Is the news doing more to you than for you?
Left and right agree on one thing: something’s broken in the news. So what would it take for journalism to serve everyone in a divided time? Moni asks two friends and partners in good trouble who’ve spent years on that question: Joy Mayer, founder of Trusting News, and Jonathan Stray, a data journalist turned conflict scholar at UC Berkeley. Together they go where journalists rarely dare. Should newsrooms hire more Trump voters? Can reporters stay curious without platforming hate? And with the midterms closing in, how do the rest of us find news that does more for us than to us?
Guests:
Joy Mayer, Executive Director, Trusting News
Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist, UC Berkeley Center for Human-compatible AI
Credits
Host & Executive Producer: Mónica Guzmán
Senior Producer: Tracy Egbas
Producer: Jessica Jones
Associate Producer & Graphic Designer: Fredo Viola
Contributors: April Lawson & Travis Tripodi
Artist in Residence: Gangstagrass
A production of Reclaim Curiosity
Distribution Partners: KUOW, Braver Angels, and Deseret News
Financial Supporter: M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
Dispatches from the Divide is a co-production of BYUradio, Disagree Better and Braver Angels. You can find the rest of the episodes of this series here: https://www.byuradio.org/dispatches-from-the-divide/episodes
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Transcript
[00:00:00]
Mónica Guzmán:
Understand what you're going to media to find. Are you looking to, you know, scratch an emotional itch? Do you wanna see the other side go down? If you do, you're not evil, you're human. That's normal, but know it. Know —
Talking about the media and talking about the news. The midterms are right around the corner, so staying informed so we can make good choices, really important. But what media is doing to us sometimes feels like more of a conversation than what it's doing for us in a healthy democratic republic. We need a journalism that is equipped to help us understand each other. And a lot of us know, it's one of the things people on the left and right can agree on, that our journalism somehow isn't rising up to that challenge right now. Something is broken. Something's not working.
Now, the two guests I have with me today are also two really good friends. Joy Mayer is the founder of an organization called Trusting News, which is amazing. She researches and then trains journalists all over the country about how to earn trust with the public, with their communities. And then Jonathan Stray, he is a former investigative data journalist at the AP, and he is now at UC Berkeley. He does an amazing job getting to the bottom of a lot of cool things.
And we'll bring up the hard stuff for sure, which is something I want to do more of. I think it's something that journalists also, if we can go to the edges that we're afraid of and find ways to make sure that the public can meet us there in the places of discomfort, the places of encounter, then maybe we really can have a journalism that serves everyone well in a divided time.
And that is the big question of our conversation coming up. And I'm so grateful to Joy and Jonathan for joining me for this. Let's get to —
Joy, Jonathan, how are you? Hello. Welcome. How's it going? So I was thinking before we hit record about the last time I saw each of you, because there's some interesting stories there. Jonathan, you and I were at a conference called Newsgeist. Was it in the fall of last year? A year ago?
Jonathan Stray:
Yeah, something like that.
Mónica:
Yeah. I remember there was one session. You and I were both in it and I got into kind of a tense exchange with a fairly well-known newspaper editor and I was all kinds of spooked. But then afterward, I think I remember you coming up to me and being like, yeah, yeah, yeah. What you said, like, something about that was good, that you brought that out. And I can't name names and probably can't go into details, but mostly I want to say I appreciated making good trouble with you at that —
Jonathan:
Yeah. That was fun. I thought you were the diplomatic one. I thought I was the pokey one on that. But that's a great intro to this topic. This is a sensitive topic for journalists.
Mónica:
It is indeed. And I hope we can go to some of the edges that are a little difficult to go to. And then, Joy, where were we last?
Joy Mayer:
Yeah, in the spring we were at the Online News Association in Chicago and we had a main stage session in front of hundreds of journalists talking about what it would look like for journalism to encourage curiosity and reduce polarization and how journalists can confront bias. And even just the title can really spur a lot of defensiveness in journalists. And also relief from journalists who are like, so ready for the conversation, and feel like it's a hard one to have. It's just complicated.
Mónica:
Yeah. How would you describe the mood of that conference?
Joy:
Yeah. Journalists feel like they're really under siege. Doing journalism is really, really hard these days. In some cases, literally under siege, like laws being passed. And the business model is making it trickier and trickier. And there are fewer and fewer journalists in almost every newsroom. There are layoffs and just real budget problems. And so I think there's some well-earned defensiveness from journalists about what they should be doing differently and how they should be sort of working harder or challenging norms.
Mónica:
Work harder and do this differently. You're messing up and it's all going to AI anyway. You may not even have a job in five years.
I remember 10 years ago, that same conference, 15 years ago, it was a very different mood. And Jonathan, you've probably noticed this too. The mood in journalism is, how would you sum it up generally?
[00:05:00]
Jonathan:
Despair. I mean, that's definitely part of it.
Mónica:
For sure. Well, to dig into that a little bit more, I wanted to open up by, let's talk about what the problem even is. There's this deep sense that things are broken in journalism. The purpose it holds, its connection to the public, the role it serves in a healthy democratic republic, for example, attacks from many sides, lots of folks blaming journalism or the media for a lot of society's ills. And both of you have in your own ways been trying to push for a better vision and move journalism and the public and the whole connection to someplace brighter.
So let's begin with the problem. How would you even sum up what the problem is? What sticks in your mind? What feel like the biggest chunks? Anyone can start.
Jonathan:
Well, I mean, I think the top-level view is journalists have lost trust of the society that they are meant to serve. Not uniformly, not everyone, not every outlet, not all the time. But if you look at the Gallup polls that have been running for decades, we are near all-time lows and it's bipartisan. There is less trust on the conservative side, but trust has been falling among liberals and Democrats as well.
So why? Right. And it's not the internet, because this started before the internet. It's not AI, because it started before AI. Those might be contributing, but it's something else. Something is broken because the journalists are no longer considered credible sources by the people they're meant to serve.
Mónica:
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. They're no longer considered credible sources by the people they're meant to serve. I see Joy nodding her head.
Joy:
Yeah. I mean, Jonathan's absolutely right that this started before the internet. It started, I mean, really it started with choice. It started when we all could choose where we wanted to get information.
Mónica:
And where there were lots of choices available. Right. Like suddenly there were lots of choices, proliferation of channels, when there used to be — but yeah, keep going.
Joy:
Talk radio, cable news, all before the internet. Right. And so the burden of choice has fallen increasingly to the public. It is very, very difficult to figure out what to trust, where to get information. It's easy to choose information that feels cognitively comfortable, that matches how you see the world, that confirms how you see the world. So I think that the well-worn neural pathways toward choosing information that is not challenging is one of the problems, one of the things that's broken.
Another problem is the nationalization of both politics and journalism means that national politicized talking points are fueling our local school board races. And they're also infecting local conversations in a way that shows up in local news. But it also means that more people are consuming national news than local news, which means we understand our neighbors less, which means it feels like the ills of the country are also the ills of our neighborhood. And in some cases they are.
