Rural journalists in small-scale study say they're afraid to report on hate groups or call certain remarks hate speech

"Journalists who cover rural areas in the United States say they are afraid to report on hate groups, and this fear is exacerbated by close community ties and limited resources among rural journalists," say four researchers who interviewed 33 journalists reporting in rural communities and published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Journalism Practice.

"Rural journalists articulate a clear definition for hate speech, but struggle to apply that definition to events within their communities, even as they articulate numerous forms of hate," Gregory Perreault of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., and his collegaues write. "Journalists often dismissed acts of hate using the residual category of 'not hate, but …' to signal something that they felt was out of place or unsuitable but did not rise to the legal definition of hate speech and thus was not worth reporting on. This approach ends up challenging journalists’ normative commitments to their communities and exemplifies their desire to avoid an objectivity trap."

Rural journalists may provide “the only nuanced local coverage community members will encounter” on the topic, the researchers write. “The journalists we interviewed articulated a clear definition for hate speech but struggled to apply that definition to the events they articulated within their communities. . . . Using the common refrain of ‘We don’t have any hate groups, but … ,‘ journalists nevertheless articulated acts of hate in their communities, which were not always associated explicitly with hate groups.”

NiemanLab reports on the paper, "Being more closely connected to their audiences, rural journalists were more reluctant to label such people and activities in their communities as hate — at least in part because of the fear of repercussion that would arise from such declarations in coverage. The researchers wrote, “Journalists in some cases felt pressure from their audience to apply false balance in their work through labeling groups like Black Lives Matter as a hate group.”

Perreault's co-authors are Ruth Moon of Louisiana State University, Jessica Walsh of the University of Nebraska and Mildred Perreault of East Tennessee State University.