With the assault of executive orders, news headlines and shock culture, it can be hard to discern where to focus our attention and who to trust when it comes to accurate information. The media and administration’s deliberate indoctrination is meant to keep our community ignorant and unable to advocate for ourselves; to fight back against a world built to be hostile towards us.
To combat this, Nay sat down with LA-based journalist Cerise Castle to talk unbiased news and how to consume it in difficult times, especially considering the way marginalized communities are written about and how policing of those communities aren’t. Spoiler alert: it’s anger. Stay mad, y’all.
“Honestly, like anger is a really good motivator for me, outrage can be a really, a really powerful tool.”
More gems from Castle? Question everything. Most of the time with news, we’re missing the larger context, history and the broader knowledge of the topic outside of a simple update because it's designed to upset you and keep you pissed off, to bait you into reading or clicking. The solution? Keep searching, listening and following the voices that are aligned with your own mission — like Castle’s, a trusted source of the podcast who does the work and takes the time to dig deeper and report on communities and important issues with compassion.
“I really care about what I’m writing and telling people’s stories the right way.”
As queers, it can feel like there’s nothing off limits when others talk about us — our bodies, our sexuality, our preferences, our right to exist. So, it’s no surprise that outside of being exploited, sensationalized and used for click bait, that when we have to sift through news coverage to find the necessary resources and facts to keep us informed, we have to debate with context vs. shocking headlines created for clicks, period.
A lot of this context is really just, missing in how American news is covered and that context is so important. I don't think you can really tell the story without talking about how we got here in the first place… what we're seeing is just like update, update, update, without anything really being able to stitch it together and make sense of it.
When we look back over the last two months, it’s clear that the purpose was fear mongering. The administration’s agenda of hate relies on click bait as a systemic tool of oppression. What is missing is journalism representative of the communities they are covering, and facts that are clean from the bias of an industry that benefits from clicks, views and the suffering of queer people — all people for that matter.
Even in journalism school, one of the principal rules is “if it bleeds it leads.” There’s always an advantage given to stories that feature suffering, so it’s no coincidence that these are the stories we hear the most when it comes to our community. It’s wild that we have to read and sift through so many different sources to get to even a kernel of the truth because so much of media is controlled by money and politics, bending to the investments of the networks, news outlets and companies — not toward the goal of resourcing the community.
TL;DR: stories do not get air time unless you can promise clicks and marginalized communities suffer the most from this system. Castle talked about how her stories about Deputy Gangs got rejected numerous times because several publications claimed that no one would read it (i.e. pay for it).
“ This is a story happening in neighborhoods where we don't have subscribers, people paying for our product, so it's not worth us to make the investment in that story because we're just not getting money from those communities. That’s not how we should be doing the news.”
Our biggest takeaway from Castle and a truth we also live by?
“Everyone is valuable. Everyone's story is important. It's not something that's determined by how much money they're giving me or my newsroom.”
We’re so grateful that Castle took the time to sit down and talk news with us. Follow her writing in outlets everywhere and soon to a bookstore near you!
Cerise Castle is a Los Angeles-based journalist specializing in arts & culture, civil rights, criminal justice, and human interest stories. She wrote the first history of deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and her reporting and commentary have been featured in ABC, Autre(oah tuh), Capital & Main, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times, The LAnd, Los Angeles Magazine, MTV, NPR, Salon and Vanity Fair. Follow Cerise at @yourmajestcee
♥︎ TiG Team
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