Living in Portland this past year means I lived around a year of protests that were commonly declared unlawful assemblies and riots by the police. A bevy of journalists followed the action, sometimes outnumbering protesters. And more interesting, the term “activist journalist” was used by Oregon Public Broadcasting describing journalists in favor of police abolition. But to my ears OPB was also plainly in favor of equal rights, so what is activism really?
The easy answer, of course, is the image of a group of picketing protesters, and there’s even an article that presents that old image, but let’s return to Portland journalists during George Floyd police brutality protests; is it activism to speak positively of the movement for equality? It’s surely propaganda of a kind failing to report on any destruction or violence committed by those who say they’re working for equality, but again, what is an activist? Isn’t activism the promotion of a policy? Was OPB acting in the role of an activist journalist if they created a positive impression of any person’s work for equality?
Is it the work of an activist for a paper to select a public interest story instead of juicy celebrity gossip? The public interest story will almost certainly generate less income, so isn’t that the work of an activist? I’ll cut to my core question, to the big picture here, are values (in the economy) compatible with capitalism?