This week has only highlighted the importance of language as a tool for power, as the White House aims to exert pressure on newsrooms’ First Amendment rights. For the past few days, it’s banned a reporter from the Oval Office because the Associated Press won’t change its editorial guidance to use “Gulf of America” (though notably, the newsroom did swap Denali to “Mount McKinley” per presidential guidance).

Reporters’ ability to execute a basic function of journalism — covering the goings-on of the most powerful — isn’t just being curtailed by the White House. It’s dampened by the norms of the industry. So co-director Gabe Schneider penned a call to action for journalists: Instead of putting President Donald Trump’s attacks on “DEI” into a both-sides context, call them what they are — a push for resegregation.

In this issue:

And also: The public launch of an initiative focused on new futures for journalism, White House threatens to limit access for newsrooms not using “Gulf of America”, PBS closes its DEI office, and the New York Magazine Union reaches a deal with management. Plus, the resource of the week is another installment of our pro-democracy reporting column, focused on protecting sources targeted by the Trump administration.

—James Salanga

The acronym “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) means many things to many people.

It’s an effort to create more equity and opportunity in a country steeped in racism, homophobia, ableism and other forms of systemic discrimination. It’s the corporate programs that focus on representation to the detriment of actual systemic change. And it’s also the scapegoat President Donald Trump is fixating on in his nascent second presidential term. (To Axios, apparently, it’s “controversial.”)

But reporters at mainstream news outlets are failing to explain what Trump’s targeting of “DEI” means, whether it be assigning blame to DEI for the first U.S. air collision in 16 years to signing executive orders pushing for its demolition. That’s a grievous failing on journalists’ part, writes my co-director Gabe Schneider. Instead, they should be spelling out what’s happening: Resegregation and targeted discrimination against the most marginalized.

Newsrooms’ decision not to clearly state this fact muddles brevity and cowardice with fairness and accuracy.

“When references to disability, gender, or race are removed from government documents and buildings, when the president implies disabled people caused a plane crash without evidence, we end up with a country that’s only built for a certain kind of person,” Gabe writes.

Just yesterday, the National Parks Service erased references to transness from the Stonewall National Memorial website, despite trans people being at the forefront of the uprising that sparked a wider gay and trans rights movement in the U.S. Uncritically stenographing this historical revisionism without contextualizing its impacts undercuts journalists’ responsibility to truth-telling.

Ultimately, Gabe says, there’s more at stake attached to clearer language: “The president and the people working for him aren’t discussing a pithy acronym, but the unmaking of integration. Journalists are ultimately writing about who this country gets to be for: White or multiracial. Able-bodied or disabled. All of us or some of us. The journalists who default to his language and explanation are failing their readers.”

Read Gabe’s full piece on The Objective.

—James Salanga

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As Meta dismantles fact-checking initiatives, generative artificial intelligence proliferates, and X’s algorithm constantly shifts, looking at how journalists might re-evaluate sourcing from social media. Read more.

News Futures, a group focused on reimagining news as an act of care, launches: The group convenes working groups focused on advocating for news as a community asset “that thrives based on the unique needs, assets, and culture of the community it serves.” Eight working groups are seeking members for 2025, though the collective has been working together before its public launch since 2018.

💭 Read more and learn about working groups on the News Futures site.

Trump administration looks to force news outlets to adopt “Gulf of America”: Since Tuesday, the White House has barred an Associated Press reporter from covering Oval Office events since the newsroom’s editorial standard continues to be the name “Gulf of Mexico.” Several major news organizations, including the AP, Reuters, and the New York Times will continue to use Gulf of Mexico, though Gannett said it would use both. Notably, AP changed its guidance per a presidential change last month, switching away from Denali to Mount McKinley.

🌊 Read the story in Nieman Lab.

PBS shutters its DEI office while facing federal investigation: Two staffers in the department were laid off, and the broadcaster says it closed the office to comply with Trump’s executive orders. The Federal Communications Commission is currently investigating PBS, NPR, and their member stations' underwriting, alleging they’re violating guidelines around commercial broadcasting. While NPR has a diversity office, it has not responded to requests for comment about whether it too is closing the office.

