collective called the Listening Project (O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher 2009) and Nick Couldry (2009, 2010). Bickford (1996) offers a landmark and detailed examination of voice and associated listening in her book, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship, in which she explores ‘pathbuilding’ communicative practices. Here, citizens engage with one another’s perspectives through an ongoing process of speaking and listening, though not necessarily with the goal of social coherence. Instead, the discord, which naturally arises during these interactions, encourages participants to re-evaluate their own speaking practices (Bickford 1996).
Charles Husband (1996, 2008) amplifies the ethical importance of listening by advocating the ‘right to be understood’ as a fundamental communication right. Lisbeth Lipari (2010) proposes a paradigm shift that places listening at the centre of communication rather than speaking, and she defines a perspective on listening, which she calls ‘listening being’. While the largest body of literature emphasises the notion of listening as central to communication, Couldry (2009, 2010) focuses the critical lens on voice. We take particular direction from his explication of the various characteristics of ‘voice’. However, while he identifies a number of different levels of voice, we will mention only those that are relevant here in relation to how voice is either carried out or ignored by the dominant news media, and what the implications are for journalism.
While the body of scholarly literature on communicative voice and listening, and the associated ethics involved, is steadily growing, we do not offer a detailed literature review of such writings here because this has already been presented at length elsewhere (see, for example, Dreher 2009, 2017; Macnamara 2012; O’Donnell 2009; O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher 2009). Rather, what we offer in this book is a demonstration of such theory in practice: we intend this as an example of active listening, with the purpose of surfacing and amplifying voice as a means to illustrate how this could be translated into journalistic practice for application in the news media.
In this book, we have kept the theoretical side of things unapologetically simple. This is because, with respect to our scholarly peers, we do not want the journalists, future journalists-in-training, newsmakers and editors who read this book to become discouraged by complexities and near-unfathomable musings so characteristic of academic writing (Heleta 2016). Rather, we adopt the principled position of offering a text that is easy to read, easy to understand and more broadly accessible, knowing that this approach offers greater potential to catalyse the type of change that we advocate in this book. We aim to provide research that is accessible to working journalists, as a practical demonstration for how to enable voice through listening and, in doing so, do good journalism. We also want this project to speak to ordinary citizens who may aspire to talk and be heard, and whom much of this book is about, as a testament that they have every right to demand a news media that listens to them and takes their stories seriously.
Since the ordinary grassroots citizen is at the heart of this project, the notion of voice as the initial act of speaking and telling one’s own story is our primary point of departure. The concept of voice is, however, for us and for many other theorists, inextricably linked to the act of listening. The two, voice and listening, are coupled: the accompaniment of listening, together with speaking, are two parts of the same equation where neither can be determined as entirely successful without the other (Dreher 2009).
The first and most crucial aspect is to acknowledge that everyone has a voice, and no one is voiceless. The voicelessness of the ‘voiceless’ is an unfortunate myth. Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao (2005), for example, attest that people are ‘voiceless’ not because they have nothing to say, but because nobody cares to listen to them. People, all people, regardless of their personal status, class, wealth, education, gender, race or ethnicity, have something to say and have stories to tell, if only we could bear to listen. This means that simply having a voice is not enough. In addition, one needs to know that one’s voice matters, that it is considered and that it is heard.
So, having a voice relies on the prerequisite of having that voice matter, to be heard and listened to by others. Active and considered listening registers and respects the distinctness and importance of the narrative of the speaker, without which voice will not succeed in being heard (Couldry 2010).
To tell one’s own story is a considered decision. It requires reflection on how to speak, which part or parts of the story to tell, and what to say. Equally, listeners ought to practise critical introspection on how they listen, on what they (choose to) hear, which parts of the story they pay attention to, and which parts they ignore. This means taking an active responsibility for whom, how and what we listen to (Bickford 1996). Of course, societal and normative hierarchies often determine the trajectory of our listening, meaning that we regard some voices as more worthy of being listened to than others (more on this later). But where voice and listening are co-dependent, and if we accept that to deny the effective practice of voice to some (by not listening to them) constitutes oppression and injustice, we must also recognise that reconfiguring listening practice can potentially break up normative traditions and hierarchies, allowing greater space for a plurality of voices (Bickford 1996).
This equation of effective voice (speaking plus engaged listening) is central to the legitimacy of modern democracies. Yet, somehow, the organisation of the human sphere of communication has naturalised and made acceptable the importance of some voices over others to the extent that alternate voices do not matter (Couldry 2010). Men’s voices have always mattered more than women’s, so much so that this seems ‘natural’. Heteronormative narratives dominate our popular culture, while homosexually aligned ones are relegated to the fringe or the obscure, and again we are duped into accepting this as ‘natural’, when in reality there is nothing strange or unnatural about being gay. Elite, middle-class and economically secure voices have always been mediated in abundance, relative to the voices of the poor and working classes.
Importantly, when some segments of society experience a lack of voice, when these are not listened to or heard, societal, political and cultural fissures and/or inequalities naturally arise. Denying voice to some has a material impact. Simply put, when everyone has a voice it is better for society. For example, feminism has long identified the lack of effective voice available to women as a determining factor regarding their social and economic status and inequity, as well as the related negatively connoted identity that is experienced by women in every part of the world (Macnamara 2012). The material impact of women’s lack of voice is clearly evident, measureable and undeniable.
For instance, the 2019 Sustainable Development Goals Index surveyed 129 countries in terms of their progress in meeting the 2030 targets for gender equality. Not a single country in the world was found to be on track to meet these internationally agreed targets, while 2.8 billion women live in countries that are doing too little or nothing to empower women and end inequality. Women the world over still suffer diminished power and under-representation in governmental bodies, including parliaments, in upper management positions in both the private and public sector, and in the economy, while women are still unaccountably, though predominantly, paid less than men for doing the same work (Ford 2019). When half of the world’s routinely marginalised voices bear direct symmetry with the same half of the world’s people who are clearly afforded less social, economic and political power than the other half, the importance of effective voice as a key factor for the overall health of society becomes obvious.
And so, firstly, a considered view of voice starts with the acknowledgement that voice, every voice, has value. More forcefully, for societal health and in the interest of justice and equality, every voice must have value. It is important to not only value voice itself, but to also value the societal frameworks, institutions, platforms and resources that themselves value voice, and consciously identify, reject and reform those that do not (Couldry 2010). With regard to such societal frameworks and institutions, the media sphere is not innocent as it routinely maintains what Tanja Dreher (2009: 445) refers to as the ‘hierarchies of language which can be slow to shift’. The task then ‘is to take responsibility for shifting those hierarchies of attention which produce unequal opportunities
