February 2, 2026 • 34 mins
Sharing your story, whether that’s on social media or through the news can be pretty daunting. But putting a spotlight on your community is essential to drawing attention to the causes you care about. So in this episode, Khadijah speaks to journalist Tamara Cherry about how trauma informed reporting can give survivors and advocates the opportunity to tell their stories in an ethical way.
US resources for Violence and Sexual Assault: https://rainn.org/
International resources for Violence and Sexual Assault: https://nomoredirectory.org/
US Suicide & Crisis Helpline: https://988lifeline.org/
International Suicide & Crisis Helplines: https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, it's Kadija.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
In this episode, we're going to explore how to use
the media to take control of your story and draw
attention to the causes that matter the most to you.
But I just wanted to give you a heads up
that in the process of doing that, we'll discuss domestic abuse,
sexual assault, violence, and murder. If you or someone you
(00:25):
love has been affected by any of the themes that
have come up in this episode, we've left some links
in the description that offer resources and support take care
of yourself. In this season of The Girlfriends, we've been
discovering some difficult truths about the city we love. Malicious prosecution, extortion,
(00:48):
sexual violence from police officers. It seems like the whills
really came off in Windot County. But in my opinion,
it's not just law enforcement that failed us, it's the
media too. They failed to report adequately on what was
happening in our community. They failed to be a check
on the police department as it went roll, and a
(01:08):
lot of our media still misrepresents and underrepresents the very
people who need it the most. Throughout my work with
Justice Awandotte, if there's one thing I've learned is that
if you want answers and accountability. If you're trying to
find a missing person or discover why a loved one
was murdered, or if you're a survivor yourself looking for justice,
(01:32):
the media may not always feel like your friend, but
it can work for you and if you really want
your voice to be heard. Understanding how the media works,
whether it's news media, social media, or podcasts like this
one gidding Wise is essential. I'm Kadidra Hardaway for the
(02:04):
teens at novel and iHeart podcasts. This is the Girlfriend's
Untouchable Bonus Episode six, how to Put a Spotlight on
(02:31):
your Story. When Stacy Quinn, RNDA Tribune, and Monique Allen,
among many other women in our County were murdered, there
was little media outrage, certainly not enough to make people
(02:53):
take any real notice or stop crimes like these from
happening again and again. We know that there is a
nationwide problem with black people being underreported as victims, and
black women are murdered at nearly triple the rate of
white women. Black people make up forty percent of the
missing person's population and only get seven percent of the
(03:15):
media coverage. That is less than one fifth of the
coverage they should be getting. I have busted a gut
throughout my life to try and get attention and accountability
for black women, and it hasn't been easy. So how
can you get the media to work for you and
with you to chew over this difficult subject. I'm talking
(03:37):
to Tamara Cherry, a celebrated crime reporter and journalist. She's
the author of The Trauma Beat, a case for rethinking
the business of bad news, which looks at the way
news media handles victims and their trauma, challenging the industry
to re examine the way it does business. I started
(03:57):
out by giving Tamara a little insight into my own
experience of the media. I have a love for journalism.
When I was a little girl, my dad nicknamed me
Katie J because I used to act like I was
the radio station and every aspect of the radio, the
weather man, the disc jockey, the news reporter. I do
(04:19):
have a love for media. When I took on the
advocacy of women in Wyandot County, even though I'm a
black woman and I've sat in spaces of media, feel
like I very much have been put on. It just
didn't feel like that way for us collectively. I found
myself in some very hard spaces losing friends in media
(04:41):
because I just wouldn't back down from the ideal that
exposure of the bad characters needed to happen. But we
do find in the media here a lot of hurdles
when it comes to just being black and female at
the same time, we're both females. Can you tell me
a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Thank you for sharing that first. I've met many people
with similar situations where they're in advocate roles and have
personal histories that are connected to some of their work,
but they've felt that same sting and the way that
stories are reported and the way that things are portrayed
in the news, it's just another nail in the coffin,
(05:22):
like they don't care about us collectively.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So I hear you on that.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
So in terms of my background, I was born and
raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, which is where I am
right now. By going to journalism and I fell in
love with news, and I fell in love with telling
stories that could make people care, and I really wanted
to be able to affect change through the craft of journalism.
(05:49):
I ended up working in television news for a decade
as the crime reporter for this big newscast, and I
was very celebrated for the work that I did.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Well to marijuana accolades for her work. The coaches she
was working in did not serve the goal she was
setting of affecting positive change.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Nobody ever talked about trauma and how to work with
victims and survivors of traumatic events, and how to report
on things in a way that was actually causing good
things to happen instead of bad things to happen. The
community is telling you, like what you're doing is is harmful,
or we don't want you hearing now, or that sort
(06:31):
of thing, but then everything else is signaling that you're
doing the right thing. You're getting nominated for awards. And
I was celebrated when I got that quote unquote scoop
where I got the grieving mother on TV, and even
though it might not have been in her best interest,
my bosses were celebrating me for it. You know, if
(06:52):
there was a homicide in an apartment building, I would
be searching through every phone number listed in that apartment
building looking for witnesses and ran into really unfortunate situations.
It's too soon, they don't have the proper supports in place.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
All that. That's a whole different part of this conversation.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And you know, you say talking about, you know, knocking
on somebody's door in that vulnerable space, did you feel
like the media companies you were working for were exploiting stories.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
There's absolutely exploitation that happens, but I don't think it's
happening consciously for the most part.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Can you tell me a little bit about how you
see media is portrayed when it comes to individuals like myself.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
When we're talking about actual systemic racism that exists. Sometimes
it is blatant, and sometimes it is so like deep
into the bones of media institutions, reporters don't realize it.
In my book, I talk about this case actually throughout
the book where there was a young man who was
murdered in East Saint Louis and his mother, Latasha Stewart,
(08:00):
was screaming from the rooftops to get the media to
pay attention to her son's murder. She had created a
Facebook page, she created like a group, she got herself
on Twitter, and she contacted the Montel Williams Show for
crying out loud like she was doing everything and nobody
was paying attention.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
It was not easy.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
She screamed from the rooftops for so long, but she
got the media coverage. She is incredible and it shouldn't
have had to be that much of a struggle.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
That was wrong.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That was the system working against her, just as it
has worked against people of color for generations.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Pretty Much everything I'm going to ask you is something
that I have experienced and just kind of tying it
together with someone who has experienced this in the media.