📺 Read the story in NPR.

New York Magazine Union reaches deal with management: The union has called off a planned walkout after settling on a tentative three-year deal, which still needs to be ratified. The new deal bans layoffs solely due to AI, “a commitment [from magazine management] to transparency around its editorial use and to protecting members’ editorial voices and likenesses,”  and would implement wage increases retroactive to April 2024. The vote is later this month.

🤝 Read the story in The Hollywood Reporter.

This week’s resource is … El Tímpano’s new source protection guidelines for covering immigrant communities.

If you’ve followed the first two editions of this column (and I hope you have!), you know I think of pro-democracy journalism as a means of civic empowerment. Yes, that means being deliberate about what information we share, but it also means being deliberate about how we go about extracting that information — especially from communities that the Trump administration targets.

So California newsroom El Tímpano, which primarily serves Latino and Mayan immigrants in the Bay Area, issued a new source protection policy last month aimed at minimizing the very real collateral damage that may happen when reporting on marginalized communities.

Case in point: Covering the onslaught of ICE raids.

Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents have arrested 826 people a day on average since Jan. 20, putting them on pace to issue 25,000 arrests within the first 30 days of Trump’s second term. These often indiscriminate raids are separating families, catching military veterans and — ironically — Native American tribal members in the crosshairs.

These raids also stoke a disinformation ecosystem so powerful it’s causing some immigrants to weigh the cost of going to work or sending their kids to school, let alone speaking to a reporter about their circumstances.

One of the policies in El Tímpano’s new guidance requires its reporters to distribute “know your rights” cards from Defined America to inform community members about the consequences of speaking to the press and the boundaries they can set during interviews. It’s one attempt to tighten up the vulnerabilities embedded into newsgathering.

There’s good reason for undocumented immigrants to be afraid to speak to the press: A 2004 CNN documentary led to the arrest of Rosa — an undocumented immigrant who agreed to be interviewed — when the license plate of her boyfriend’s car was visible in the background of a shot. Later, during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, police used news and social media footage to retroactively identify protesters.

And just last spring, journalists covering Palestinian encampments had to contend with how their newsroom policies might make campus protesters more susceptible to doxxing from groups like Canary Mission.

Even if the Trump administration hates journalists, they’re also obsessed with us — at least, using our work to prop up the surveillance state. (Cue that one Mariah Carey song, lol.)

But newsflash, we don’t work for the government. We do, however, work for our communities in at least a roundabout way, which means we have a responsibility to minimize the harm we cause while trying to help them.

To that end, El Tímpano will no longer default to identifying sources by their first and last name, instead opting to use first name and last initial only alongside age and city of residence. If information such as workplace or immigration status is relevant to a story, reporters will limit how much other identifying information they cite.

“We recognize that this approach seems unconventional in the context of the traditional idea that journalism’s credibility is rooted in gathering and sharing as much information as possible,” the new guidelines read. “El Tímpano’s credibility and legitimacy, however, aren’t derived from journalistic standards that are extractive and potentially harmful. Our position as an authoritative source depends on our close connection to our community.”

(To see the rationale behind these guidelines, El Tímpano has an annotated bibliography of the sources they consulted.)

This new regime is yet another call to action for us to consider how our reporting may harm marginalized communities. El Tímpano’s guidelines may not work in every newsroom, but the overarching sentiment of interrogating the ethics of our work is something we can all take with us.

—Beatrice Forman, Democracy Journalism Columnist

For more style guides, journalism job boards, and tip sheets, check out The Objective’s resource list.

Thanks for reading. And happy Valentine’s Day! We appreciate you giving your attention to our media criticism — looking at the thing we care about (journalism, for better or worse) to make it better and to redress its harms. As Sister Sarah Joan says in Lady Bird: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” We run thanks to you, and we’ll have more for you next week.

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