In today’s digest is a Q&A about a new book, A Second Sight, which narrates U.S. history through Black journalists' and storytellers’ lens. As we near the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence under a presidential administration threatening equal rights policies, voting rights access, and freedom of the press, author Sarah J. Jackson argues it’s imperative to learn from Black media-makers, who “have been continuously narrating and contesting the meaning of American democracy.”

An abbreviated version of our media links is on our Instagram each week, focusing on what a handful of those stories say about how power and identity impact journalism. (Previous week’s here.)

—James Salanga

Sarah J. Jackson, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center, sat down with The Objective to talk about how Black journalists and media-makers have both reckoned with the structurally racist gaps in mainstream narratives about the U.S. while reimagining a truly inclusive democracy.

The Objective: How have your perceptions around justice for Black media-makers and a robust Black media-maker ecosystem changed as you worked on this book?

Jackson: One of the things that really became important as I worked on this book was second sight and the way that it’s incorporated into media stories is doing … two really important things.

It’s critiquing — it’s pointing out the gap between the ideals the nation claims to describe to the norms the media institutions claim to value and what actually exists. But it’s also creating a map and a guide, and imagining what it could look like if the country did ascribe to those ideals, if institutions did represent everyone in how they report and how they tell stories. …

My argument in the book isn’t a racial essentialism. It’s not saying, “Oh, all Black people tell similar stories” or “All Black people are part of this collective project,” but that second sight is a collective project. Black media-making has been this intergenerational collective project.

… I tried in the book to do this [recording] with nuance, to point out that there are ideological disagreements and differences among Black media makers — even the Black press, which historically had a shared project of Black freedom, of Black civil rights.

Read the full Q&A.

🍽 The Columbia Journalism Review dug into into the history of “invitation-only” press dinners, and how these casual, insider-relationships altered literal front-page news.

📉 The BBC plans to cut 2,000 jobs. Some of these cuts are being made before the end of the financial year, and the rest will happen before the close of the 2027-2028 fiscal year. These cuts are expected to affect 1 in 10 BBC employees in a bid to reduce costs.

🖥️ In favor of a new framework on covering generative AI development: For Truthout, writer Andy Lee Roth makes the case that when corporate media covers LLMs and generative AI development as a race between rivals, it “buries questions about how new technologies are likely to impact the general public.”

🤬 FOLLOW-UP: “They bypassed their own basic journalistic standards.” Veteran columnist and journalist Karen Attiah gives an update on her arbitration case against the Washington Post following her dismissal in November after her posts about the racist double standards around Charlie Kirk’s death and U.S. gun violence. (We spoke with Attiah last year about objectivity, Black representation at the Post, and “democracy dies in darkness.”)

🥊 FOLLOW-UP: Seeing Paramount bias. Trump hosted a UFC fight on the White House lawn, broadcasted exclusively on Paramount+, which is vying for his favor of its $111 billion merger agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery — meanwhile, Paramount Skydance refused to air an ad criticizing the merger.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This issue is by James Salanga and Marlee Baldridge. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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