Why Use Journalism for Justice?

When you don't see yourself in media, it shouldn't come as a surprise if you find a drive by making yourself part of representation.

It's the same in journalism. It's the same in the legal system. It's the same in TV shows and movies. Everyone wants to be represented or simply understood in media or in the career they want to be in. 

TV and movies have moved into creating more visual representation and using minority actors, like Native Americans or darker-skinned Mexicans. However, journalism stays following the big story at the risk of maintaining the media outlet or the specialization of journalism, legally and financially.

One such risk was the famed Weinstein exposé. 

Between the 1990s and 2015, victims of a then-major Hollywood executive, Harvey Weinstein, were not heard. Allegations of sexual misconduct, abuse and harassment, and rape kept popping up. Weinstein and his team kept buying their silence.

It took one journalist to give these women their voices back, regardless if they went public or never spoke about the events. In 2016, Ronan Farrow (left), then at NBC, began his investigation into Weinstein, unknowingly being followed by men hired by a private Israeli intelligence company called Black Cube. 

NBC claims to have never had the need to run Farrow's Weinstein expose because Farrow hadn't had enough sources to publish the story. Farrow claims that NBC actually kept killing his story before he could get any new sources.

Farrow and coworkers working on the investigation quickly grew frustrated at the story being caught and killed before editing. It wasn't long before Farrow left NBC for The New Yorker in 2017.

The New Yorker published Farrow's investigation within the same year under the name From Aggressive Overtures To Sexual Assault, Harvey Weinstein's Accusers Tell Their Stories.

A second exposé quickly followed from The New York Times writing that Weinstein paid off his accusers.

Et voila. 

Weinstein was charged in May 2018 in New York with rape and a number of other charges. He was convicted in February 2020 for the criminal sex act of forcibly performing oral sex and rape in the third degree. He's been sentenced to 23 years in prison in the state of New York.

Had Farrow not called out Weinstein through the power of the press, the numerous women with allegations may have never seen some form of justice.

I want to give people their voices back. I was one of those little kids that never truly saw herself in the media or being reported on with a positive light as so many white people had while I grew up to today. 

On the right, a graph shows that even in 2022, white representation overcame all other minorities at over 50% of media. A majority of minorities, including my own, don't break double digit percentages.

I may not look like it, but I am of Mexican decent. I never saw a Mexican on the shows and movies I watched as a kid.

In 2018, Trump exclusively called the immigrants of Latin-American decent at the southern U.S border "rapists and drug dealers" and generalized them as all "Mexicans." That's no truth.

I chose journalism to publish the truth, which seems to be fading behind gossip and entertainment media. I want to publish the actual truth about people as individuals and to erase often-harmful generalizations of minorities.

Justice can be achieved by journalism. It just needs to be used appropriately, ethically, and morally.