Where I found myself is that at some point I
realized this is trauma and their trauma is beginning to
(08:55):
impact me and become trauma on me. When did you
have that moment where you felt like you had that aha,
like this is not what I'm reporting. This is actually
something else and something needs to be done about it.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
My specialty in my crime reporting be was the domestic
sex trafficking of women and girls in Canada. And when
I first was introduced to the term human trafficking, I,
like so many other people, thought, Oh, somebody's been brought
over in a box car from Russia or whatever.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I was reporting on all these international cases. A woman
from Russia who had answered an ad to work as
a model in Canada and has turned out as an escort,
you know. And then I got an email from a
vice investigator who said, why do you come out and
talk to us? They opened my eyes to all the
other human trafficking cases. They are impoverished, quite often, they
(09:46):
come from group homes, quite often, there was sexual abuse
when they were younger.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And it's a lot of them followed the same.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Pattern, but none of them was what I had in
my mind is human trafficking. Some of them are white,
some of them are black, some of them are indigenous,
but marginalized in some way. That's when I started noticing
in the police news releases that would come out a
runaway or somebody who's gone missing.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
She's gone missing.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Before, and as a result, for years I dedicated a
big portion of my career to exposing that and to
writing about these stories that otherwise weren't being written about.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
One thing that became clear to Tamara is that who
you are determines how the media reports your story.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Marginalized people in general are treated differently. How a young
marginalized woman from poverty and has gone missing many times
before might be referred to as somebody who has gone
missing several times before, even though she's a fifteen year
old girl and very vulnerable, and so she's immediately labeled
as well habitual runaway who will just come back, whereas
(10:50):
if a more affluent white girl were to go missing,
there would be more immediate alarm bells. Right, the police
narrative is always the primary, very narrative. The journalists are
not getting proper training on communities, and in general, they're
never given the proper training to understand communities. There is
the systemic racism. I had mentioned the homicide of Gregory
(11:13):
Stewart in East Saint Louis, and what was interesting when
I was working on my book was going back and
into the history of East St. Louis and the segregation
and the role that the media played in that and
in inciting violence, like going back to like the nineteen
thirties and seeing the actual like racist roots that exist
(11:34):
in the media, even though journalists today there might not
realize it.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Something Tamera said that I relate to is that bias
comes from a number of issues. Yes, there are racist
roots to the media, but there are other kinds of
bias that combine to stack the deck. Against us.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
One of the things I talked about in my book
is the fact that the media doesn't report on planes
that land. They see the news as uncommon things that
are happening. So they are much more likely, for example,
to report on a white, affluent person who is murdered
(12:14):
because it doesn't happen statistically as often as a black,
impoverished person who is murdered.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
You just said something unique to me, and that's that
they report on the white victim if he's affluent, rich, right,
But they don't report on the black. What they report
on the black is the criminal. They don't even report
on the victim. Here in Kansas City, Missouri and wyan
Dot County, the media doesn't portray us in a good light.
(12:46):
It doesn't want to tell our feel good stories. We
know that these problems of underreporting and misrepresentation are happening
on a mask. I want to hear more of what
we're doing about it. After the break, we're going to
(13:07):
talk about ways the media can do better. Journalism is
a major two for addressing injustice in our community. But
(13:30):
an issue we face so often is the people reporting
our problems are not us and don't know us. As
of twenty twenty two, Black people made up six percent
of the journalists, which is a lot less than the
fourteen point four percent of the population which black people
make up in the US. Given the history of our community,
it's even more important for those in the media, especially
(13:53):
white journalists, to think carefully about how they report on
us when we're at our most vulnerable. We find that
most journalists want the victim in the rawest form, which
I think puts them in a very vulnerable place.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh, and I've seen it play out with sexual violence
survivors here in Canada, where they go to the media
first they share their story and then I go and
I'm sitting in the trial for the alleged perpetrator. And Oh,
you're saying this now, but you said it differently when
you spoke to this newspaper reporter a year ago. That's
something I advise sexual violence survivers in particular about as well.
(14:29):
When we're talking about journalists, you know that they want
them in the more vulnerable position.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
And I was the same.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
You want that raw emotion, You don't want them reading
from a prepared statement.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
You say, knocking on somebody's door in that vulnerable space.