But I think that, you know, there's a real opportunity for local journalism to play a different role than national journalism. And that can be lost as newsrooms lose staff and also because people are just tuning to national narratives differently.
Mónica:
Yeah, I'm a big fan of agency, by the way. And the fact of nationalization takes attention up to a level where most people can't have a lot of power, at least not as much power as in their own community and what's going on there. So our attention is taken to a place where we get a little bit lost and diluted, which is not helpful to the sense that journalism ought to help you understand your society so you can be a more active participant in it. But please —
Joy:
Yeah, no, just a third thing I think is really wrong, as the problem, is that journalists and the public don't understand each other. So journalists, and I'm sure we'll talk about who journalists are, who staffs newsrooms. But journalists increasingly have less in common with society overall and are not building in enough curiosity about who they're aiming to be serving, who feels seen and understood by journalism and who feels neglected or misrepresented by journalism.
And the public has a harder time understanding the motivations of journalists and the role they play in society. I've had members of the public say to me, like, question whether what I'm providing is a public service. Yeah, just some things that the journalism I grew up in took for granted can no longer be taken for granted.
Mónica:
Yeah, that's well said. And Jonathan, I remember you making the point another time that we talked about this, that there's nothing wrong with partisan media. Some people kind of put the blame on it. So it's not all the partisan media, it's more about not having nonpartisan media, right? That's more of a problem. So can you elaborate there?
[00:10:00]
Jonathan:
There are very few, maybe no journalistic outlets where you find that audience members of all political or ideological persuasions trust that outlet. And, you know, these have gradually disappeared, right? So now the AP is considered left-wing, which I think is crazy. So I was an AP editor for a while. And we were studiously, for lack of better language, non-editorial throughout our time, very careful.
Mónica:
What do you mean by non-editorial, just to make sure that I understand?
Jonathan:
Well, there was this idea that you could really separate facts from opinion, which is kind of true and kind of not true. We can really get into that one a bit later if you want. But we tried very hard to just, you know, just the facts. We didn't put our opinion in.
And I remember actually in journalism school, an old wire service editor, I'll never forget this. He says, "Nobody cares what you think. That's not your job as a reporter. If your ideas are that good, you should be an analyst, you should be an academic, you should be a public intellectual. That is not the reporter's job." And so that was the ethos. But that is no longer convincing to the public. And it's still not convincing to journalists either.
Mónica:
Yeah, I wondered about that, because I saw you look like you agreed. Joy, has that ethos changed from your vantage point?
Joy:
I think that some of the values that drive journalism have expanded to include a sort of truth-telling that can absolutely feel like analysis. Yeah. I think that that is accurate.
Mónica:
Yeah, whether —
Joy:
Or whether or not it would feel to people like I'm injecting my opinion, versus it feels very important to name this thing what it is, to make sure people see the truth. You know, I would separate motivation from reality. But I think in general, who we are as human beings is showing up in our journalism more than it used to.
Mónica:
I want to name one more thing, which is the attention economy, how much that has influenced journalism economics. Everything about how news is produced, structured and targeted is about, news organizations don't survive unless they can get eyeballs on their work. Geography is no longer putting bounds around certain communities of information and communities of knowing. So there's an international competition. And it's not just competing against another news source. You're competing against Netflix, you're competing against almost everything. So there's really, really deep challenges that come from this mandate to get your attention on whatever it is we produce. It's got to hook you, it's got to get you.
Okay, well, now we've got some of that out. Let's get a little bit sunnier, perhaps. What's the vision? What's the vision we're striving for? And each of you have particular angles that I know you're super passionate about. So let's start with you, Joy. And if you wouldn't mind, tell us a little bit about how and why Trusting News got started, just so we can understand the path you walked to how you see it.
Joy:
Yeah, I worked in newspaper newsrooms and taught at the Missouri School of Journalism. And I was leading a community engagement team in a newsroom in Columbia, Missouri, the local morning newspaper for Columbia, Missouri.
Mónica:
I think that's where we first —
Joy:
Yeah, I think it is. And I was realizing that more people didn't have faith in the basic integrity of what our newsroom was trying to do. We were trying to engage people in our, you know, coverage of whatever was happening in town and host conversations. And it became clear that fewer people were trusting us to do that. And they were asking really basic questions about trust and about what our role was in society. And so I thought I wanted to learn how trust is gained and lost in general and try to experiment with strategies for journalists to rebuild trust.
The answer that I was seeing from journalists was, well, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing. Surely it'll start working again. It's always worked before. I mean, this isn't to say that people didn't used to get mad at journalists. Of course, that's always been. You know, we used to say, if everyone's yelling at us, we're probably doing something right. And yes, that old adage has needed to adapt over time, because we're not getting yelled at equally. And we should care very deeply about that.
So I just started to recruit journalists to help me test out strategies for rebuilding trust. What is it people need to understand about your journalism to find it credible? Can we test out ideas? I work with academics and with partner newsrooms, and our team is just continually learning about trust.
And our vision is for journalism to be really curious about who it's serving and who it's not serving, to be willing to adapt based on what it learns, and to be continually more responsive and committed to earning trust day to day rather than expecting it or demanding it.
[00:15:00]
Mónica:
How would you know that that vision came to life? What signals would you look for? How would you know you've succeeded?
Joy:
We would have succeeded if we are reaching a more diverse public. We like to think of what we're doing as public service, but you serve the public you have, not the public you wish you had. And so we are not actually providing a public service to people who don't trust us. And we should have, to Jonathan's point, an audience, an active audience of people from all walks of life.
Mónica:
And I'm going to ask you to just expand on that a little bit, because when people hear diversity, there's so many different colors and flavors, right? And for some groups, it's just this. And for other groups, the more important diversity is that. Can you give us a sense of what kinds of difference you try to embrace?
Joy:
Yeah. I mean, I think across fault lines like age, race and ethnicity for sure, gender, geography, urban, suburban, rural, like who are you here to serve? Faith communities, socioeconomic fault lines, and intellectual and diversity of perspective fault lines as well.
I think, actually, that's something we haven't said yet, and I think it's really important. Some news exists to serve a specific slice of the community. Right. Some news exists to serve an age demographic, a very specific geographic demographic. And some has a kind of philosophical lens or a political lens, and they're going to center specific voices and views. And that is perfectly fine and appropriate. So mostly, I think what we're talking about today is journalism that aims to serve a complex, diverse community and is not doing that successfully.
Mónica:
Right. And I'm going to name, because this is a podcast rooted in the political divide, that when Joy is talking about differences in perspective, that absolutely includes different political ideologies. Of course, a lot of the energy of the conversation about bias and trust in journalism is about that particular divide. So we see that. I know Joy sees that, because you and I have talked about that. There's a lot going on with that.
