Slow-seeing journalism is a different way of experiencing, writing about and reporting on the world. Marcos Colón, author of LAB book The Amazon in Times of War, celebrates this way of immersing oneself in a subject. Other outlets for news on the Amazon share this perspective: Amazônia Real, Sumaúma and Colón’s own Amazônia Latitude. It is a journalism that eschews faux-neutrality, and while defending those who live in and defend the environment, acts and advocates to defend the Amazon, the forest and its peoples.

Dom Phillips, the British journalist murdered in the Amazon in 2022, was an effective exponent of ‘slow-seeing journalism’, says Marcos Colón, a professor of media and Indigenous communities at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the USA in a recent article. By this, Colón means that Phillips repudiated the ‘fly-in, fly-out’ journalism practised by many prominent correspondents, who are often sent into the field by mainstream media outlets for a short period to cover major stories. Because they are not immersed in the region, these journalists often treat the Amazon ‘as an exoticized or extractive space’, says Colón.

But Phillips was different. He lived in the region and paid attention to ‘the rhythms of the forest and the voices of its peoples’. He was, says Colón, able to translate the peoples’ ‘struggles and wisdom into language that educated readers, rather than entertaining them with sensationalism’. Moreover, he understood that journalism in the Amazon was essentially a ‘story of survival’ in which reporters and communities alike faces constant danger, marginalization, and what he called ‘an all-pervasive slow violence’.

The official death toll is high, though many assassinations are not reported in the media. According to Global Witness (2023) and regional NGOs, between 2020 and 2022 alone, more than 200 killings of environmental defenders, journalists, Indigenous leaders, and small farmers occurred across Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. This high number of deaths, Colón explains, is the convergence of at least four inter-related factors – state abandonment, institutional violence, extractive capitalism and attacks on Indigenous territories.

Philips was not alone in practising ‘slow-seeing journalism’. Several independent and Indigenous-focussed outlets, such as Amazônia Real, Sumaúma, and Amazônia Latitude (which Colón founded), have a similar approach. It is only through submersion into the culture, they say, that it is possible to break with ‘colonial media practice’.

The well-known Brazilian journalist, Eliane Brum, who founded Sumaúma, has taken concrete steps to promote slow-seeing journalism. She has recruited ‘forest journalists’ from the region, who work with conventional journalists. ‘We want to create another type of journalism,’ she has said, in which both sides learn. While defending professional journalism, in which information is fact-checked, she denounces what she calls the ‘myth of neutrality’, saying that journalists must take a side. Her aim, she openly declares, is to defend ‘the forest and its peoples’.

Moreover, she argues, in an even more radical proposal, that Amazonia should become ‘the centre of the world’.  The crucial importance of the vast Amazon forest as a stabilizing force in the world’s climate becomes clearer every day as we hurtle towards a planetary emergency. It is only by recognising that we face an emergency, she says, that we have a chance of survival.

But, pitched against the growing awareness of the gravity of this planetary emergency, is what Colón calls ‘extractive logic’, that is, the wish to use the Amazon forest as a resource from which to extract mineral and agricultural wealth. Nowhere was this clearer, says Colón, than at COP 30, the UN climate change conference held in Belém in November 2025.

An agreement was reached which included a commitment to multilateral climate action, with the goal of increasing adaptation finance threefold by 2035. But deep divisions between developed and developing nations, particularly with regard to climate finance and fossil fuel agreements, stalled progress on key issues. The parties attending the summit were unable to agree on a form of language that would anchor a phase-out of fossil fuels, due to the opposition of major fossil fuel-producing nations.

Marcos Colón is the author of LAB book The Amazon in Times of War (2024)

Article Main image: from ejournoaward.com