Did you feel like the media companies you were working
for were exploiting stories for capital gain.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Most news managers who are telling us to go cover
these stories, their intentions are overwhelmingly good. They want this
violence to stop, They want people to care. I don't
think that there's a conscious will to exploit.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
There may not be a conscious will to exploit by
all media organizations and editors, but is often the result
of prioritizing the most shocking stories to sell newspapers and
get more clicks and subscribers.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
You want it raw because it makes for a more
compelling story. What I teach journalists now, though, because I
do a lot of trauma informed storytelling training, is about
the impact that trauma has on the brain and recognizing
that if you bring that survivor into that unsafe zone
activating their trauma responses, then you might not actually be
getting an accurate story. A lot of journalists they're going
(15:41):
into newsrooms that are mostly white, and they don't reflect
the communities that they are reporting on.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Along with the crisis of representation, there's also a crisis
within the press industry. In the age of the Internet,
local reporting and investigating reporting has struggled to find resources
is to do good work. As Tamarra found in one
of her jobs.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
We were so short staffed that I would come into
the office some days and be like, Hey, I've got
a really great scoop on this case. I need time
to work on it. And they'd say that's great, but
you're one of two reporters working today, so we need
you to write half the paper. So you're just going
to rewrite eight press releases instead. So in that way,
I'm regurgitating whatever's coming up from police by and large,
(16:27):
and I don't have the time or the resources to
actually dig into anything because it's just like I got
to get this stuff filed and then get out the door.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Ultimately, we need more black journalists and editors calling the shots,
and I can only hope that as awareness spreads about
the harm done by sensationalizing stories, there would be more
urgency to change things.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
There are journalists out there who are becoming trauma informed,
and when I tell them that actually a lot of
what you're doing is harmful, they're surprised and they ask
me how can I do better? And then I teach them,
or they read my book or they listen to my podcasts,
and then they reach out to me and they say, Tamara,
I've been doing this job for thirty three years and
I just wanted you to know I just did this
(17:11):
interview differently because of what this survivor said was harmful
for her in the past.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
So change is happening, Trauman.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Foreign practice still remains the exception rather than the expectation,
but it is happening. And if you can find that
good journalist or news your manager or advocate who has
those connections, you can actually have an experience with the
media that is healing instead of harmful and can help
you reach your goals.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
I have to be honest, I am still skeptical about
the role the media has played and continues to play
in our communities. The news media is still by and
large a for profit business driven by what sales. But
what Tamara has described seems like a route forward and
maybe calls for optimist I hope Tamara is right that
(18:02):
we are moving to a more compassionate and thoughtful culture
of journalism. After the break, we're going to talk about
survivor empowerment and what advocates and survivors can do to
amplify their voices within the media.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I got you I got you, I got you.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
When it comes to the media and getting your voice
out there, there is a lot stacked up against women,
especially marginalized and black women. We saw what that looked
like for so many of the women of Wyandot County
who got caught up in Galucy's web of abuse and
were ignored. But I know from my own experience the
media can work for us. We'll be talking through some
(18:59):
of those two and two's to help navigate the media
while dealing with trauma. And one of the most traumatic
things we'll deal with is when a loved one goes missing.
Getting the media's attention can be the difference between life
or death. The chances of being found after the first
forty eight hours go down sharply, so every moment counts.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
If you're wanting to utilize the media after a loved
one goes missing, when you go to the media, if
a news release goes out forty eight hours later saying
a runaway quote unquote is gone, your number one mission
is to humanize your missing loved one.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
It's not something that you should have to do.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
But the unfortunate reality is if it's not getting media attention,
it's because they're being treated as just another statistic, another runaway.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
You know, I have dealt with many of people who
said their loved one was missing. What I usually do
is I challenge the individual that is looking for the
miss loved one to let me know what organizations they
belong to. Are they disable, are they a veteran? Descriptions
(20:08):
about them that connect them to other people. If you
can find the people that associate with that individual, you
can find the best help. It has helped rescue at
least five people that I know in my community. Another
situation where you might need to get your voice heard
by the media is if a loved one or a
(20:30):
community member is murdered. And if you're black, newsflash, you're
going to have a harder time getting your story heard.
According to a study by Stanford University, in majority white neighborhoods,
murder victims are around twice as likely to be covered
as a complex and rounded person than those in majority
(20:50):
black neighborhoods. And that goes to a whole new level.
When you're speaking out for young black men, You know
how it goes. They must have been in a game,
So breaking through prejudice takes some hard work.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
So how can you humanize them. I think back to
a campaign that I did about a teenage boy who
was murdered several years ago, and on the surface, this
homicide would have gotten not the most compassionate care from
the media. I had conversations with the family and we
(21:24):
put out this video of him, and it really showed
how young he was. It really tugged at the heartstrings.
And just by putting out that video, we got media
attention that we would not have otherwise gotten, and we
got the story covered because it humanized. It was no
longer just this teenage boy was murdered in this neighborhood.
(21:46):
It was this human being with loved ones who care
about him, who is now missing from our collective lives.
His family is hurting, and this is how you can
help them.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
We like to call that empowerment. Do believe that the
more a person knows, the more experience and influence they
have with their own situation walking through it, the better
they can help the next person. You may find yourself
in a position of being a survivor of a crime,
navigating the media at a terrible experience. So what is
(22:20):
the best way for you to fight for your own justice?
I do believe that there are so many ways to
use the media. One, don't overshare your story, but two,
make sure that when you tell it is powerful, it's impactful,
and you're telling it to the right people who can
help you. Most people don't know how to tell their
story and they think instantly something should happen.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
As a journalist and somebody who has worked with trauma survivors,
my message is, first decide what you are comfortable sharing.
What message do you want to get out there. Think
about the trauma that you endured. Are you actually comfortable
talking about the event, or do you just want to
talk about the impact that event had on you and
(23:04):
your family, your loved ones. Identify as a survivor, but
talk about something else that you're seeing in the news,
because journalists will always try to get to that personal story.
But if you don't know going into that interview very
clearly what you want to talk about, you can end
up going down a very slippery road that can cause
you more harm. You need to have a clear understanding
(23:26):
of what are you comfortable talking about to everybody surrounding
that survivor. That survivor needs to be wrapped in support
when dealing with the media. They should never be doing
it alone, whether it is with a lawyer or an
organization or like a nonprofit or whatever.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
A part of the process of telling your story is
about making compelling, strategic campaigns that punch through the lack
of care and get your story heard. One way to
go about that is to focus on social media campaigning.
It's free and anyone can do it, and if you
have a community behind you, it can really make a splash.
(24:04):
I don't know if you agree with this, but sometimes
when we don't get the coverage, we will share the
story on several social media outlets, tagging those news outlets
with that life that story, comment on that story, or
how viral that story goes. It sometimes get picked up
that way.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Social media can be a very powerful tool. One caution
I would give about social media is it can be
a very dark, awful place full of trolls. There needs
to be somebody there, ideally with some media literacy and
who's trauma informed and is looking out for the best
interest of that survivor.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I tell people there's a big difference between social media
influencers and one that's the credibility that is going to
go behind something that's published from a licensed journalist, as
if an article that said it came from the Washington Post.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
You make that social media campaign with your vertical videos,
but you also produce those videos horizontally for mainstream media
to use, and so you're fighting it from both sides.