So all right, Jonathan, what in the world are you doing? What's the angle you come from? And why?
Jonathan:
Well, I've had a strange career. So I started as a computer scientist, I took a complete left turn, went to journalism school in Hong Kong, ended up as an editor at the Associated Press in New York and had a 10-year career in New York journalism. So I saw, you know, inside the belly of the beast. It was actually a great experience. And now I'm a conflict scholar.
So somewhere along the line, I got involved with the international peacebuilding community. I started to see how the people trying to end wars were dealing with very similar problems as the people thinking about polarization in the US. Now, I actually study AI in conflict. So the questions I ask are basically, are the machines going to make us fight ourselves more or less?
But mostly, that looks like social science. Mostly, what I study is how do people react to different types of messages, different types of ways of discussing the truth? And we'll hit on truth a lot, right? That's going to be a big part of this question.
So, but you know, what I like to tell people is, the people who study political conflict, and let's just restrict this to the United States for the moment, the United States domestic conflict, the culture war, the polarization, the left-right divide, right? There's no universal name for it. But we all know what we're talking about. Liberals versus conservatives. They know a lot of things about the dynamics of this that journalists don't. Journalists don't think this way. And there's a lot of sort of low-hanging fruit, right? There's a lot of stuff that is fairly obvious if you study conflict that journalists just don't think about.
And so this is what I think about all day long. And, you know, the fundamental problem that we framed this episode about is how do you create a journalism that people who really disagree on all kinds of values and ideas and even facts will all go to, because we have to have some places where that's still possible, as we keep saying, right?
[00:20:00]
Mónica:
If you want to do that, why do we have to have some places where that's still possible? Why isn't a media that's a bunch of silos serving its own little silo, and everything's fine? Why?
Jonathan:
So I think that is strictly worse. And I think the reason is there's no place. So if there's any future where things get better, there has to be positive contact between the sides in these fights. And if there's no place that can happen, there's no way that things can improve.
And Mónica, I know you know this very well from your work with Braver Angels and the bridging field. You've been in a thousand conversations between liberals and conservatives, and you really know the micro details of this, whereas all the work I do is I take this very broad statistical view. I do these 10,000-person experiments. So, you know, I have this sort of macro view of it. But it is possible to have positive contact between people who disagree, to have them come to understand each other, to have them agree more on basic facts, not entirely, we'll get into the fact question a little bit, and to generally improve things. And it's not that complicated, really. It would just require a different approach within newsrooms.
Mónica:
So before we get to what those different approaches are, and how to answer some of the barriers journalists feel, one more thing. Jonathan, you had mentioned there are things that conflict folks do and get that journalists don't. Can you think of one example?
Jonathan:
Yeah, so this is one that I've been really talking about a lot recently. Let's talk about misinformation, everybody's favorite topic.
Mónica:
Yeah, you know what, we were going there next anyway. Hop in.
Jonathan:
All right, let's do it. Right. So what are the objections we get? And we've all heard this in various contexts, when we talk to journalists about this idea of — so first of all, I'm gonna put a name on it. I'm gonna call it pluralistic or plural journalism. So journalism that respects the diversity of the audience and allows different political takes.
And so, you know, I start talking about this idea of pluralistic journalism, and almost always the first question I get is, yeah, but I don't want to repeat falsehoods. And, you know, we're gonna get real specific here and less abstract, right? So, you know, journalists are usually liberal-leaning, and, well, that is contested. But, well, you know, I've got the data, we can get into that a little bit. And so usually what they say is something like, am I supposed to pretend that the 2020 election was won by Trump?
And, okay, so here's a basic idea. So there's been a huge amount of discussion and research and conversation about fact checks, and the idea that when someone says something isn't true, you should push back on that. And generally speaking, I believe that part of having an informed society is if there's strong evidence that something isn't true, you should say it. However, refutations don't seem universally effective.
In particular, what has happened is that the people who are most likely to be the targets of fact checks, if that's the right word, also are the least trusting. Trust in fact checkers collapsed among conservatives circa, you know, 2019, 2020, somewhere around there, maybe a little earlier.
Okay, so what's the option? Because the journalists I talked to think the option is either a strong refutation or a very neutral, like, both-sides, not-trying-to-say-who's-right answer. And I think there's a third option. I think the third option is give the strongest possible case for both sides. And if it is true that there is better evidence that the 2020 election was not fraudulent, then that should be clear to a reader.
Right? Like, we have to have some basic faith in this idea that presented with the strongest possible evidence for each case, which is a very old idea, right? This goes back to John Stuart Mill. This is like basic Enlightenment philosophy, that people will come to evidence-based conclusions. And I think we've lost faith in that idea. It's not something that usually even enters into this discussion.
So there's one idea. And I'm in fact running large experiments to prove that this works, that a two-sided steelman argument persuades in the direction of truth. So if we do this next year, I'll have the results.
Mónica:
Yeah. There's a book by Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge, I think, something like that. But he makes the very good case that historically, people do move toward what is the strongest evidence and what is factually true over time. Sometimes people have reasons they want to hold on to something that's a little bit shady, reasons of kind of attachment to some identity or loyalty to some group. And once that reason falls away, then okay, people kind of accept something as being true.
But yeah, what you're pointing out to me, Jonathan, is, I think that there is a fear among many journalists and, you know, people who are putting information out there, to be responsible. And they're so afraid of what people will do with their reporting. And so if I even air the concern or a perspective that questions something that I believe to be factually true, then I am causing a kind of harm. I am contributing to the degradation of society. So you're saying something that flies in the face of that and saying, actually, why don't you trust the process? Go grab evidence.
And you and I know, and Joy does as well, Isaac Saul, famous case, right? Isaac Saul, this journalist who heads up Tangle News. 2020 election, he's like, okay, people are worried there was fraud. I'm gonna take that seriously. Why wouldn't we? What if there was fraud? Right? What if there was? What if people are hiding a lot of stuff?
I mean, I'll just name right now that several weeks ago in New Jersey, you know, it came out that hundreds of people who were non-citizens were, you know, accidentally enrolled to be voters. And it turned out, I think, 400 of them actually voted. It wasn't enough to sway an election one way or the other. But it told me as a citizen, don't be so sure. You know, don't believe too hard any narrative, including, like, you know, the oft-repeated line, because it is backed by a lot of evidence, that voter fraud is extremely rare. That's true. That doesn't mean we don't go and check it out, especially if a lot of people are concerned.
So what you're saying, Jonathan, is what would be the harm in checking everything out, taking everything seriously, reporting it all the way? Isaac did that. And time and time again — I mean, he's even written about, like, "I kind of wanted to find fraud. And I couldn't." Right? "I couldn't find it. I really tried."
So Joy, yeah, your thoughts on this piece.
