An Interview with Wesley Lowery

With time, journalism practices and ways of covering various stories continue to change. Throughout this, Wesley Lowery has gained the recognition of an important journalist who seeks to challenge some older narratives within the field. The Pulitzer prize-winning New Jersey native has gained notoriety for his frequent efforts to challenge journalism ethics and objectivity.

Lowery, 32, studied at the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism, at Ohio University, where he was the editor-in-chief for the school’s student-led publication, The Post. His professional career continued at The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and most recently 60 minutes at CBS. He has also written freelance pieces and authored a book titled They Can’t Kill Us All.

He made his name covering the earlier days of the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly at the Ferguson protests. Similarly, he put The Washington Post at the forefront of Black Lives Matter coverage with his Fatal Force Project, a database focused on tracking police shootings in the United States.

Constantly writing, hosting university lectures, tweeting, broadcasting and more, Lowery’s determination to use his platform and leave a positive footprint in the journalism field is evident. His determination to tell stories across platforms is remarkable, especially taking into consideration that he is often referred to as a younger reporter.

With a mission to amplify voices and issues unheard, his dedication to finding not one, not two, but every side of a story is exemplary. Lowery recently spoke about his experience in journalism during an hour-long interview over Zoom

The interview that follows has been edited and shortened for clarity.

Question: How did you get into journalism?

LOWERY: I got really lucky that I was able to find something that I enjoyed and was good at very early on. I got hooked in eighth grade, working at the middle school newspaper and then spent time at my high school newspaper and [Ohio University] newspaper. The thing that was so addicting to me was that there was power in giving people information. Handing someone the newspaper and watching them receive information about our school, which is our society, our community, that they didn't have before. Then, they were now in power to do something about it. Talk to their counselor, talk to the principals, talk to their friends. There's something very addicting about that. I think the second thing was that there is something so fascinating, so intriguing about the idea that I could spend my day all day everyday calling people who were smarter than me and asking them questions. It felt like cheating. It felt like there was something

I had found, . Some cheat code for the system just seemed like a really interesting way to live life.

Question: What have been some of your most challenging moments as a journalist?

LOWERY: I've covered a lot of stories that involve a lot of human pain and difficulty, and I think the most challenging moments are always where stories of trauma intersect and interact with our partisan political news cycle. Where you take stories that are very human and you strip the humanity out of them and they become political quarrels. To cover pain, you have to come in close proximity to that trauma yourself. There's [also] any number of ethical and moral dilemmas about how to best cover people who are really hurting, and how to do that in a non exploitative, not extracting way. Once something becomes a political football, you become a target in this kind of political game, and that can become difficult. You're already working on something that's hard. You're already in close proximity to be traumatized and now you're coming under personal attack by partisan operatives. That can be really hard and really exhausting. So when I think about some of the more difficult stories I've covered, a lot of them have to do with that.

Question: Tell me about your take on objective journalism, and if you believe having a personal stake in a piece or issue can be a powerful tool as a journalist.

LOWERY: Well, I think every journalist has a personal stake in every issue, and I think the mistake we make is pretending that that's not true. That as a man, I have a personal stake in gender issues. As a white person, white people have a stake in all types of issues of race, right? What the problem is, what we do is we pretend that the so-called dominant majority group doesn't have a stake. They are the objective neutral and everyone else is the one who has a stake in it, right?

And so I think that the biggest step to doing journalism that is fair and encapsulates the complexity and nuance of the world we live in, is to be aware of our own biases that we're bringing into our reporting so that we can correct for them and can report against them. We cannot do that in the world or we are just running around insisting that we possess no biases.

I think that that is the biggest and most difficult thing facing all of us. I think beyond that, when we look at the concept of journalistic objectivity, it was never about personal objectivity. The entire purpose behind what [author Walter] Lipman wrote when he created this idea was that the individual journalists cannot be objective. Yet now we see things like objectivity being used as a catchall term to include things like both sidesism or balance, which is not what objectivity means in the first place.

The point of the system of objectivity is to understand that people have personal biases. What we've seen is this term has been used as a catch-all and as a blunt object to try to control working journalists and the work that they're doing. I think you see example after example of times where the concept of objectivity is wielded to reinforce a white status quo within our industry.

Question: What has been your most rewarding reporting project?

LOWERY: I did a reporting project in 2018 called Murder with Impunity, which is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. That project looks at the places in major American cities where homicides are never solved. I was looking at the relationship between law enforcement and the community, and we often talk about those relationships breaking down because of the presence of bad behavior, because the police kill someone because of stop and frisk. But we talk a little bit less about the idea that a relationship can also break down because of the failure to meet expectations. When you look at so many communities around the country, these are some of the most victimized communities in the country, and if they never receive justice when they're the victims of crime. So we did this project that was looking at the extent to which the failure to solve major crimes in black and brown communities, how does that undermine the trust in police? It was really revelatory reporting.

Question: Do you have any unexpected advice?

LOWERY: This is a craft. This is a trade. It's something that we gain by doing it. I'm someone who learns by doing. And so I think that the biggest thing that I always say to students and other groups is that if this is what you want to do, you gotta start doing it. You should be writing every day, you should be interviewing someone every week, right? Because the more you do it, the better you get at it. And so I think there's a lot to be said for that.