“It’s Not Hate but … ”: Marginal Categories in Rural Journalism

ABSTRACT

Journalists who cover rural areas in the United States say they are afraid to report on hate groups, and this fear is exacerbated by close community ties and limited resources among rural journalists. We examine the concept of “hate speech” as a boundary object, analyzing in-depth interviews with U.S. journalists reporting in rural communities (n = 33) to better understand how rural journalists report on hate. We find that rural journalists articulate a clear definition for hate speech but struggle to apply that definition to events within their communities, even as they articulate numerous forms of hate. Journalists often dismissed acts of hate using the residual category of “not hate, but … ” to signal something that they felt was out of place or unsuitable but did not rise to the legal definition of hate speech and thus was not worth reporting on. This approach ends up challenging journalists’ normative commitments to their communities and exemplifies their desire to avoid an objectivity trap.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural journalism
• hate
• journalism
• white supremacy
• bias
• objectivity trap

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Two journalists requested to not share demographics, and given that gender, ethnicity, age are not the primary focus of this study, their interviews were nevertheless included.

2 Worth noting perhaps is that several participants linked these explicitly, offering that they didn't have many issues related to hate and related it to a lack of diversity in their community (e.g. Participants 26, 31 & 32).