metajournalistic discourse explore the ways journalists use their public discourse to protect their own autonomy and jockey for cultural legitimacy. For many journalists, defending yourself is just part of the job.
That’s why Moon’s study of Rwandan journalists is so remarkable. In interviews with 40 Rwandan journalists as part of an ethnography of the country’s newsrooms, Moon found that their professional identity is dominated by a metanarrative in which they are untrustworthy, too powerful, and need to be reined in by other social institutions. This narrative stems from Rwandan journalists’ deeply rooted sense of complicity and guilt in helping foment the genocide of the 1990s. As a result, they’re treated extremely skeptically by audiences, sources, and policymakers, and in their eyes, they deserve it. It’s a haunting and fascinating picture of the power of negative discourse to shape professional identity in post-conflict journalism, fueled by collective guilt.