The headlines and memes after November 6th expressed the same disbelief in infinite ways: more than 77 million Americans had just elected a convicted criminal, someone held liable for sexual abuse and denounced by many as racist and transphobic, as the President of the United States of America.
As a Colombian, the feeling was all too familiar to me. The same sense of loss and hopelessness. Being certain that you belong to the right side of history while watching the bad guys get away with their lies and manipulations, knowing that the historically oppressed will be the ones who will suffer the most.
In 2016, the Colombian government submitted to popular vote a historic peace agreement with the country’s oldest and largest guerrilla group. The agreement set the conditions for the demobilization of more than 13,000 combatants and established long needed social reforms, but a slight majority of voters rejected it. They had been subjected to systematic and targeted right wing campaigns of disinformation.
At the time I was working at Pacifista, a journalistic platform I co-founded to cover the Peace Process and educate young publics around armed conflict in Colombia. There, I embraced positional journalism, a calling to abandon traditional journalistic neutrality and situate myself on the side of the oppressed and abused, holding the lens of human rights as the framework to identify, denounce and transform injustice.
Pacifista showed me that journalism was a very effective tool to foster and amplify relevant conversations that usually take place in specific niches within social movements. This led me to envisioning Mutante, a social conversation movement that in 2018 pioneered participatory journalism to increase the engagement of audiences with agendas of social change.
Today, after almost a decade of experimenting within the blurry boundaries between journalism and activism in Latin America, I wonder if positional journalism is furthering polarization. In my year as a 2025 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, I aim to understand the reasons for contemporary polarization and the ways partisan and positional journalism may be contributing to it.
Polarization isn’t a problem in itself. Societies evolve thanks to thriving diversity and the intrinsic conflict that arises from within it. What really worries me is the tribalism that accompanies polarization, which widens the distance between facts and perception, as well as the animosity between conflicting groups.
As Debra Statz, dean of Humanities at Stanford University, stated on the first day of the class Democracy and Disagreement this past April: “What is a cause for concern is when disagreements are taken to be immune from evidence and critical scrutiny. When loud voices drown out dissenting views. When minds are closed. When humility is seen as a vice and when a culture of incivility prevails with respect to those with whom we disagree”.
Journalists and media outlets are moderators of complex and uncomfortable conversations. These conversations are specially sensible when they concern and affect the rights of oppressed groups or members of a specific community.
The liberal media industry, developed during the 20th century mainly by white privileged men, established impartiality as an industry’s standard. The 21st century and its digital revolution, opened up spaces for new voices and made power imbalances more visible. For journalists committed to social justice, it became impossible to moderate a conversation from a neutral perspective. It lost its moral ground.
Some of you may argue that it is in fact the concern for justice that defines the difference between neutrality and impartiality. An impartial journalist gets enough distance from all the voices involved in a discussion, in order to assess and contrast their sense of truth. On paper, this may be correct. In practice, my concern is that neutrality and impartiality have become interchangeable in our daily practice, making positional journalists allergic to both concepts.
Unless we are able to find a proper replacement, I fear that renouncing impartiality elevates the risks of becoming partial or partisan, which in turn will inflict great damage to journalism’s capacity to serve as a public forum. Regardless of the scale of the conversation — hyperlocal, regional, national or international — the role we play as moderators will define who trusts us and who wants to engage in the conversation we moderate. It is clear that we cannot remain impartial; there is too much at stake. But if we embrace partiality, we risk nurturing an ever increasing trend of partisan media, contributing to the increase in affective polarization, the animosity and dislike people feel towards those who have opposite ideas.
During my first quarter at Stanford, I had begun to explore multipartiality. It is a concept borrowed from negotiation and facilitation practices, two fields that involve — no surprise — a lot of conversation. In the book The Art of Effective Facilitation, Robbie Routenberg, Elizabeth Thomson and Rhian Waterberg state that a multi-partial facilitator should be able to identify both the dominant and the silenced narratives around an issue, in order to intervene and balance a conversation. This demands a lot from the moderator, who ought to have the capacity to get into everybody’s shoes and identify the moments where that leveling is needed. The facilitator, “simultaneously identifies inequalities perpetuated during discussions and raises awareness of how these inequities have an impact on the life of people who experience privilege and oppression.”
Multipartiality offers several challenges for journalists who aspire to moderate conversations that are simultaneously plural, accurate and fair. First, we need to develop the capacity to identify the different narratives that are built around an issue. Secondly, we have to interrogate the facts that support those narratives. Third, find the relevant facts that are missing. Fourth, summon all parties and facilitate a conversation where those narratives are acknowledged, contrasted and challenged.
My colleague, JSK Fellow Bettina Chang, co-founder of City Bureau in Chicago, recently shared a story that reveals how multipartiality may look in practice. During one community working session focused on rental prices, the group was divided in two. One side, the majority, was against the increase in rent prices, while on the other side, a single person defended them. As facilitator, Bettina realized that the single person’s father was a landlord, and by making space for her story, the rest could be exposed to the complex economic realities faced by property owners, including data the majority was not aware of. “Instead of focusing on the disagreement, we encouraged participants to be more curious about where other people’s opinions were coming from. When they saw that the situation was more complex than they expected, they realized they needed to do more research”, Bettina said.
I wonder if multipartiality could become a framework that could help journalism mitigate the contemporary fragmentation of public conversations and the increasing levels of affective polarization. As journalist and author Jeff Jarvis recently put it, “journalists might see ourselves as conveners of conversation… to build bridges among communities — to make strangers less strange, to help people escape the filter bubbles in their real lives”. In order to achieve that, we need to explore strategies to moderate conflict within those communities, because they are complex organisms, characterized by diversity, inequality and the oppressive systems we want to transform.
At a small scale — say, for instance, a private community conversation made up of a few conflicting individuals — we could test if multipartiality can help us establish a common sense of facts or increase the level of trust on the information we provide to the participants. We could also identify the effect that such a conversation has on them. Do they acknowledge their misconceptions? Do they change their minds? Do they develop more than an ephemeral compassion over their opponents?
At a larger — digital — scale, I wonder if multipartiality could be encoded into algorithms powered by artificial intelligence, offering moderation resources to all of those designing, operating and analyzing contemporary digital conversations (this could include initiatives such as Stanford’s Deliberative Poll, Cortico or Polis, but it could also be more traditional commercial social media).