I work with a lot of organizations that have very
small social media followings, and so it's like, we create
this whole social media campaign, it's really not going to
be seen by a lot of people because they've only got,
you know, a few dozen followers. But we take that
(25:23):
to mainstream media and they amplify it in that way,
and it also drives followers then to their social media.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Today, social media plays a bigger role than ever in
getting the word out, but traditional media platforms continue to
be important. To build momentum around your story, you need
to be smart and have multiple approaches to campaigning. Oftentimes,
when we think of media, I would say justice for
(25:51):
wine that not necessarily has fared well. We need to
be more impactful, and so how do we do that.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Are not expected to be an expert in the media.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Surround yourself with people who already have that media literacy.
Learn about the media, create those relationships and magic can happen.
Back in November, which in Canada is Domestic Violence Awareness Month,
one of my clients is an organization that provides wrap
around services for victims and survivors of intimate partner violence,
(26:23):
and they wanted to do an entire campaign around strangulation.
So we created a campaign called taking Your Breath Away,
and it was a social media campaign that included something
like eighteen or nineteen videos. Here's a survivor who is
part of the campaign, and she doesn't want to do
media interviews, but here are video clips that we've created
(26:43):
with her protecting her identity, where she shares her story.
Here are these experts from San Diego who are experts
in strangulation that are a part of it. Here's the
executive director of the organization that we created a whole
mainstream media campaign around this, where we had a news
conference and with a campaign law video, we create a
whole media frenzy around this. Whereas if somebody were to
(27:05):
just call a news station and say, why don't you
ever talk about strangulation, Well, that's a lot of work
and I don't have time to do that because I'm
filing for six or I'm doing this, but if I
hand you the story on a platter, then you're golden.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Once you start speaking the experts language, they're going to
want to talk about and dissect it and look at
it from a and in some cases give you strategies
that you would not have thought about before. And we
refer to that as being empowered.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Mm hmm for sure.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Another way to control the message is depending on what
is happening in the news, write and off ed, like
write an opinion piece that you can then submit to
the local newspaper. That is a great way because you
can control that message and it doesn't need to be
tied to specific work you are doing. But it's presenting
yourself as the thought leader because you have done X,
(27:58):
Y and Z, and newspapers love to run a piece
that presents a different point of view to what has
already been reported.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
I've been working with the press for years and despite
the wins we've had, just being heard continues to be hard.
I don't think it would ever be easy. Working with
survivors whose stories are definitely newsworthy, we can struggle to
get the media's attention. That can be for a number
of reasons. Is the victim from the wrong neighborhood, the
(28:30):
wrong race, and the wrong line of work? Are they
too poor? Sometimes I feel like I'm being ignored, not
because of what I am saying, but because my face
just doesn't fit. In the beginning, I felt like the
princess of why and not because everyone wanted to hear
(28:52):
what I had to say and I was tied to
a white organization at that time. When we broke free
of the white organization, then we noticed that they would
put the white organization before our movement.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
If you are working in a market where they're not
going to talk to you because you're black, go to
a different media market where you can talk about this
issue with a local news hook. That was like, Okay,
let's find a news hook in Detroit, for example, where
there is a more friendly reporter perhaps who will do
this story, and then we can bring that story back
to social media and share it locally and say why
(29:28):
isn't the media talking about this here in Kansas?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
There wasn't until we decided that we would not deal
with our media. I would gravitate toward activists outside of
Kansas City who had a media platform who could post
and share the things. And when they did that, that's
when we began to see the New York Times, Washington Posts,
and news outlets that put us on a national platform.
(29:53):
From where I'm standing, no one can stop you. If
you are set on your goal. If you hit but
it feels like a wall, don't give up, find another way.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Find the good reporters, get the good stories done, and
then all the rest of the media will start to
pay attention what you did.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
It was brilliant.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I just want to say thank you again for sharing
with me. It is great speaking with you. Journalism. I
know it's not an easy job. You need it in
a lot of communities, and I appreciate the ideal of
having trauma response reporters. I would love to see trauma
(30:37):
inform journalist here in Kansas City.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Thank you so much for having me. It's been so
wonderful to learn about the work that you're doing, and
I look forward to following your journey.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
That was tomorrow Cherry writer journalists and reformer, look up
her truly amazing book, The Trauma Beat, which is calling
for reform and showing the way to a better media
landscape which would be more victim centered. I got a
lot of hope listening to Tamara, seeing that we can
(31:17):
shape the media narrative and that change is happening in journalism.
There is racism at the heart of many of America's institutions.
The media is no exception, but we have to challenge
it and speak out for our communities. It's possible. I
know because at Justifuydot we have been able to make
(31:39):
a splash. You can make change too. You just have
to find the right partners and use the right tactics.
We need a mass movement to meet this challenge. Let's
do this together.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
Hi, this is Nikki again. Nico Khadija and I have
been on a long, hard journey to fight for the
women of Kansas City, and while this is the final
episode of the series, our story isn't over. We're still
fighting for police reform and doing what we can to
make sure the people most affected by this story feel
(32:28):
seen and heard. And we're not alone. There are thousands
of people across the world fighting to improve the places
they live, doing the often slow but necessary work needed
to hold the authorities to account. But as we've learned,
while the path to progress is long and winding, it's
(32:50):
worth the ride, because if we keep fighting back and
refusing to accept the status quo, we can work together
to create a future where nobody, even people in positions
of authority, can ever get to the point where they
think they're untouchable. Next time, Annisenfield will be back with
(33:10):
another season of The Girlfriend's Spotlight and more untold stories
of women winning. Until then, thanks for listening, and hold
your girlfriends tight.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
The Girlfriend's Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcast.
For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio. This episode
was hosted by me Kadija Hardaway. It was written and
produced by Mohammed Ahmed. The editor is Joe Whiller. The
researcher is Aiyana Yusef. Production management from Sharie Houston and
(33:48):
Joe Savage. The fact checker is Vindo Fulton. Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kimpsen with additional engineering by
Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Refriro Masurura, Nicholas Alexander and
Joe Wheeler. Original music by Amanda Jones. The series artwork
(34:10):
was designed by Christina Limku. Novels Director of Development in
Selena Metta, Willard Foxton is Novels. Creative Director of Development,
Max O'Brien and Craig Strackton are executive producers for Novel.
