Weeks before federal agents arrested Georgia Fort, the vice president of Minnesota’s NABJ, she warned that many newsrooms privilege official narratives over community voices. Fort and independent journalist Don Lemon were charged after covering protests at a Minnesota church tied to an anti-immigrant leader. Fort says newsroom practices and the weaponization of the word “activist” have pushed many Black reporters into independent roles, and she urges broader media solidarity to protect independent, community-centered reporting.
‘They Prefer Official Versions’: Georgia Fort’s Dire Warnings About the Press Weeks Before Her Arrest
Weeks before federal agents arrived at her door, I interviewed Georgia Fort, vice president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, about mounting threats to independent reporting under the Trump administration.
Fort and fellow independent reporter and former CNN host Don Lemon were arrested and charged by federal authorities after covering protests at a Minnesota church where a leader tied to the administration’s hardline, anti-immigrant campaign serves as pastor. Disturbing footage that Fort and a relative recorded shortly before her arrest has kept her warnings fresh in my mind.
Reporting Under Pressure
During our conversation, when Fort was covering the immigration crackdown, I told her I saw echoes of Ida B. Wells — the Black independent journalist who documented lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Fort said many Black reporters still face denial, minimization, or reframing of their fact-based coverage of racism within newsrooms.
She described a persistent tendency in some news organizations to privilege official statements over community accounts. "When you put that much credibility on government and official statements over community narratives, you end up with a bias," she told me.
"A code of ethics that indoctrinates journalists to uphold officials’ narratives over community ones creates blind spots that silence affected communities," Fort said.
Choosing Independence
Fort — an award-winning reporter by her own account — said those newsroom pressures helped push her into independent journalism. She co-founded the Center for Broadcast Journalism to ensure that media better reflects and serves Black and Brown communities and to prioritize community narratives that corporate outlets may sideline.
Journalist Georgia Fort; Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn.(Georgia Fort via Facebook; Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)
She added that the label "activist" is sometimes weaponized to undermine the credibility of Black journalists doing community-centered reporting: "I feel that the term activist has been weaponized against me to diminish my credibility as a journalist."
What This Means For The Press
Independent Black journalists — like Fort and Lemon — often lack the legal and institutional protections a corporate employer can provide. That vulnerability, Fort and others say, raises urgent questions about how much solidarity and defense they can expect from the wider media ecosystem while contesting criminal charges or facing political pressure.
The Black press has a long tradition of bold truth-telling, documented in works such as "News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media" by Juan Gonzáles and Joseph Torres and Char Adams’s "Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore." But Fort’s case underscores that independent Black outlets cannot be left to shoulder this burden alone if democratic norms and press freedom are to endure.
Meeting that challenge will require mainstream newsrooms to take community-centered reporting as seriously as Fort and Lemon did when covering the Minnesota church protests. In these fraught times, anything less risks becoming complicity.
This article originally appeared on MS NOW.
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