Happy Sunday, Reader,

I skipped last week's newsletter because of other deadlines and the launch of the Leading for Transformation course. We kicked off with an incredibly interesting cohort of editorial leaders from around the world (Romania, Malaysia, India, France, Uganda, and Turkey). Guest speakers Aphrodite Salas and Darshini Kandasamy set the tone in the first two sessions. More editions coming, watch this space!
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And if you're in the Netherlands, the Solutions Journalism Retreat is back. A weekend in nature for media, content, and communication professionals who want to have mental clarity and literal breathing room. You'll return to work with fresh ideas!

When a journalist becomes an activist

When should a journalist stop being a journalist? It is one of the oldest tensions in the profession. A current Dutch case is worth analyzing for new insights to this old conversation.

Joris Luyendijk is a former Middle East correspondent, author of Swimming with Sharks (about the London banking culture), and one of the Netherlands' most recognisable public intellectuals. He's the kind of journalist whose work shaped how a generation of Dutch readers understood the Middle East (in the early 2000s) and the 2008 financial crisis. He now reaches headlines because he handed in his press card, and doesn't want to be a journalist anymore.
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His decision came after he traveled to Ukraine, where he fundraised for generators and drone detectors, instead of writing a story. He concluded that journalism and activism cannot coexist. A journalist, he argues, must always be able to return to their own interpretations, and actively question their own hypotheses to present information as neutrally as possible. Since he now puts his own money and time into supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, that neutrality is gone.

Luyendijk's decision is totally understandable. Donating money to one side of a conflict is a genuine line in journalism ethics. But the way he frames his departure from the profession is worrying. He repeatedly mentions that Europe is in "wartime," as opposed to "peacetime," and that in times of war, doing journalism isn't sufficient. You have to take action.

That is a tricky message, especially when press freedom is already under pressure across Europe and the value of independent journalism is being questioned from multiple directions at once. It is based on a definition of journalism that is being discussed widely and is kind of outdated. Methods such as solutions journalism, but also the decolonial approach to journalism, have been challenging how journalism has developed for decades. It challenges the assumption that neutrality or objectivity is something a journalist can possess, protect, and then lose.

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(You can watch it with subtitles in English)

The myth of neutrality

Positionality is key in decolonial thinking. Every journalist brings a perspective, a background, and a set of unexamined assumptions and blind spots about what story is urgent and whose suffering should be in the headlines.

The video embedded above shows Luyendijk being interviewed in Amsterdam's leading debate centre. Luyendijk draws a clear line in the conversation: the war in Ukraine is an existential threat to European democracy, because it's close (literally bordering the continent) and therefore urgent.

He also mentions Gaza and the Palestinian cause, and how he sees people around him who are in solidarity with Palestinians be "in very bad shape" after watching the online imagery for two years. He adds that there is not much someone can do, either.

His point is valid: research on climate communication confirms that constant exposure to images of suffering without any sense of agency is psychologically damaging. But his framing is worth examining for a moment. Isn't the genocide in Gaza and the fact that so many Western countries don't oppose Israel in its actions, a similarly dangerous attack on our democracy, instead of just a mental health burden?

In a world of cyberattacks, authoritarian networks and propaganda that crosses borders, the logic of proximity that we're used to in journalism—it's the measurestick for deciding what to headline and what not—functions less and less. The International Criminal Court is in The Hague. Dutch-made parts fly in Israeli F-35s over Gaza. The distance Luyendijk assumes is a choice more than a fact.

"Late to the party"

When asked whether he isn't "late to the party" regarding his Ukraine activism, Luyendijk answers:

There are two ways to arrive late, though. The first: you show up, bring your resources (money, time), you help and assume that your contribution compensates for the gap while you weren't there. The second: you show up, acknowledge why you are late, ask who knew before you did, and why you didn't listen to them, and build that into your analysis going forward.

The second approach produces better knowledge and long term change. It is also the decolonial approach where questioning your own position is a starting point: Who already knew this? Why didn't I know it then? Whose analysis did we ignore? On whose shoulders are we standing?

In the context of "war time," Luyendijk explicitly acknowledges that Dutch people of colour already know what existential threats feel like. White Dutch people don't, because threats are hardly ever directed at them. His observation makes it almost inevitable to ask: if they already knew, what can we learn from them? But instead of asking that question, he names the group and returns to his audience.

False binary

The activist vs journalist binary that Luyendijk has constructed in his interviews is a false one, and solutions journalism is an example of a method that shows why.

You can be journalistically rigourous and at the same time deeply commited to giving your audience agency. You can be an activist for human rights and democracy, for the survival of the free press, without pretending you have no position. Instead of chosing between neutrality and activism, it's much more about being transparent about where you stand and work from there.

In Dutch newspaper NRC, Luyendijk wrote an opinion piece which ends with this line:

The framing of reflection vs action is exactly the binary that inclusive journalism rejects. Good analysis leads to better action, and people who act without analysis repeat the same mistakes. And when the analysis comes exclusively from one demographic, one geography, and one set of life experiences, the action it produces will consciously or unconsciously reproduce the same blindspots.

The communities and people that have spent generations navigating institutional threat by living between loyalty to a state and scepticism of that same state, have developed precisely the knowledge that Luyendijk is now looking for in Ukraine. How do you live under threat without paralysis? How do you build a community in stressful circumstances? How do you maintain agency when democratic institutions fail you? That knowledge exists and you don't need to travel to Kyiv or Gaza. It is within our own borders, in communities that rarely get invited to the podium.

Luyendijk has written and spoken extensively about his own privilege as a white man and what he failed to see because of it. All the more striking, then, that he doesn't draw on that knowledge in his conversations about leaving journalism.

The end of nuance?

Luyendijk's turn is understandable. Many journalists probably feel useless watching democracies be destroyed while writing nuanced commentary. The impulse to do something, to take action and put skin in the game, is not wrong at all.

But the solution is not to leave journalism but instead deepen it, to bring decolonial thinking into how we frame urgency, whose expertise we centre, which conflicts we headline, and what historical context needs to be added.

A journalism that asks who already knew this, and why didn't we listen? is more honest and it doesn't mean you become an activist. In the long run, putting up a mirror to our profession is also more useful because it prevents journalists from just responding to the crisis in front of us. It builds the capacity and the knowledge to see the next one coming.

Love to hear your opinion about the journalism vs activism debate!

See you next week,

Sanne