[00:25:00]
Joy:
Yeah, I think that one of the things that frustrates me the most is how invisible the process of journalism is. And I think it's one of the reasons that people are now really gravitating toward individual journalists, creator journalists, newsletters, podcasts, things that are a little more spacious, because those journalists can take you along on a journey. Right? Like, here's the question I set out to ask. Isaac does a great job of this in the Tangle newsletter. And here's what I found. I'm inviting you along. There may not be a conclusion at the end. His format is to have a conclusion. But it's bringing people along on a journey. And it's sharing those questions that are like research questions, right? They are neutrally framed. They are open-minded. They are curious, right?
The format of journalism is so often what we call the inverted pyramid, which is that it's shaped like a triangle, and at the very top is the main point, which is often a conclusion. Here's the thing you most need to know. And if you stick with it, we're going to back that up to certain degrees, but we're not bringing you on a journey. And I think that there is a lot of room and need for journalism that roots itself in the process of the inquiry.
Mónica:
Yeah, absolutely. And there's examples, you know, with COVID, there's examples going back to the Iraq War. I mean, everybody wants to do right by truth. And, you know, when we think that means avoiding certain questions, I think we need to be careful. Maybe there isn't —
Joy:
I would like to add something, which is that you mentioned that one of the challenges, one of the things that's broken, is the attention economy.
Mónica:
Yeah.
Joy:
Because what journalists are going to say to you is, who the heck is going to come along with me on a journey? I can't get them to click past the headline. Right. And so we can say that we want this. And yet the market forces that drive journalism don't make a strong case that people will stick with you through a long exploratory journey.
Mónica:
That's a very good point. I don't think we have a good answer to that. That is a tough one. Everyone's doing their best at the moment, but it is really tough.
Okay. Another point I want to make on this is I worry a lot about people making others almost ineligible. Let me start over. That once somebody says something that seems to be a falsehood or is going in the wrong direction, that someone in journalism would say, there's nothing to learn from that person. If I talk to that person, if I explore what they believe and why, then I'm only going to be opening kind of a Pandora's box of ugliness and things that are going to deform.
But that's not quite it, because when people, even if they believe something that may factually be untrue or is pointing them toward conclusions that there's just not a lot of evidence for, talking to people about what's concerning them, what they're worried about, always reveals an important truth, which is the truth of people's perspectives. The truth of what people are concerned about. That has to be fodder for good journalism.
You know, because I think the vision we're all kind of agreed on is we need a journalism that is equipped to help people understand each other. Because without that, you know, are we just reporting facts? I don't think that's what we're doing anymore. I don't think that's going to serve a divided world very well, to only do that.
[00:30:00]
Jonathan:
Yeah. So I have strong feelings about this one. So first of all, I think it's important to acknowledge that journalism long ago stopped just reporting facts. And, oh, can I do my first chart?
Mónica:
Do it. Go.
Jonathan:
All right. Here we go.
This is Nieman Journalism Lab, and this is now, I think, a decade old, but this is me writing about this graph, which is from a study where they looked at the front pages of newspapers over a 50-year span. And basically what's happening here is this conventional line here, this is the just-the-facts reporting. Look how that's now a minority. Whereas what they call contextual, or what you might call analytical journalism, is increasing. And in fact, there's other studies that show that this trend goes back a hundred years. It used to be journalism just reported, a ship docked and 400 elephants came off of it yesterday at the pier. And now you will write a story. It's like, well, this is why there were 400 elephants there and this is where they're going. And this is the backstory.
Mónica:
Yes. This is the last time animals landed at the pier. Right.
Jonathan:
Exactly. Right. And that's not bad. That's useful. That helps people to understand their world, that provides, you know, important information. And especially in the age where, you know, once a fact is in public, you can get it in 20 different sources, that adds value, right? This is journalism moving up the value chain. So we should stop saying that journalism is just about "just the facts, ma'am," right? It has not been for decades, if not longer.
So what do we have instead? Well, we have to have some sort of analysis, contextualization, and there's a lot of subjectivity in that. And that's okay. That's not the problem. The problem is when that subjectivity differs from your audience. And this includes even basic ideas around — so in my research, one of the things that I've shown is many disagreements about facts are actually disagreements about which sources are reliable. Right.
So before you can even get to, I don't know, let's take the COVID lab leak hypothesis, right? Before you can even get to, was it actually a lab? You have to get to, do you trust the CDC? Do you trust the CIA? Would you trust this independent analyst? Do you trust Fauci? Right. You can't even have the conversation about having a conversation about which sources are reliable.
And I think it's a failure of human psychology that when people disagree with us, we think there must be something wrong. But I think it's a basic sort of useful rule of thumb that if lots and lots of people are doing something that seems crazy to you, it's not crazy. They're not more rational than you somehow. Right. So the tendency is to say, well, they're misinformed, or they're ignorant, or they're brainwashed, or they're evil, usually in that order. But normally it's none of those. Normally, for their context, for the world they live in, what they're doing actually makes a lot of sense. And until you can understand why it makes sense, you're going to fail to both understand them and to persuade them.
Mónica:
Exactly. You're gonna miss something. So it's, what am I missing? What's going on? And yeah, my vision of that ideal kind of journalistic ethos is the curiosity to want to understand: this is meaningful to someone, this is valuable to someone. Why? Why? And to not be scared off by something that feels too wrong, you know, at the start.
Jonathan:
And this is what the refutation, or the one-sided fact check — this is why it fails. It's because it says to the person reading it who is of the opposite view, you're not taking me seriously. Right. I believe A, B and C. And you're not even mentioning A, B and C. So why should I think you've actually done your homework here?
Mónica:
Right. You're checking the fact, but you're not listening to what's behind my embrace of this —
Jonathan:
You're not listening to me at all. I have reasons to believe what I believe.
Mónica:
Exactly.
Joy:
We all can picture that interpersonally, right? Like if I'm arguing with my husband and he's just missing my entire point, he thinks he understands my frustration, but he's arguing the wrong thing. I'm like, stop, could you just stop? You're not hearing me. Yes. I think that's what's happening.
[00:35:00]
Mónica:
Exactly. Turns out this is called switchtracking. I learned this from Julia Minson, who's over at Harvard, and another researcher at a conference I went to. But switchtracking is when people are having a disagreement, but they're actually talking about two different things, and they're not meeting each other on the thing they're actually disagreeing about, you know? And that's exactly the example you just gave, Joy. So if that happens between journalists and the public, how can we expect anything other than mistrust?
So let's move to that. The obstacle of suspicion. There's this sense, there's this narrative, and there's this deep, like, earned, I would say, mistrust. And Joy, like, you're the trust queen, you know, it's earned, right? Like, we have to see how we got here.
