Untangling reparative journalism: Iterations of the ‘harmful’ press

Following a wave of racial reckoning that set in after the global protests of the Black Lives Matter Movement, news organisations responded through a series of unambiguous public apologies, newsroom diversity policies, and even the payment of reparations. Attendant public and metajournalistic discourses have described these developments as operationalising ‘reparative journalism’, a reform agenda whose goal is to dismantle journalistic power structures that have promoted or enabled historical injustices in relation to colonisation, indigeneity, gender or race. While reparative journalism holds the promise of reconfiguring contemporary press accountability, there is a risk that its conceptualisation may conjure up a reductive view of the harms of journalism. This article ventilates on the reparative turn in journalism by exploring the intersections between journalistic harms/historical injustices, accountability and repair. The paper delineates ways to describe the press when implicated in harm in the age of reckoning.