aftermath of that, I figured that I had to write.
Were you inspired by Galizia’s story and what it exposed about Malta’s media landscape?
It mostly made me realise that journalism can be so powerful that it can cost you your life. After starting my own blog, I started writing articles about abortion rights, because this was something that you couldn’t really write about. But the newsroom where I started working after I graduated actually pushed for more pro-choice voices every now and then. And then I ended up in Malta’s only psych ward, where I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And the hospital was really, really bad. That made me want to start writing about mental health, which is also extremely stigmatised here. And people were actually grateful that I brought it up, it even led to the government talking about a potential new hospital. That’s how I got into advocacy journalism.
How do you balance wanting to be both a journalist and an activist?
I think it just happened by accident. And it's only recently that I realized that I am having to balance this at all. I was like, it shouldn't be a question. I started writing about issues that I cared about, like mental health and abortion. I was going to protests and meeting activists, artists, and people trying to make a change. And I never really thought about the fact that journalism and activism maybe shouldn't go together. First of all, you can separate your personal life from your work life. Second of all, and I feel like everyone in journalism knows this: no one is fully objective. There is no objectivity in journalism because you have to choose what you're covering, which language you're using, how you're covering it, who you're interviewing, and where you get your information from.
Can objectivity not exist regardless of that?
I guess if you want an objective piece, Reuters would come close, but that’s fucking boring. And in the end, most journalists, especially if you go a few decades back, are just white American men. It's always people with an education, with connections, upper class, whatever. They all have a massive bias in their worldview in general. Even now in the journalism landscape, if you look at the gender divide; yes, there might be more women than men, at least in Western countries. But then if you look at the higher-ups, they're still all white men. And these are still the people who decide what goes and what doesn't go. If you want truly objective media, you would have to make it almost democratic in a way where the newsroom represents every single part of society. Because without having journalists who have diverse backgrounds, you're not going to get many different perspectives.
How do you envision that in practice?
The best I think we can do as individual reporters is to just be open and transparent about our biases. I think if you want to know how your news is biased, you need to know who brought it to you. What's the company, who wrote the article, who wants you to see this and for what reason? Which doesn't really happen in mainstream journalism. How can you know someone is biased without knowing who they are? I think being more personal in journalism would work, because people enjoy having this parasocial connection with the person who brings them the news. And at the same time, it's more transparent because you know who you're listening to.
How would that kind of transparency affect the trust in the media?
People are trusting the news less, and I don’t think that will be solved by continuing what the media has been doing. I think a lot of people now prefer getting their news from social media and I think the best we can do is instead of being worried about them not getting objective news, worry about the misinformation that is being spread. I think that’s a bigger issue than a lack of objectivity.
How do you think the media contributes to the spread of misinformation?
It’s really tiring to see journalists just parrot what their sources say without scrutinising it. Which sometimes just comes down to a lack of resources or a lack of time. But still, that’s not journalism. There’s a famous quote by Jonathan Foster, which says: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.” And I think that part of being transparent about your bias, is not to give up on being critical.
“If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”
In what ways can journalists be more critical?
I think something that is lacking in the media is journalists scrutinising each other. We should be holding other media to account as well. For example, journalists have actually been coming together to speak out against the pro-Israel bias in Western media. But it often takes months or even years for people to come forward and dare to say that. I also think that because the biases coming from mainstream Western media are all so similar, coming from an often white, male, outsider perspective, people are embracing alternative media more.
“I think something that is lacking in the media is journalists scrutinising each other. We should be holding other media to account as well.”
You are very open about your political views on your social media, especially in criticizing this pro-Israel bias. How has that affected how people view you as a journalist?
Actually, a lot of people have told me that I’m their only news source. And then I think like, what? No! I shouldn’t be. What’s an issue is that people often don’t distinguish my work as a journalist from me also being a human being. It’s interesting because apparently people do see journalists as a certain authority who shouldn’t behave like normal people. And on my social media, people are seeing a journalist with very loud opinions. And I do get why people are critical of that. At the same time, I think you can write the news as a journalist, and you can also comment on it as an individual with opinions and a following. I don’t think we should necessarily be seen as this unaffected authority, but as people who are part of society as well, whose role is to inform. In that case, I would rather be someone who is transparent about their background and beliefs, than someone pretending to be objective, while knowing that my worldview is still going to seep through in my work anyways.
How do you aim to achieve that?
Personally, I’m quite radical in the sense that I think if you have something so big, and hegemonic, and imperial and powerful like Western mainstream media, you need radical opposition. I don't think we're going to defeat the far right, for example, by having centrists oppose them because you're going to need a stark opposition to actually win. So I think by calling out mass media and doing the radical opposite, at least I'm providing a counter-narrative. I don't really think being neutral or objective is going to get us anywhere, if there are so many powerful voices who will push their narratives onto people who are completely clueless about the objectives and political economy of media. I think we have to be radical in our criticism and in our scrutinising. And I think as a journalist, if you're being critical, you have to be critical of everything – especially ourselves.