Joy, you and our friend Tom Rosenstiel, who just put out a great book on journalism called The Next Journalism, both talk about something called benevolence. Tom breaks it down, and please fill in the blanks where they exist. Tom breaks down trust into these three pieces, that, you know, journalists or anyone else who's trying to get trust needs to be accountable, credible and benevolent. They have to demonstrate those three things. So, I know what I'm doing. I'm going to fix my mistakes and be honest about them. But also, I have your best interest at heart. I have good intentions. So yeah, I don't know if that's where you want to start or not, but I'm fascinated by this idea of benevolence as something we need to talk about.
Joy:
Yeah. The researchers will break that down even further into individual benevolence and societal benevolence. Do I think that you care about me and the impact that your work has on me? And do I think that you care about society? Are you on the side of good, right? Are you one of the good guys? And do you care about the influence that your work has on society?
And I think journalists do a really terrible job of making that clear, and of being curious about where maybe their work is serving a certain slice of the community and not other slices of the community, because what we miss can cause harm. And people — is it David Brooks who said that being unseen feels like an injustice?
Mónica:
Yes.
Joy:
Being misunderstood and unseen feels like an injustice. So for all the people who are in that disconnect you just described, Moni, of, you know, journalism is not seeing me and not understanding me, that feels like an injustice. Why in the world would I then turn back and trust your fact check?
Mónica:
Yeah, exactly. Oh, you're very talented. You're very capable of doing great reporting. You really are surfacing wonderful information that may turn out to be really true, the best there is. But if I don't think that you're taking me seriously, you're helping me, or you're doing good, the facts don't matter. It's kind of that simple. Right?
Yeah. So all right. What's the constructive side of this? How does one build benevolence from this despairing place?
Joy:
I mean, honestly, where I start with newsrooms is really diving into much more curiosity. I was training a statewide public radio newsroom last week. And, Moni, a part of your book that I quote the most often, that journalists really love, is "whoever is underrepresented in your life is overrepresented in your imagination." And when I say that to a newsroom, I say, look around and think about your own families, your own social network, your own neighborhoods. Who do you have personal experience with? And what viewpoints or ideas or demographics are you filling in the gaps on without realizing it? Are you making assumptions?
I talk a lot about how, of course, we tell sophisticated stories about things we know really well. So when I was a 21-year-old intern in Juneau, Alaska, I had to write a story about pulp mining. I didn't even know what it was. I'm not even sure I could tell you what it is right now. But at the time I had to dive in and somehow become an expert on pulp mining, right? That story was not as good as it would have been if I had come in with subject matter expertise, even like agricultural expertise, much less that specific, you know, timber in that specific part of the world.
So journalists get that. You ask more sophisticated questions, you get to the heart of it better, when you come in with some knowledge. And teams of journalists do a fairly good job in some ways, leaning on each other. Like, oh, I want to do a story about fishing. I know who fishes on the weekend. Let me make sure I go ask that person, what questions should I ask? Who should I talk to? What's really going on here?
We too often lack that same curiosity when it comes to viewpoints. When it comes to, what might I be missing? We don't even realize what we're missing and where we're filling in the gaps.
Mónica:
Yeah, it's things we don't share, things that are not that familiar to us. There's fewer kind of threads to pull on. And so we're more likely to kind of leave that question there, you know. Or if it feels like it's coming from a perspective that opposes our own personally, then we're actually repelled by it a little bit. We don't want to investigate it, which contributes to this sense that we're not serving people.
Jonathan, anything to add on this one?
[00:40:00]
Jonathan:
Well, I'm gonna go in the sort of spicy concrete example. And I'm gonna talk about immigration politics. I would say that over the last few years, it has been dawning on liberals in general, and let's say the Democratic Party in particular, that their stance on immigration was in fact very unpopular with many people.
And so, okay, why, right? And this is a big hairy discussion. I think that many people with liberal politics will very quickly jump to explanations like racism. And I don't want to say that racism is not a factor, because we know that it is real, it has happened. You can talk to anybody who's not white, and they'll be able to tell you this.
However, there are other reasons that immigration, especially unauthorized immigration, is a problem for communities. And if you live in a city where you don't get a lot of, you know, new arrivals who, you know, need all of these services and that sort of thing, you don't see it. If you live in a border town, it's real obvious what's going on. And there's a bunch of stuff that's hidden.
So for example, it was a few years ago, I think — don't quote me on this, but something like, in 2022, New York City spent $4 billion to house and provide services for unauthorized immigrants. $4 billion. You know, that's a lot of money. And it's not that we necessarily shouldn't be spending money on people who need our help in a humanitarian way, right? That's a very reasonable argument to have. And we can talk about that. It's just that that is a negative effect that is real. And that is a concrete reason, especially for, like, a smaller town where, you know, you're trying to keep the schools funded, but you got to provide all of these essential services to people who never plan to arrive. That's a real stress on the community.
And so the coverage in journalism about the immigration crisis was for a long time very one-sided, in that it never really grappled with the concrete drawbacks that weren't just bigotry. It was sort of very uncurious about this. And it paid a trust price. And not just journalism, but I would say the sort of liberal political establishment in general is finally coming around to the view that, like, oh, actually, people actually do care about this. And some of the reasons they care about it are good reasons.
Mónica:
Yeah, I love the phrase "paid the trust price." That quote, that trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Yeah, so true. So unfortunate, right? If we're missing something.
So there's two things I want to pick up on. I hope we have time to get to both from what you both are saying. One is, there's a whole conversation here about representation, how well do journalists represent their communities, that we're touching on. I want to dig into that. Also, though, there is the fear of causing harm.
So, Joy, you and I, when we were at the Online News Association conference — and this was pretty cool, pretty stunning — we opened submissions for people to, you know, ask questions. We only got time for, I don't know, five, but people sent what? Way more. Dozens. And one of them was this: "Whether we understand someone or not, left or right, their humanity doesn't change. So how do you reduce polarization in situations where a person's humanity is at the forefront of the story?"
And another version of kind of the similar type of question that a journalist posed was, "How do you balance being curious about other perspectives without platforming hate speech?" Both those questions get to, we don't want to platform anything that feels like a harmful tendency in our society, which, who doesn't love that instinct, right? So how would you —
Jonathan:
Many people don't love that instinct, I would say, actually.
Mónica:
No, nobody loves that instinct. Yeah, exactly. So, okay. How are we supposed to thread this needle?
Joy:
Yeah, I mean, it's a really complicated question. I'll just say, Moni, that when you and I were getting those questions, we were in Chicago, where there had been in April, not too long after, quite an immigration surge, ICE presence. And there were panels at the same conference about Chicago journalists and how they had covered the ICE presence.
I think that one of the things that can be so complicated is to figure out what expertise you are giving people, what you are inviting people to share, and not ascribing expertise to people beyond what they are qualified to talk about. People are experts in their own experience. And sometimes people are also experts in other things. But I think that if you center the goal of helping people understand each other, it doesn't actually serve a community to not understand the different lenses people would have on the presence of immigrants and the response of the government. It is in the best interest of a community to understand the different ways that people experience that.
