In recent years, Wesley Lowery been a leading voice in the public debate about the role of the press in a free society and multiracial democracy.

In 2020, he published an op-ed in the New York Times discussing the media’s failures to diversify, and need to reckon with the way “objectivity” has been used for decades to silence black voices inside mainstream media institutions and to empower powerful actors, particularly the police, to advance mistruths.

In early 2022, he published Black City, White Paper — a historical account of the Philadelphia Inquirer and, by extension, major white-owned newspapers to serve the black residents of their cities and the black journalists in their newsrooms.

In 2023, he published A Test of the News in the Columbia Journalism Review — laying out his “mosaic theory” of journalism and calling for rigor, fairness, context, transparency, nuance and clarity to be the principles that professional journalism seeks to uphold. Later, during an interview with Nieman Reports, he expanded upon those principles and what they mean for journalism education.

In 2024, he participated in a forum hosted by the Knight-Columbia First Amendment Institute about the future of the free press. The essay argued that the market-based press is broken, and advocated for the establishment of a federal trust for news and information. He later wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books drawing on the history and tradition of the black press for guidance for what journalists must do in difficult societal moments.