Lewis Wallace reported for Marketplace for several years before being fired in January for his blog post on Medium.com, “Objectivity is dead and I’m okay with it.” In it, Wallace, who is transgender, discussed the difficulty of trying to keep his own opinions out of stories that had personal resonance. Marketplace‘s response was that Wallace’s blog post had violated its code of ethics and that its journalists’ mission is to “be honest, impartial, nonpartisan and independent in their work.” Wallace tells Robert Scheer that when it comes to transgender issues in the news, he cannot be objective nor does he believe he should be. He believes that real diversity in newsrooms, not token-ism, is essential so that populations that have been marginalized have a chance to be represented. And they discuss the idea that determining what is the “center” in news coverage is not a simple process.
Credits
Guest:
Lewis Wallace – writer, editor and multimedia journalist – @lewispants
Host:
Robert Scheer
Producers:
Joshua Scheer, Rebecca Mooney