Katrina Novel and Nikki Etour are the executive producers for
iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantour. And
(34:32):
a special thanks to Carley Frankel and the whole team
at WM
Hi, it's Kadija.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
In this episode, we're going to explore how to use
the media to take control of your story and draw
attention to the causes that matter the most to you.
But I just wanted to give you a heads up
that in the process of doing that, we'll discuss domestic abuse,
sexual assault, violence, and murder. If you or someone you
(00:25):
love has been affected by any of the themes that
have come up in this episode, we've left some links
in the description that offer resources and support take care
of yourself. In this season of The Girlfriends, we've been
discovering some difficult truths about the city we love. Malicious prosecution, extortion,
(00:48):
sexual violence from police officers. It seems like the whills
really came off in Windot County. But in my opinion,
it's not just law enforcement that failed us, it's the
media too. They failed to report adequately on what was
happening in our community. They failed to be a check
on the police department as it went roll, and a
(01:08):
lot of our media still misrepresents and underrepresents the very
people who need it the most. Throughout my work with
Justice Awandotte, if there's one thing I've learned is that
if you want answers and accountability. If you're trying to
find a missing person or discover why a loved one
was murdered, or if you're a survivor yourself looking for justice,
(01:32):
the media may not always feel like your friend, but
it can work for you and if you really want
your voice to be heard. Understanding how the media works,
whether it's news media, social media, or podcasts like this
one gidding Wise is essential. I'm Kadidra Hardaway for the
(02:04):
teens at novel and iHeart podcasts. This is the Girlfriend's
Untouchable Bonus Episode six, how to Put a Spotlight on
(02:31):
your Story. When Stacy Quinn, RNDA Tribune, and Monique Allen,
among many other women in our County were murdered, there
was little media outrage, certainly not enough to make people
(02:53):
take any real notice or stop crimes like these from
happening again and again. We know that there is a
nationwide problem with black people being underreported as victims, and
black women are murdered at nearly triple the rate of
white women. Black people make up forty percent of the
missing person's population and only get seven percent of the
(03:15):
media coverage. That is less than one fifth of the
coverage they should be getting. I have busted a gut
throughout my life to try and get attention and accountability
for black women, and it hasn't been easy. So how
can you get the media to work for you and
with you to chew over this difficult subject. I'm talking
(03:37):
to Tamara Cherry, a celebrated crime reporter and journalist. She's
the author of The Trauma Beat, a case for rethinking
the business of bad news, which looks at the way
news media handles victims and their trauma, challenging the industry
to re examine the way it does business. I started
(03:57):
out by giving Tamara a little insight into my own
experience of the media. I have a love for journalism.
When I was a little girl, my dad nicknamed me
Katie J because I used to act like I was
the radio station and every aspect of the radio, the
weather man, the disc jockey, the news reporter. I do
(04:19):
have a love for media. When I took on the
advocacy of women in Wyandot County, even though I'm a
black woman and I've sat in spaces of media, feel
like I very much have been put on. It just
didn't feel like that way for us collectively. I found
myself in some very hard spaces losing friends in media
(04:41):
because I just wouldn't back down from the ideal that
exposure of the bad characters needed to happen. But we
do find in the media here a lot of hurdles
when it comes to just being black and female at
the same time, we're both females. Can you tell me
a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Thank you for sharing that first. I've met many people
with similar situations where they're in advocate roles and have
personal histories that are connected to some of their work,
but they've felt that same sting and the way that
stories are reported and the way that things are portrayed
in the news, it's just another nail in the coffin,
(05:22):
like they don't care about us collectively.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So I hear you on that.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
So in terms of my background, I was born and
raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, which is where I am
right now. By going to journalism and I fell in
love with news, and I fell in love with telling
stories that could make people care, and I really wanted
to be able to affect change through the craft of journalism.
(05:49):
I ended up working in television news for a decade
as the crime reporter for this big newscast, and I
was very celebrated for the work that I did.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Well to marijuana accolades for her work. The coaches she
was working in did not serve the goal she was
setting of affecting positive change.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Nobody ever talked about trauma and how to work with
victims and survivors of traumatic events, and how to report
on things in a way that was actually causing good
things to happen instead of bad things to happen. The
community is telling you, like what you're doing is is harmful,
or we don't want you hearing now, or that sort
(06:31):
of thing, but then everything else is signaling that you're
doing the right thing. You're getting nominated for awards. And
I was celebrated when I got that quote unquote scoop
where I got the grieving mother on TV, and even
though it might not have been in her best interest,
my bosses were celebrating me for it. You know, if
(06:52):
there was a homicide in an apartment building, I would
be searching through every phone number listed in that apartment
building looking for witnesses and ran into really unfortunate situations.
It's too soon, they don't have the proper supports in place.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
All that. That's a whole different part of this conversation.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And you know, you say talking about, you know, knocking
on somebody's door in that vulnerable space, did you feel
like the media companies you were working for were exploiting stories.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
There's absolutely exploitation that happens, but I don't think it's
happening consciously for the most part.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Can you tell me a little bit about how you
see media is portrayed when it comes to individuals like myself.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
When we're talking about actual systemic racism that exists. Sometimes
it is blatant, and sometimes it is so like deep
into the bones of media institutions, reporters don't realize it.
In my book, I talk about this case actually throughout
the book where there was a young man who was
murdered in East Saint Louis and his mother, Latasha Stewart,
(08:00):
was screaming from the rooftops to get the media to
pay attention to her son's murder. She had created a
Facebook page, she created like a group, she got herself
on Twitter, and she contacted the Montel Williams Show for
crying out loud like she was doing everything and nobody
was paying attention.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
It was not easy.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
She screamed from the rooftops for so long, but she
got the media coverage. She is incredible and it shouldn't
have had to be that much of a struggle.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
That was wrong.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That was the system working against her, just as it
has worked against people of color for generations.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Pretty Much everything I'm going to ask you is something
that I have experienced and just kind of tying it
together with someone who has experienced this in the media.