So, I think that there has to be a — I mean, journalists will go straight to, like, I'm not going to interview Nazis, right? You know, I'm not going to just republish hate speech. And I think we need to be a little less binary in terms of what we are inviting people to share and what we are making room for people to share. It's really complicated. The answer is not going to be the same for every newsroom, for every community.
I think it's also worth saying that that is not the work for every journalist. At that same conference, someone came up to us to talk about a member of her own family who had been picked up that week. And it is not the work of that journalist to be out interviewing people about their views on immigration, perhaps. And I think that newsrooms need to make room for the sort of comfort levels, and who is able and up for the job of accepting what people have to say about that.
[00:45:00]
Mónica:
I'm going to push on that a little bit. And this is risky. But I've often wondered, if some journalists, depending on who they are and where they come from, can opt out of curiosity on some corner, why are they a journalist? That's a really provocative question. And I know it's really risky. And I know I'm going to get —
Jonathan:
Yeah, I had a little bit of that too, right? Like, there's a way in which I agree with you, Joy, and a way in which I'm like, but this is your job.
Mónica:
I know how insensitive that sounds.
Joy:
I know. But there are a lot of ways to be a journalist. You're not dismissing curiosity in general. I mean, my husband's a social worker. He decided going into social work that he would be happy working with old people. He didn't necessarily have the separation to work with young kids when he was a young dad. I'm not here to investigate the abuse of children. That's not the kind of social work I want to do.
I do think within journalism — I mean, we should also say, this might be a good moment to say, there are a lot of ways to be a journalist. Some people cover the travel industry. Exactly. You don't have to wade into all of this. I mean, not everybody wades into all of this, and things look really differently covering, you know, this small town you grew up in versus — you know, most people aren't covering the Trump administration. Most people are covering local communities or specific topic areas. If you're a health reporter — now, politics can absolutely overlap with health reporting, business reporting, all those things. But it is not the job of everybody in a newsroom to be out interviewing people about their feelings about immigration.
Mónica:
I think that's true. And I worry about the culture getting too strong of — I don't know if I can even get the words out, but I worry about a culture in journalism getting too strong that says, you know, journalists can make personal decisions about the places where they can't go because it's just too uncomfortable. It's like, that's true. But I don't want it to become so true that it ends up masking a lot of places where people are not asking questions they should, for the benefit of their community, because we have a newsroom that wants to care for the people in the newsroom.
I love that. I mean, I remember growing up and becoming a journalist and being very wary of the fact that all these statistics said this is the most stressed-out occupation. Everything sucks. And I was like, do I really want to do this? It's true. I'm not saying let's go back to that. But I guess I would like a little more in the journalism culture that builds capacity, rigor and pride around the ability to ask anything of anyone. And can we at least say, all journalists ought to be pushing their edges? Could we at least say that?
Joy:
I don't know. I will agree with that. I do think that journalism at its best is a team sport. And that sometimes you can tag out and sit on the bench and let somebody else dive into something. Not everybody's going to be up for sitting through the gnarliest trial, or knocking on the door of the family that just lost a loved one in a crime. I mean, there are a lot of really tough jobs in journalism. And some people are really well suited to some more than others.
Mónica:
Yeah, no, I think that's true. And Jonathan, I think I misheard some comment you made earlier, so let me just double-check that. When I was reading the question about, you know, how do you reduce polarization in situations where a person's humanity is at the forefront of the story, saying it's an instinct we can all get behind, to want to reduce harm — did you actually say some people don't? Okay, so what did you mean by that? I should have jumped right in and said, what do you —
[00:50:00]
Jonathan:
Okay, so what I mean is that the debate over whether and what kinds of speech are harmful and should be restricted is a live one. It has been a live one, you know, in the sort of current cultural context, for at least four decades. It has been a live one in the broader context, you know, forever, literally. So there are different values at play here.
So not saying things which could be considered harmful to some people is a value. And I totally get that. There are reasons we don't use the n-word, right? There are good reasons. At the same time, there are drawbacks. Letting people say what they actually think and believe in the way that they understand it is also a value, is also a valuable thing to do. So let me, again, I like to go direct to the most controversial concrete example.
Mónica:
I'm appreciating this about you, Jonathan. I'm loving it.
Jonathan:
I just think you should get real about all this stuff. Let's not mince words. Okay, so let's talk about journalistic coverage of trans issues. All right, let's jump right into it. Of course, this has been an extremely hot-button topic, which is fascinating for all kinds of reasons, one of which is they're not a very large segment of the population. So how did they become an electoral issue? But that aside for a second.
So within the trans community, or at least certain vocal segments of the trans community, there's a lot of discussion about the right language to use for trans people and trans issues. So, for example, you know, "assigned female at birth," as opposed to, say, what other people might say, "biologically female," and so on. All right. So now the question is, you know, how should the newsroom treat this language? What should reporters use? Should you quote people who say "biologically female"? Should you, you know, platform people who make the argument that that's the right thing to say? And, you know, this isn't even the spiciest thing we could talk about on this issue.
And what I would say is that forcibly excluding certain ideas and certain kinds of thoughts has its own harm that has to be balanced against the potential harm of saying things that might be considered hurtful to some people.
And now I'm going to get super spicy. And I will say two things. One is that being oppressed doesn't always make you right. And journalists have to remember that, right? It's very easy to decide on the side of the oppressed because we want to help out the powerless, but it doesn't make them right. It doesn't make them kind necessarily. In fact, being oppressed often makes people mean.
And also that certain elements of the political left have spent several years, let's say a decade or more, employing, let's call them, illiberal strategies. Illiberal, yes, non-liberal. So, you know, volumes and volumes have been written on this, so I don't want to rehash too much of it here, except to say that I think the best way I heard this described was, somewhere in the early 2010s, there were segments of the left that gave up on the idea of trying to persuade people. They just said, you know what, these people are bigots. We need to defeat them politically. We don't need to engage with them. We don't need to try to persuade them.
Now, there's a lot one could say about that. As a political strategy, maybe, right? If you want to defeat the anti-trans candidates in your elections, fine, go for it. That's what democracy is. But as journalists, I think we have to be in the business of persuasion rather than forcibly telling people what to think or shutting down conversations.
I don't want to be an absolutist. I'm not going to say you should never shut down a conversation or you should entertain every conversation, but I would say generally our bias has to be around more speech, not less, even if that speech might be harmful, because there is a cost to preventing certain things from being said. And one of those costs is the people who think that way will feel, correctly, that they're not represented. And so why should they trust anything you said?
Mónica:
They're not being heard out. They're being made into monsters. There's probably some sense of loss and something really important to understand, and we're not understanding it. It's harm versus harm.
What I love about the equation you kind of just put is that the concern about there being harm around airing certain ideas has to be weighed against the concern of not hearing out what's going on there, right? Building the trust, being able to say, "We're hearing you and you deserve to be heard. You're worthy. You've built a life. You have expertise around your own life. What have you been seeing and going through?" But then people think if you hear that out, you are again actively harming the people that those views are harming. And so it's just this one giant moral panic around trying to be a good person. That's what this is.
