Marcellus Williams and the Problem with the Contingency of Innocence in Journalism
by Anita Varma, Solidarity Journalism Initiative lead
Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri on Tuesday, September 24, 2024. In a calendar year when death has been rampant in dominant news headlines, this story, like many before, was told with the contingency of innocence — or possible innocence. Squeezing into headlines and sub-heds, the possibility of Marcellus Williams’ innocence was reported across major news outlets as the reason that people were organizing to make phone calls to the governor, sign petitions, and protest against Williams being executed.
The contingency of innocence in news coverage is a strange yet normalized narrative technique. Reporting that this individual is “one of the good ones,” news coverage routinely suggests that the systems governing society are in place to punish the unequivocally guilty — not the innocent. The basis for outrage, then, lies in a system malfunction, not the system itself.
The same rhetorical maneuver happens all the time in news coverage of war, genocide, and other humanitarian crises. Victims are (news)worthy if they are innocent victims, dominant news coverage suggests. A defenseless newborn, an unsuspecting child, a kindly elderly person are routinely part of a predictable cast of “sympathetic” characters who dominant news media will spotlight, magnify, and insist illustrate the real problem at hand. The guilty can die, it seems, but the innocent are supposed to remain protected. Who decides and defines guilt and innocence, however, is never discussed or disclosed.
Preoccupied with demonstrating Marcellus Williams’ worthiness, most news coverage neglected relevant facts. Organizing for Marcellus Williams included groups like Critical Resistance, for instance, which stands against the death penalty categorically — not just if the person is or may be innocent. Yet this view and the work of groups mobilizing for it were nowhere to be found in leading, breaking, or trending news coverage this week.
I lead the Solidarity Journalism Initiative, which helps journalists, journalism students, and journalism educators understand and address longstanding problems with how marginalized communities are represented in journalism. The name of this initiative often attracts disapproval from people who claim that journalism is, has always been, and should always be an impartial service. Yet if journalism were (ever) impartial, then constant contingencies of innocence would not be appended to people’s deaths. Coverage of organizing efforts would include all the groups involved — including those that refuse to abide by centrist boundaries of “acceptable advocacy.”
Journalism aligned with a solidarity approach reports the truth of people’s universal basic dignity. People, also known as human beings, have basic dignity or “value beyond price” in the words of philosopher Immanuel Kant. Dignity requires no external validation in the form of evidence of one’s innocence, humanity, or worthiness to be alive. By starting with this fact, solidarity journalism reports the truth of people being subjected to conditions and systems that deny their dignity, including state-ordered brutality.
Marcellus Williams’ humanity is not a debatable question, and so news coverage straining to prove a human is human amounts to circular reporting that serves no purpose. Instead, the state’s humanity (or lack thereof), and the ongoing collective fight across civil society to demand a humane state is the news story that still urgently needs to be told.
Anita Varma, PhD, leads the Solidarity Journalism Initiative. This piece builds on her peer-reviewed research, including her study “Evoking Empathy or Enacting Solidarity with Marginalized Communities?” Views are her own.
