The line between activism and journalism breaks

 Via Neiman Labs

By Hafsa Maqsood

December 10, 2025

“When journalists around the world are being killed for practicing their freedom of press, journalists have no choice but to become activists.”

There is a growing frustration in the pit of the global journalism industry’s stomach. A frustration that comes from witnessing an entire year of devastating war in the Middle East, massive bloodshed, and ongoing conflicts across the globe where nothing seems to be working. A sickening frustration fed by the reeking hypocrisy of trying to “holding truth to power” in a post-truth world simultaneously bowing to power.

This frustration was born long ago in the stomachs of marginalized members of various diasporas, like myself, coming from histories of ancestral displacement and ravaging colonialism, and it is in part what has motivated them to join media and journalism industries only to be met with walls of supposed objectivity. An “impartiality” that leads to donning a hollow mask of white neutrality discordant with their lived realities.

That frustration will come to a breaking point in 2025 and translate into tearing down the line between activism and journalism that has already been breached, particularly since the 2020 rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

When democracies are in peril, when international laws meant to hold humanity accountable are being disregarded, when people charged with criminal offenses are leading governments, when journalists around the world are being killed for practicing their freedom of press, journalists have no choice but to become activists.

In 2025, journalists will no longer be told that coming in to work with a “Free Palestine” sticker on their laptops or water bottles is controversial and against guidelines while a “Stand With Ukraine” sticker is praised. Massive refugee and humanitarian displacements that occurred in 2024 will also impact news audiences. As journalists respond to audience demands, this shift will encourage a journalistic focus on human interest and global perspective stories that amplify refugee and diaspora narratives. Diaspora communities will play a crucial role in shaping these narratives through activism and storytelling that will bloom in the 2025 media and journalism industry.

When giving a lecture on media framing at the University of British Columbia in 2022, I held a roundtable attended by many members of Palestinian diaspora in Canada. Every one of them expressed turning away from legacy media in favor of citizen journalism and treating activists as sources for news. What if journalists with training and established platforms could tap into these audiences who are rejecting them in favor of unofficial news sources? What does this rejection mean for the decline of legacy media and journalistic ethics of “truth-telling?”

The answers to these questions, I predict, will come to fruition in 2025. We, as an industry, will have to reevaluate the meaning of “journalistic independence” if we want that sickening pit of frustration to heal. And the demands of a growing diaspora born out of conflict, war, and displacement will be one exceedingly difficult to ignore.

Hafsa Maqsood is a journalist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary.