Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery is a journalist and Black Lives Matter activist. He gained prominence during the 2014 Ferguson riots in Ferguson, Missouri.

Bio

From the ACLU:

"Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice. He is the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an innovative “training hospital” journalism non-profit based at American University in Washington, D.C. that trains a rising generation of journalists by partnering them with professional newsrooms to work on projects that fill crucial gaps in media coverage. He is also a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project.

His began his career covering politics but in 2014 was sent to Ferguson, Mo., to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years that followed, he would chronicle the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing a bestselling book and launching Fatal Force — a real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police. That database — which remains the most reliable public data on police shootings — won the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, and the Peabody Award and was named one of the decade’s top 10 works of journalism.

'News Literacy Project' Connection

News Literacy Project Training Features Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery was featured at a training for the News Literacy Project, a partisan organization that claims to be "the nation’s leading provider of news literacy education".

Excerpt from RAIR Foundation in February, 2022 (including commentary):

“Top journalists and digital media experts anchor the platform’s interactive lessons,” according to the Checkology website, which features Wesley Lowery.,

Lowery is vastly known for his highly partisan coverage during the 2014 Ferguson riots, where he was arrested for “interfering with a police officer’s duties” as he “failed to comply with ‘repeated commands to immediately exit’ a McDonald’s”.

Lowery wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in 2020 decrying “neutral objectivity” which is a tool of “whiteness”. Ironically, the company behind the News Literacy Project, the E.W. Scripps Company, brags on their website that they “are one of the nation’s largest local TV broadcasters, serving communities with quality, objective local journalism.”

So which is it? Are they objective or not? Why feature Wesley Lowery if they strive for objective journalism? “Since American journalism’s pivot many decades ago from an openly partisan press to a model of professed objectivity,” Lowery argues in a 2020 New York Times OpEd, “the mainstream has allowed what it considers objective truth to be decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses.”

Instead, Lowery says one should use “moral clarity” in reporting. He gives an example:

"Neutral objectivity trips over itself to find ways to avoid telling the truth. Neutral objectivity insists we use clunky euphemisms like ‘officer-involved shooting.’ Moral clarity, and a faithful adherence to grammar and syntax, would demand we use words that most precisely mean the thing we’re trying to communicate: ‘the police shot someone.’"