Where I found myself is that at some point I
realized this is trauma and their trauma is beginning to
(08:55):
impact me and become trauma on me. When did you
have that moment where you felt like you had that aha,
like this is not what I'm reporting. This is actually
something else and something needs to be done about it.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
My specialty in my crime reporting be was the domestic
sex trafficking of women and girls in Canada. And when
I first was introduced to the term human trafficking, I,
like so many other people, thought, Oh, somebody's been brought
over in a box car from Russia or whatever.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I was reporting on all these international cases. A woman
from Russia who had answered an ad to work as
a model in Canada and has turned out as an escort,
you know. And then I got an email from a
vice investigator who said, why do you come out and
talk to us? They opened my eyes to all the
other human trafficking cases. They are impoverished, quite often, they
(09:46):
come from group homes, quite often, there was sexual abuse
when they were younger.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And it's a lot of them followed the same.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Pattern, but none of them was what I had in
my mind is human trafficking. Some of them are white,
some of them are black, some of them are indigenous,
but marginalized in some way. That's when I started noticing
in the police news releases that would come out a
runaway or somebody who's gone missing.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
She's gone missing.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Before, and as a result, for years I dedicated a
big portion of my career to exposing that and to
writing about these stories that otherwise weren't being written about.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
One thing that became clear to Tamara is that who
you are determines how the media reports your story.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Marginalized people in general are treated differently. How a young
marginalized woman from poverty and has gone missing many times
before might be referred to as somebody who has gone
missing several times before, even though she's a fifteen year
old girl and very vulnerable, and so she's immediately labeled
as well habitual runaway who will just come back, whereas
(10:50):
if a more affluent white girl were to go missing,
there would be more immediate alarm bells. Right, the police
narrative is always the primary, very narrative. The journalists are
not getting proper training on communities, and in general, they're
never given the proper training to understand communities. There is
the systemic racism. I had mentioned the homicide of Gregory
(11:13):
Stewart in East Saint Louis, and what was interesting when
I was working on my book was going back and
into the history of East St. Louis and the segregation
and the role that the media played in that and
in inciting violence, like going back to like the nineteen
thirties and seeing the actual like racist roots that exist
(11:34):
in the media, even though journalists today there might not
realize it.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Something Tamera said that I relate to is that bias
comes from a number of issues. Yes, there are racist
roots to the media, but there are other kinds of
bias that combine to stack the deck. Against us.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
One of the things I talked about in my book
is the fact that the media doesn't report on planes
that land. They see the news as uncommon things that
are happening. So they are much more likely, for example,
to report on a white, affluent person who is murdered
(12:14):
because it doesn't happen statistically as often as a black,
impoverished person who is murdered.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
You just said something unique to me, and that's that
they report on the white victim if he's affluent, rich, right,
But they don't report on the black. What they report
on the black is the criminal. They don't even report
on the victim. Here in Kansas City, Missouri and wyan
Dot County, the media doesn't portray us in a good light.
(12:46):
It doesn't want to tell our feel good stories. We
know that these problems of underreporting and misrepresentation are happening
on a mask. I want to hear more of what
we're doing about it. After the break, we're going to
(13:07):
talk about ways the media can do better. Journalism is
a major two for addressing injustice in our community. But
(13:30):
an issue we face so often is the people reporting
our problems are not us and don't know us. As
of twenty twenty two, Black people made up six percent
of the journalists, which is a lot less than the
fourteen point four percent of the population which black people
make up in the US. Given the history of our community,
it's even more important for those in the media, especially
(13:53):
white journalists, to think carefully about how they report on
us when we're at our most vulnerable. We find that
most journalists want the victim in the rawest form, which
I think puts them in a very vulnerable place.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh, and I've seen it play out with sexual violence
survivors here in Canada, where they go to the media
first they share their story and then I go and
I'm sitting in the trial for the alleged perpetrator. And Oh,
you're saying this now, but you said it differently when
you spoke to this newspaper reporter a year ago. That's
something I advise sexual violence survivers in particular about as well.
(14:29):
When we're talking about journalists, you know that they want
them in the more vulnerable position.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
And I was the same.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
You want that raw emotion, You don't want them reading
from a prepared statement.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
You say, knocking on somebody's door in that vulnerable space.
Did you feel like the media companies you were working
for were exploiting stories for capital gain.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Most news managers who are telling us to go cover
these stories, their intentions are overwhelmingly good. They want this
violence to stop, They want people to care. I don't
think that there's a conscious will to exploit.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
There may not be a conscious will to exploit by
all media organizations and editors, but is often the result
of prioritizing the most shocking stories to sell newspapers and
get more clicks and subscribers.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
You want it raw because it makes for a more
compelling story. What I teach journalists now, though, because I
do a lot of trauma informed storytelling training, is about
the impact that trauma has on the brain and recognizing
that if you bring that survivor into that unsafe zone
activating their trauma responses, then you might not actually be
getting an accurate story. A lot of journalists they're going
(15:41):
into newsrooms that are mostly white, and they don't reflect
the communities that they are reporting on.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Along with the crisis of representation, there's also a crisis
within the press industry. In the age of the Internet,
local reporting and investigating reporting has struggled to find resources
is to do good work. As Tamarra found in one
of her jobs.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
We were so short staffed that I would come into
the office some days and be like, Hey, I've got
a really great scoop on this case. I need time
to work on it. And they'd say that's great, but
you're one of two reporters working today, so we need
you to write half the paper. So you're just going
to rewrite eight press releases instead. So in that way,
I'm regurgitating whatever's coming up from police by and large,
(16:27):
and I don't have the time or the resources to
actually dig into anything because it's just like I got
to get this stuff filed and then get out the door.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Ultimately, we need more black journalists and editors calling the shots,
and I can only hope that as awareness spreads about
the harm done by sensationalizing stories, there would be more
urgency to change things.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
There are journalists out there who are becoming trauma informed,
and when I tell them that actually a lot of
what you're doing is harmful, they're surprised and they ask
me how can I do better? And then I teach them,
or they read my book or they listen to my podcasts,
and then they reach out to me and they say, Tamara,
I've been doing this job for thirty three years and
I just wanted you to know I just did this
(17:11):
interview differently because of what this survivor said was harmful
for her in the past.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
So change is happening, Trauman.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Foreign practice still remains the exception rather than the expectation,
but it is happening. And if you can find that
good journalist or news your manager or advocate who has
those connections, you can actually have an experience with the
media that is healing instead of harmful and can help
you reach your goals.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
I have to be honest, I am still skeptical about
the role the media has played and continues to play
in our communities. The news media is still by and
large a for profit business driven by what sales. But
what Tamara has described seems like a route forward and
maybe calls for optimist I hope Tamara is right that
(18:02):
we are moving to a more compassionate and thoughtful culture
of journalism. After the break, we're going to talk about
survivor empowerment and what advocates and survivors can do to
amplify their voices within the media.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I got you I got you, I got you.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
When it comes to the media and getting your voice
out there, there is a lot stacked up against women,
especially marginalized and black women. We saw what that looked
like for so many of the women of Wyandot County
who got caught up in Galucy's web of abuse and
were ignored. But I know from my own experience the
media can work for us. We'll be talking through some
(18:59):
of those two and two's to help navigate the media
while dealing with trauma. And one of the most traumatic
things we'll deal with is when a loved one goes missing.