[00:55:00]
Jonathan:
And it's not just a moral panic. I think it also has to be said that there was political risk about holding certain positions. We saw a lot of internal censure in newsrooms circa 2020, the peak of this era.
And I think there's this old maxim, which is, the only interesting case for free speech is when someone says something you don't like. And I think as a profession, as an ideology, we got a little bit on the wrong side of that. I think we lost our faith in discussion and debate. And we allowed people who wanted to shut down certain types of conversation to win the day, at least for some topics, for some time. And I think that was a terrible mistake. And I think it cost trust from exactly the people journalists might most want to reach.
Mónica:
Okay, there's a lot here. So Joy, yeah, on this.
Joy:
And then I want to add one thing, which is there's another way that people are left out that I think journalists often miss. And that is not the people who most stridently hold their views on one side or the other. It's people who haven't been invited to the conversation. And I talk to journalists a lot about what the on-ramps are to different ideas.
And I actually have a recent example on this topic. A high school journalist outside Orlando, Florida, near where I live, was doing this story about trans students and their experience on campus. Her high school newspaper wouldn't publish the story. And so it was published in a nearby local nonprofit newsroom. And she included a box with the story explaining some of the vocabulary of the story. And I asked her why she did that. And she said it just seemed clear that she didn't want anyone to feel ashamed for not already knowing. She wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page. Really thoughtful, lovely explanation.
I interviewed the executive director of the Trans Journalists Association about their thoughts about doing that sort of thing. And they were really thoughtful as well. And so they thought of it as a matter of audience legibility: to who is this story legible?
And just, what are we skipping over when we assume that people either already know or are filled with hate, right? As if this is a binary. Like, if you're not already familiar with these ideas, if you don't already know people like this and have them in your life, then you probably aren't one of us. You probably are bigoted, as opposed to, who still needs an on-ramp when talking about this topic?
Mónica:
Yes. Oh my gosh. I want to move us to something I wanted to make sure we had time to cover, which is the bright spots, the green shoots. Who are the journalists, the organizations who are doing something right when it comes to serving everyone in a divided time through the service of journalism? So I want to open the floor. Do you all have someone in mind?
Jonathan:
I've got some papers.
Joy:
Okay. I'll mention just a couple things. Well, I send people to Tangle News all the time. I wish we had more examples of news outlets where the value proposition is a full exploration of different ways of seeing something. And then I also wish there were more organizations where a core value proposition was what Ground News does, which is, we're going to help you see things that you're missing, right? Filling out your gaps.
What I look for with local journalists — I had a newsroom that's been through a bunch of training with Trusting News recently send me an example of a story in Shasta County, California. And the headline of the story was "Shasta's recent election signals a shift in what California's most conservative voters will tolerate." Shasta County is really interesting. They've got a big Indigenous population, also a pretty far-right extremist population that gets covered a lot nationally. The community overall feels really frustrated by national portrayals of what's going on in their hometown.
And the staff was rightly really proud of the story. It was so nuanced, avoided easy labels, asked people how they wanted to be identified before putting people in buckets, really took time to expansively explain how people saw things. And there was really robust debate in the comments. This news outlet is a local startup, hasn't been around all that long, a small team, but they've earned the right to host a conversation around something like this. And people were respectfully disagreeing with it. "I respectfully disagree," but they were hosting conversation, right? And multiple people thanked the reporter.
I'm always on the lookout for spots where I think the journalists took time to do it differently, named their goal in a way that would invite people to consume the story through a specific lens of, here's what we're trying to do.
[01:00:00]
Mónica:
All right. That's awesome. Good to know that's happening. Jonathan, what have you got?
Jonathan:
Well, I was going to name Tangle and Ground News as well, but since Joy grabbed them — and I think it's notable that there are so few exceptions. I also want to say Semafor. I think Semafor is a very interesting organization who are also trying to do a broader perspective and have done some interesting experiments in this way.
And part of their format — so part of what this comes down to is article format. And both Tangle and Ground News have a very explicit, here's what the left is saying, here's what the right is saying. In the Tangle case, here's what I think. Semafor does this occasionally. Another interesting thing about Semafor is that the executive editor is Gina Chua, who's a transgender woman. So she's not blind to these issues. She's got a very interesting perspective on what it means to grapple with these very, very complicated issues.
I also want to name-check, if you're only going to read one thing about this problem, I would say the stone-cold classic is still Amanda Ripley's "Complicating the Narratives." I think it's 2019. Anyway, incredible essay. And of course she has a book as well called High Conflict, but just start with the essay.
And the last thing I would say is that one of the things that the organizations who are best at this kind of pluralistic reporting do is they have people on staff who disagree. And so if I can jump into the graphs again.
So this is something that is contentious, right? So are journalists all liberal, right? If you ask journalists, they'll be like, no, that's not true. And if you ask conservatives, they'll be like, obviously. So let's look at some data. So first of all, because people have arguments about, you know, what does it mean to be liberal or conservative, blah, blah, blah, how do we tell? The first thing I want to show you is this chart from Pew Research, which maps not the journalists, but the audience. I think I can make this a little bigger.
Mónica:
There we go. Yeah, thank you. That would be great.
Jonathan:
All right. So this is from 2019, but little has changed. And most of the sort of traditional media outfits are on the left here. The audience for those outlets is to the left of the average American.
Mónica:
And name a couple of the best-known ones there for folks.
Jonathan:
Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, for our listeners. Okay. So, you know, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Politico, Vox is way out there on the left. And then on the right, we have Washington Examiner and Fox News, sort of on the mid-right. And then this big gap, and then we get to, like, Daily Caller and Breitbart. So most of the traditional news outlets, their audience is substantially left of center. Okay, so that's just their audience. And this is what people call themselves, right? This is self-identified. We're not trying to sort of classify them.
So there's that. And then if you try to estimate the actual ideology of journalists — and this was from a 2020 study using Twitter data, which sounds sus, but they validated it against people's self-identification — this is a chart which says, in the middle, average Twitter user, right at zero. And it's like a histogram of where journalists are. And most of them are in this peak, which is far to the left of the average Twitter user, who, by the way, is already at that time somewhat liberal or left, but also to the left of Bernie Sanders. Right? So the politics of most journalists are unusually left.
Mónica:
Yeah. And by the way, it's worth saying that this chart is from 2020. Was that before Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X? The ideological makeup of Twitter has shifted for sure.
Jonathan:
It has shifted a little bit. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. It's now about equal, believe it or not.
Mónica:
Wow.
Jonathan:
Yeah, it used to be significantly more left. It's now about equal. And so anyway, most of them are left. And then there's this little bump way to the right of the chart. So that's kind of what it looks like. Nate Silver called it, rather than red versus blue, we should call it the purple blob versus red. And that's kind of true. There's this sort of big leftish blob.
