Personal Touch Boutique owner, Derrick Maxwell, credits his customers and his community in East St. Louis for making his business what it is today. Maxwell began selling items from a car and now 30 years later his business has matured and prospered. Maxwell's story was one of those Belleville News-Democrat reporter DeAsia Paige wrote as a journalist in the Report For America program. (Belleville News Democrat photo by Derik Holtmann)

SIU professor, young reporters weigh in on handling distrust in media

By CHRISTOPHER HEIMERMAN
For Illinois Press Association

DeKALB — Hundreds, if not thousands, of DeKalb residents were about to be evicted from their homes when the state’s extension of the eviction moratorium was set to expire. The local homeless shelter was getting about 30 calls a day, according to Juanpablo Ramirez, a Report for America corps member who covers social justice for DeKalb’s NPR affiliate, WNIJ.

“And that’s just those who are calling,” he said.

The local tenants’ association had been protesting for weeks.

Yet local media couldn't get its members to do an interview on the record.

“I can sympathize,” Ramirez said. “There is a fractured relationship between the media and whom the media covers. We’re trying to improve coverage with the communities that haven’t been covered and don’t trust us.”

That’s a common steep-hill climb for RFA reporters. The agency works with its newsroom partners to put the corps members on beats that are underserved. By and large, that means communities that have been oppressed and misrepresented.

“I understand why there’s distrust there,” said DeAsia Paige, a 21-year-old RFA reporter who covers poverty-stricken East St. Louis for the Belleville News-Democrat.

She and the BND’s editor and general manager, Jeffry Couch, both said the lion’s share of the community’s coverage has related to crime, violence, and prep sports.

“When they don’t want to talk to the media, it’s pretty valid,” she said. “If you’re used to being misrepresented, you obviously wouldn’t want to talk to anybody in the field.”

So the $64,000 question becomes how to break through distrust that’s been ingrained for generations?

“It’s a very good question. African-Americans don’t feel as though the traditional media is telling their story correctly,” said William Freivogel (left), who’s covered the greater St. Louis for half a century, with most of those years primarily dedicated to civil rights issues.

Compounding that is the fact activists feel they can tell their story not just more accurately, but faster, Freivogel said. They have boots, and cellphones, on the ground in a way they never did before. For instance, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson on Aug. 9, 2014, a Saturday.

“Cable news didn’t cover the story until Monday, after there were millions of tweets by activists,” Freivogel said. “They were able to get their story to the world above the heads of traditional media. There’s a feeling in Black community that it’s their story, and that they should be the ones to tell it. Or Black journalists should be telling their story.”

The roots of distrust with the media are so deep that even Paige, who is Black, will struggle, Freivogel said. But he has advice for her or any journalist covering misrepresented communities.

First and foremost, honesty is the best policy. Simple as the concept is, reporting accurately is paramount.

“You need to be seen as an honest broker of facts,” Freivogel said. “You need to be trustworthy, and be as close to the truth and the facts as you can be.”

More specifically, how do we do that? Freivogel has some tips.

Get out there

Pandemic be damned, reporters can’t cover a marginalized community from the office, or over the phone.

Freivogel has been the director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University since 2006, after spending about 35 years at the St. Louis Dispatch, including nearly 10 years as deputy editor of its editorial board. But he began, as most all of us did, as a green reporter.

He learned his greatest lessons in the field.

“Get out and talk to the community — all parts of the community,” Freivogel said. “You need to get out to community events — and not just community events where a Black person was shot by a cop.”

Paige has made massive in-roads by pounding the pavement. She shared the story of a 9-year-old Black girl who’s brought the community together with a socially distanced lemonade stand, and outdoor movie nights. She also did a lengthy, thought-provoking piece on Black-owned businesses and their owners’ bond with the community.

Ask them

Rather than operating under the pretense that we know what needs covering, Freivogel said we need to ask people in the community what the media should be covering.

“It’s so simple when you think about it,” he said. “They know what’s going on in their community. Nobody knows that better than the people living there.”

Paige has had success soliciting story ideas via social media, but she understands that, most often, the fastest way to tell someone’s story is asking for permission in person, face-to-face.

“I’m doing my best to get out there,” Paige said. “It’s about starting with an honest, casual conversation.”

Don’t tip your hand

Freivogel said, to Paige’s point, approaching a potential source casually and having a candid conversation often lays the foundation for comprehensive, compelling reporting.

But whereas Paige can tuck her reporter notebook in her back pocket, Ramirez’s equipment is impossible to conceal.

“You come in with giant headphones and a giant machine hanging around your neck, and a huge microphone you’re going to put into somebody’s face,” he said, laughing. “In that way, you’re literally trying to get as close to somebody’s face as possible.”

So he goes into the field with the mindset that he won’t be coming away with a story that day. Not a produced, airwaves-ready one, at least.

“We have to be there when things are happening, and it might just mean you have to show up without a microphone and know you’re not leaving with a story,” he said.

He credits his editors at WNIJ with understanding that the most compelling stories are built on relationships that take time to grow.

“I’m really lucky to have landed in an ideal newsroom,” he said. “It gives me peace of mind knowing that I have time.

He grew up in Rockford, so the stories are downright personal.

“I just have to keep kicking until we break through,” he said.

Be patient

It took Freivogel years as a burgeoning reporter to engender trust with Percy Green, an activist who in 1964 climbed the St. Louis arch to protest for African-Americans — primarily for equality in the workforce. Green is also a founder of the Action Council to Improve Opportunities for Negroes. ACTION has orchestrated countless demonstrations and protests, including the unmasking of the Veiled Prophet in 1972. The all-white Veiled Prophet Organization held its annual ball each December, and some activists found the veil worn by the VP — in 1972, it was the CEO of Monsanto — eerily reminiscent of the Klu Klux Klan.

“I know that Percy Green was very skeptical of me as a member of the media,” Freivogel said. “I think it took 50 years for me to develop a real relationship of trust with him. He saw me as being associated with the man — the Post-Dispatch. I love the P-D, but it did an awful job of covering civil rights. I needed to show him I was different.”

Most recently Green contributed articles on both of the above demonstrations, to “The 1857 Project”, an edition of the quarterly magazine put out by Gateway Journalism Review — over which Freivogel presides.

Freivogel conceded that RFA corps members, whose one-year contract goes through May 2021, are on the clock.

“How do you develop trust in a year?” he said. “It’s very hard to do that.”

Don’t be written off

Freivogel said the trapping of being an empathetic reporter is listening when someone tells you that you’re not the one to tell their story.

“I understand where distrust comes from, and the feeling that Black people should be telling the stories of the Black community, but civil rights has always been very important to me, and it’s actually all of our story,” he said. “It’s something we all need to work at to get past where this nation was, and where it continues to be, for that matter.”

He rattled off a number of his colleagues at the Post-Dispatch who weren’t necessarily champions of civil rights, but who experienced an awakening during the nation’s reckonings and emerged as pre-eminent voices telling stories of the need for change.

“I would encourage white reporters to be really sensitive,” Freivogel said. “But at the same time, there will always be a role for us here.”

He concedes that coverage that engenders trust, even serves as an agent of change, is hard work.

“For any reporter, developing trust and understanding people whose backgrounds are different from your own, that’s a very tough job for a reporter. It always has been, and it always will be.”

Personal Touch Boutique owner, Derrick Maxwell, credits his customers and his community in East St. Louis for making his business what it is today. Maxwell began selling items from a car and now 30 years later his business has matured and prospered. Maxwell's story was one of those Belleville News-Democrat reporter DeAsia Paige wrote as a journalist in the Report For America program. (Belleville News Democrat photo by Derik Holtmann)