Getting the media's attention can be the difference between life
or death. The chances of being found after the first
forty eight hours go down sharply, so every moment counts.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
If you're wanting to utilize the media after a loved
one goes missing, when you go to the media, if
a news release goes out forty eight hours later saying
a runaway quote unquote is gone, your number one mission
is to humanize your missing loved one.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
It's not something that you should have to do.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
But the unfortunate reality is if it's not getting media attention,
it's because they're being treated as just another statistic, another runaway.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
You know, I have dealt with many of people who
said their loved one was missing. What I usually do
is I challenge the individual that is looking for the
miss loved one to let me know what organizations they
belong to. Are they disable, are they a veteran? Descriptions
(20:08):
about them that connect them to other people. If you
can find the people that associate with that individual, you
can find the best help. It has helped rescue at
least five people that I know in my community. Another
situation where you might need to get your voice heard
by the media is if a loved one or a
(20:30):
community member is murdered. And if you're black, newsflash, you're
going to have a harder time getting your story heard.
According to a study by Stanford University, in majority white neighborhoods,
murder victims are around twice as likely to be covered
as a complex and rounded person than those in majority
(20:50):
black neighborhoods. And that goes to a whole new level.
When you're speaking out for young black men, You know
how it goes. They must have been in a game,
So breaking through prejudice takes some hard work.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
So how can you humanize them. I think back to
a campaign that I did about a teenage boy who
was murdered several years ago, and on the surface, this
homicide would have gotten not the most compassionate care from
the media. I had conversations with the family and we
(21:24):
put out this video of him, and it really showed
how young he was. It really tugged at the heartstrings.
And just by putting out that video, we got media
attention that we would not have otherwise gotten, and we
got the story covered because it humanized. It was no
longer just this teenage boy was murdered in this neighborhood.
(21:46):
It was this human being with loved ones who care
about him, who is now missing from our collective lives.
His family is hurting, and this is how you can
help them.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
We like to call that empowerment. Do believe that the
more a person knows, the more experience and influence they
have with their own situation walking through it, the better
they can help the next person. You may find yourself
in a position of being a survivor of a crime,
navigating the media at a terrible experience. So what is
(22:20):
the best way for you to fight for your own justice?
I do believe that there are so many ways to
use the media. One, don't overshare your story, but two,
make sure that when you tell it is powerful, it's impactful,
and you're telling it to the right people who can
help you. Most people don't know how to tell their
story and they think instantly something should happen.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
As a journalist and somebody who has worked with trauma survivors,
my message is, first decide what you are comfortable sharing.
What message do you want to get out there. Think
about the trauma that you endured. Are you actually comfortable
talking about the event, or do you just want to
talk about the impact that event had on you and
(23:04):
your family, your loved ones. Identify as a survivor, but
talk about something else that you're seeing in the news,
because journalists will always try to get to that personal story.
But if you don't know going into that interview very
clearly what you want to talk about, you can end
up going down a very slippery road that can cause
you more harm. You need to have a clear understanding
(23:26):
of what are you comfortable talking about to everybody surrounding
that survivor. That survivor needs to be wrapped in support
when dealing with the media. They should never be doing
it alone, whether it is with a lawyer or an
organization or like a nonprofit or whatever.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
A part of the process of telling your story is
about making compelling, strategic campaigns that punch through the lack
of care and get your story heard. One way to
go about that is to focus on social media campaigning.
It's free and anyone can do it, and if you
have a community behind you, it can really make a splash.
(24:04):
I don't know if you agree with this, but sometimes
when we don't get the coverage, we will share the
story on several social media outlets, tagging those news outlets
with that life that story, comment on that story, or
how viral that story goes. It sometimes get picked up
that way.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Social media can be a very powerful tool. One caution
I would give about social media is it can be
a very dark, awful place full of trolls. There needs
to be somebody there, ideally with some media literacy and
who's trauma informed and is looking out for the best
interest of that survivor.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I tell people there's a big difference between social media
influencers and one that's the credibility that is going to
go behind something that's published from a licensed journalist, as
if an article that said it came from the Washington Post.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
You make that social media campaign with your vertical videos,
but you also produce those videos horizontally for mainstream media
to use, and so you're fighting it from both sides.
I work with a lot of organizations that have very
small social media followings, and so it's like, we create
this whole social media campaign, it's really not going to
be seen by a lot of people because they've only got,
you know, a few dozen followers. But we take that
(25:23):
to mainstream media and they amplify it in that way,
and it also drives followers then to their social media.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Today, social media plays a bigger role than ever in
getting the word out, but traditional media platforms continue to
be important. To build momentum around your story, you need
to be smart and have multiple approaches to campaigning. Oftentimes,
when we think of media, I would say justice for
(25:51):
wine that not necessarily has fared well. We need to
be more impactful, and so how do we do that.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Are not expected to be an expert in the media.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Surround yourself with people who already have that media literacy.
