Intersectionality and standpoint epistemology in journalism studies: Interrogating journalism’s power for a more equitable field

One of journalism’s key societal functions is to serve the public. In recent years, however, scholarship has increasingly interrogated this ideological claim, exposing journalism as an unequal space, guided by entrenched traditional norms and practices that stifle journalism’s growth, and where journalists and audiences marginalized by various domains of power feel excluded. While these studies have cracked open crucial debates about how journalism is done, by whom and for whom, they have often offered a disassembled view by essentializing gender, race or class as single domains of power. This chapter advances the argument that standpoint epistemology and intersectionality provide us with a critical framework and analytical tools to interrogate journalism’s inequalities with more complexity, and at various levels of influence, including journalists’ and audiences’ experiences of doing and consuming journalism, as well as the organizational, structural and normative belief systems that shape it. The chapter concludes by pointing to several avenues of research and ways of engaging with these perspectives to advance critical journalism studies.