And okay, so what does this mean? I don't think this is a conspiracy. You know, this is not like journalists trying to keep conservatives out. I think, honestly, the very simple explanation is it's geography and education. Most newsrooms are in urban centers. Most urban centers are pretty liberal. You can look at any map of election results and you can see that it's much more than red states and blue states. It's urban versus rural. And most journalists are, you know, college educated, for better or worse, which is also highly left. So that's just sort of the way it ended up.
And what Tangle does, and what I wish more newsrooms would do, is they have people on staff who are conservative. And so they have the arguments inside their newsroom that they hope that they get to inspire in their audience. And the way I like to put this is, if you can't hash out a reasonable argument inside your own newsroom, how are you going to lead the public in that same argument?
[01:05:00]
Mónica:
Yeah, that's beautiful. It's an update to the conversation about representation.
Jonathan:
Exactly.
Mónica:
And, you know, it's complicated. It's a tricky one to have sometimes, but yeah, imagine a newsroom that actually intentionally tried to recruit folks who were familiar with different corners of American perspectives —
Jonathan:
Hire some Trump voters. It's not like they're rare, you know. It's half the population, roughly, right? A little less. Right. But this is a very controversial thing to say. Many journalists feel that hiring Trump voters, or conservatives in general, would be betraying their mission, betraying the truth.
And what I would say to them is, well, what is your mission? Right. So, last chart I'm going to show you. This is NPR's audience share, liberal versus conservative, as revealed in — these were actually leaked by, was it, Uri Berliner, I think, a couple of years ago. So first of all, interesting that they didn't want to share these publicly. Second, what the chart actually shows is, from 2011 to 2023, the fraction of liberal listeners went up from about 40% to about 70%, while the fraction of conservative listeners went from about 25% to about 10%.
Mónica:
Yeah, that's pretty —
Jonathan:
So the accusations that NPR is predominantly liberal are true, right? Like, they're full of people in DC, which is one of the most liberal cities in America, and their audience is liberal. In what sense are they not a liberal publication? Now, because they are a public station, you could say that maybe they should be one of the newsrooms who see it as their mission just to reach and serve anybody.
So the question I have — and I don't want to be too mean to, you know, to NPR execs, some of whom are friends of mine — when you as a journalist look at this, do you care? Is this a problem? And you get to say no. You get to say, no, we are a liberal publication, this is not a problem for us. But if you want to serve the whole public, then you have to say yes. And that to me is the strongest argument for getting more conservatives working in journalism. All right, thanks for listening to my soapbox.
Mónica:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. No, but this outlines a lot of what we were talking about before, what is the problem? And it gets us to that question of representation. So thanks for bringing some charts and facts and evidence to bear, because it is a really difficult one. Most people have conversations based on kind of a gut sense. And Joy and I, I think, know how difficult this is to talk about with journalists. It's extremely difficult.
We only have a few minutes left. I wanted to make sure we got to one angle of the question that we haven't touched on, which is, most listeners of this podcast are regular people. They're consumers of media. So they've been hearing us talk about everything from mistrust to representation to misinformation. And the midterms are coming up and they're wondering, okay, what does all this mean for me? How am I supposed to navigate media?
I'll give you my test question. I think that awareness creates choice. And I think everyone who reads media has to have awareness. And it's very difficult to do that on platforms where things tend to fly at you really fast, and there's this pressure to learn a lot really quickly. But understand what you're going to media to find. Are you looking to, you know, scratch an emotional itch? Do you want to see the other side go down? If you do, you're not evil, you're human. That's normal. But know it. Know that you have that tendency and you're looking for that. Because then you won't be such an easy mark for people who want to manipulate that in you, to hook you, to build you into a loyalist, and to perhaps, you know, inscribe a kind of incuriosity. So just be aware.
The question for me that's a big test is, is this going to do more for me or to me? Right? Is this piece of journalism, media, political thing going to do more for me or to me? And I think a lot of people know that some media feels like it does more to us. So yeah, what would you all leave people with?
[01:10:00]
Joy:
I would really encourage people, when you think about journalism and what it's doing for you, to spend some time thinking about local, because that's where we have the most influence. It's where we have the influence as citizens. It's where we have agency to make change. It's also where you have the opportunity to know journalists personally, which most people don't do. It's also where you have the chance to influence journalism.
So the responsible journalists in your community would very likely be happy to hear from you with constructive suggestions, with emails or phone calls saying, I think you're leaving this thing out. I wish you would talk to this person. I wish you would be asking this question. Help them out if you think they're missing something and well-intentioned. If you believe in their integrity and their benevolence, then help them out, I think.
And then absolutely seek things out that feel like they're based in inquiry, that seek opportunities to learn about perspectives that are different, and find the journalism that is helping you understand the complexity and nuance of things. If you find yourself constantly having your outrage buttons pushed by the journalism that you're consuming, then you have the chance to change that.
Mónica:
Hear, hear. What would you add?
Jonathan:
Yeah, that's really good. Definitely watch your emotions and sort of start to understand your own reactions. I would say that it is easier than it has ever been to get accurate, nuanced portrayals of the other side, whatever you may perceive the other side to be.
And, you know, there's one argument that is based in curiosity and compassion. And someone believes something different than we are. First of all, we know there's tons of research showing that we have inaccurate ideas of where the other side is, because the most extreme voices get the most visibility and the most amplification. So first of all, they're not as crazy as you think. Yes, some of them really are, but most of them are not.
So first, I would appeal to curiosity and compassion and say, well, what are they really like? Because they're probably reasonable people just like you. It would be very unlikely and very strange if all of the, you know, smart people ended on one side and all of the stupid, crazy people on the other. It's just not what's going on here.
And if appealing to your curiosity and compassion doesn't work, I would say it is bad political strategy to misunderstand the other side, both because if you don't understand what's happening with them, there's no way to understand why their message is appealing and therefore how you would win or counter that messaging —
Mónica:
And second, be persuasive.
Jonathan:
Yeah, exactly. As I said, I think the left gave up persuading people somewhere around 2012, 2013. So just as a political strategy question. And the other is that you probably have a lot more opportunity for collaboration than you think. One of the victims, or sort of horrors, of polarization and conflict is that it becomes very all or nothing, right? This person is either good or bad. I can either work with them or not. Whereas the route towards a saner society, a more collaborative, less divided society, is finding where you have common interests and working with people on common interests rather than trying to sort people into good and bad buckets.
So that's what I would say: there are curiosity and compassion reasons to understand the other side better. But even if your only motivation is winning at your political goals, you still need to understand them better.
Mónica:
Yeah. All roads point to more understanding, not less, more questions, not fewer, and maybe a little less fear and a little more trust of the public, so that maybe journalists can earn their trust back.