Learn about the media, create those relationships and magic can happen.
Back in November, which in Canada is Domestic Violence Awareness Month,
one of my clients is an organization that provides wrap
around services for victims and survivors of intimate partner violence,
(26:23):
and they wanted to do an entire campaign around strangulation.
So we created a campaign called taking Your Breath Away,
and it was a social media campaign that included something
like eighteen or nineteen videos. Here's a survivor who is
part of the campaign, and she doesn't want to do
media interviews, but here are video clips that we've created
(26:43):
with her protecting her identity, where she shares her story.
Here are these experts from San Diego who are experts
in strangulation that are a part of it. Here's the
executive director of the organization that we created a whole
mainstream media campaign around this, where we had a news
conference and with a campaign law video, we create a
whole media frenzy around this. Whereas if somebody were to
(27:05):
just call a news station and say, why don't you
ever talk about strangulation, Well, that's a lot of work
and I don't have time to do that because I'm
filing for six or I'm doing this, but if I
hand you the story on a platter, then you're golden.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Once you start speaking the experts language, they're going to
want to talk about and dissect it and look at
it from a and in some cases give you strategies
that you would not have thought about before. And we
refer to that as being empowered.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Mm hmm for sure.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Another way to control the message is depending on what
is happening in the news, write and off ed, like
write an opinion piece that you can then submit to
the local newspaper. That is a great way because you
can control that message and it doesn't need to be
tied to specific work you are doing. But it's presenting
yourself as the thought leader because you have done X,
(27:58):
Y and Z, and newspapers love to run a piece
that presents a different point of view to what has
already been reported.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
I've been working with the press for years and despite
the wins we've had, just being heard continues to be hard.
I don't think it would ever be easy. Working with
survivors whose stories are definitely newsworthy, we can struggle to
get the media's attention. That can be for a number
of reasons. Is the victim from the wrong neighborhood, the
(28:30):
wrong race, and the wrong line of work? Are they
too poor? Sometimes I feel like I'm being ignored, not
because of what I am saying, but because my face
just doesn't fit. In the beginning, I felt like the
princess of why and not because everyone wanted to hear
(28:52):
what I had to say and I was tied to
a white organization at that time. When we broke free
of the white organization, then we noticed that they would
put the white organization before our movement.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
If you are working in a market where they're not
going to talk to you because you're black, go to
a different media market where you can talk about this
issue with a local news hook. That was like, Okay,
let's find a news hook in Detroit, for example, where
there is a more friendly reporter perhaps who will do
this story, and then we can bring that story back
to social media and share it locally and say why
(29:28):
isn't the media talking about this here in Kansas?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
There wasn't until we decided that we would not deal
with our media. I would gravitate toward activists outside of
Kansas City who had a media platform who could post
and share the things. And when they did that, that's
when we began to see the New York Times, Washington Posts,
and news outlets that put us on a national platform.
(29:53):
From where I'm standing, no one can stop you. If
you are set on your goal. If you hit but
it feels like a wall, don't give up, find another way.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Find the good reporters, get the good stories done, and
then all the rest of the media will start to
pay attention what you did.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
It was brilliant.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I just want to say thank you again for sharing
with me. It is great speaking with you. Journalism. I
know it's not an easy job. You need it in
a lot of communities, and I appreciate the ideal of
having trauma response reporters. I would love to see trauma
(30:37):
inform journalist here in Kansas City.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Thank you so much for having me. It's been so
wonderful to learn about the work that you're doing, and
I look forward to following your journey.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
That was tomorrow Cherry writer journalists and reformer, look up
her truly amazing book, The Trauma Beat, which is calling
for reform and showing the way to a better media
landscape which would be more victim centered. I got a
lot of hope listening to Tamara, seeing that we can
(31:17):
shape the media narrative and that change is happening in journalism.
There is racism at the heart of many of America's institutions.
The media is no exception, but we have to challenge
it and speak out for our communities. It's possible. I
know because at Justifuydot we have been able to make
(31:39):
a splash. You can make change too. You just have
to find the right partners and use the right tactics.
We need a mass movement to meet this challenge. Let's
do this together.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
Hi, this is Nikki again. Nico Khadija and I have
been on a long, hard journey to fight for the
women of Kansas City, and while this is the final
episode of the series, our story isn't over. We're still
fighting for police reform and doing what we can to
make sure the people most affected by this story feel
(32:28):
seen and heard. And we're not alone. There are thousands
of people across the world fighting to improve the places
they live, doing the often slow but necessary work needed
to hold the authorities to account. But as we've learned,
while the path to progress is long and winding, it's
(32:50):
worth the ride, because if we keep fighting back and
refusing to accept the status quo, we can work together
to create a future where nobody, even people in positions
of authority, can ever get to the point where they
think they're untouchable. Next time, Annisenfield will be back with
(33:10):
another season of The Girlfriend's Spotlight and more untold stories
of women winning. Until then, thanks for listening, and hold
your girlfriends tight.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
The Girlfriend's Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcast.
For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio. This episode
was hosted by me Kadija Hardaway. It was written and
produced by Mohammed Ahmed. The editor is Joe Whiller. The
researcher is Aiyana Yusef. Production management from Sharie Houston and
(33:48):
Joe Savage. The fact checker is Vindo Fulton. Sound design,
mixing and scoring by Daniel Kimpsen with additional engineering by
Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Refriro Masurura, Nicholas Alexander and
Joe Wheeler. Original music by Amanda Jones. The series artwork
(34:10):
was designed by Christina Limku. Novels Director of Development in
Selena Metta, Willard Foxton is Novels. Creative Director of Development,
Max O'Brien and Craig Strackton are executive producers for Novel.
Katrina Novel and Nikki Etour are the executive producers for
iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantour. And
(34:32):
a special thanks to Carley Frankel and the whole team
at WM
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