In response to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announcing on Tuesday that she will grant one-on-one interviews only to black and brown journalists, media outlets should refuse to interview her until she changes her racist policy.
Gregory Pratt, a Latino reporter for the Chicago Tribune, tweeted that he “asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them.”
Media outlets should follow the Chicago Tribune’s lead and not interview Lightfoot. It is a basic democratic truth that elected officials cannot choose who covers them. It is wrong when Republicans, such as former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, restrict press access, and it is wrong when Democratic politicians, including Lightfoot, do the same. There’s a framework of prior experience to guide how the Chicago media community could act. In 2009, all the major news networks refused to interview an Obama administration official unless Fox News was included. The administration relented.
Even the National Association of Black Journalists stated that Lightfoot’s interview policy is wrong: “While the mayor has every right to decide how her press efforts will be handled on her anniversary, we must state again, for the record, that NABJ’s history of advocacy does not support excluding any bona fide journalists from one-on-one interviews with newsmakers, even if it is for one day and in support of activism. We have members from all races and backgrounds and diversity, equity and inclusion must be universal.”
Racism cannot be fought with racism. Diversity means including people from all backgrounds, not fulfilling quotas. It is not the job of elected officials to dictate to newsrooms who they should employ. Journalists should be judged not by their race, but rather by the quality of their work.
Until Lightfoot reverses course, news outlets should boycott one-on-one interviews and press conferences with the mayor. To tolerate her policy would be to aid and abet racism.
Jackson Richman is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him @jacksonrichman.
