BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: social journalism

  • A journalism of belief and belonging

    1 comment on A journalism of belief and belonging
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    I increasingly come to see that we are not in a crisis of information and disinformation or even of misguided beliefs, but instead of belonging. I wonder how to reimagine journalism to address this plight.

    Belonging is a good. The danger is in not belonging, and filling that void with malign substitutes for true community: joining a cult of personality or conspiracies, an insurrection, or some nihilistic, depraved perversion of a religion.

    What role might journalism play to fill that void instead with conversation, connection, understanding, collaboration, enlightened values, and education?

    Hannah Arendt teaches us that amid the thrall and threat of totalitarianism, some people belong to nothing, and so they are vulnerable to the lure of joining a noxious cause manufactured of fear. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I quote her:

    “But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation but destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” For Arendt, to be public is to be whole, to be private is to be deprived; to be without both is to be uprooted, vulnerable, and alone.

    Arendt found in Nazi and Soviet history “such unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” The lessons for these populist times are undeniable as Trump’s base shows a loss of self-interest (what did he accomplish for them over the rich?), an indifference to death (defiantly burning masks at COVID superspreader rallies), a passionate inclination toward abstract notions (are abortion and guns truly more important to their everyday lives than jobs and health?), and contempt for common sense (see: science denial and conspiracy theories).

    Later in my book, I call upon the theories of sociologist William Kornhauser, who contends that the solution to such alienated mass society is to support a pluralistic society of belonging, in which people connect with communities — they “possess multiple commitments to diverse and autonomous groups” — and are less vulnerable to, or at least feel a competitive tug away from, the siren call of populist movements. I write:

    A pluralistic society is marked by belonging — to families, tribes (in the best and most supportive sense, which Sebastian Junger defines as “the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with”), clubs, congregations, organizations, communities. A pluralistic society is more secure and less vulnerable to domination as a whole, as a mass. In such associations we do not give up our individuality; we gain individual identity by connecting, gathering, organizing, and acting with others who share our interests, needs, goals, desires, or circumstances. When that occurs, in Kornhauser’s view, elites become accessible as “competition among independent groups opens many channels of communication and power.” Then, too, “the autonomous man respects himself as an individual, experiencing himself as the bearer of his own power and as having the capacity to determine his life and to affect the lives of his fellows.” In short, a pluralistic society is a diverse society.

    Of course, it is diversity that most threatens the autocrats, populists, racists, and fascists who in turn imperil our nation and democracy around the world. That is why they condemn “identity politics.” The internet, I theorize, enabled voices too long not represented in so-called mainstream — i.e., old, white — mass media to at last be heard. That is what the would-be tyrants and cultists use to stir fear and recruit their rudderless hordes, preaching that the Others — Blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ people, immigrants, “woke mobs,” and lately trans people — will come steal their jobs, homes, history, security, society, and even children.

    Journalism brings information to the fight for their very souls. We stand outside reactionary revival tents with slips of paper bearing facts, thinking that can compete with the heart-thumping hymns of fear within.

    In 2022 in Paris, a group of scholars gathered at the International Communication Association for a preconference that asked, “What comes after disinformation studies?” In a paper reporting on the discussion, Théophile Lenoir and Chris Anderson conclude: “Fact-checking our way out of politics will not work.”

    Journalists want to believe that we are in a crisis of disinformation because they think the cure must be what they offer: information. The mania around disinformation after 2016 led to what Joe Bernstein in Harper’s calls Big Disinfo, a veritable industry devoted to dis-dis-information. I was part of that effort, having raised money after 2016 to support such projects. I’m certainly not opposed to reporting information and checking facts! But we need to concede that these are insufficient ends.

    If the problem is not disinformation, then it must be belief, we say, pointing to opinion polls in which shocking numbers of citizens say they ascribe to insane ideas and conspiracy theories. Regarding such polls, I will forever return to the lessons of the late James Carey: “Public life started to evaporate with the emergence of the public opinion industry and the apparatus of polling. Polling … was an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to prevent an authentic public opinion from forming.”

    Polls are fatally and fundamentally flawed because they reflect the biases of the pollsters, who insist on sorting us into their buckets, leaving no room for nuance or context. Worse than that, polls have become a mechanism for signaling belonging in some rebellious, defiant cause. Writes Reece Peck, another scholar at the ICA Paris preconference, “Political scientists have come to understand that voting is less a cool-headed deliberation on how specific policies help or hurt the voter’s material economic interest and more an occasion for expressing the voter’s cultural attachments and group loyalties.” Fringe opinions are a means for these citizens to tell pollsters, media, and authority: ‘You can’t sort us. We’ll sort ourselves.’ As researchers Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux have found, people who circulate hostile political information do so out of a “Need for Chaos,” a desire to “‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” In the hope, that is, that they will find a place to belong in their posse, their institutional insurrection. See again: Arendt.

    I believe there is only one true hope to cure vulnerability to such performative belief: education. By that I do not mean media- or news-literacy, the hubristic assertion that if only people understood how journalism works and consumed its products, all would be well. I mean education, period: in the humanities, the social sciences, and science. As I write in my upcoming book, The Web We Weave, I taught in a public university because I believe education is our best hope. But universities — particularly their humanities departments — are being starved of resources and attacked by populist, right-wing forces that view education as their enemy because it is through education that they lose voters and power. This is where our underlying crisis and solution lie.

    What can journalism do? I am not sure.

    In any discussion of the crisis in democracy, someone will pipe up with banalities about the internet segregating us in filter bubbles and echo chambers. But research by Petersen and Axel Bruns shows that — as Petersen says — “the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one we live in in our everyday lives,” in the towns, jobs, and congregations we seek out to be around people like us. Journalist Bill Bishop said it well in the subtitle of his 2008 book, The Big Sort: “The clustering of like-minded American is tearing us apart.” The internet doesn’t cause filter bubbles, it punctures them, confronting people with those they are told to fear. The internet does not cause division. It exposes it.

    Thus I have argued that one mission for journalism (and, for that matter, social networks) should be to make strangers less strange. At the Tow-Knight Center, I funded research to that end by Caroline Murray and Talia Stroud, who found 25 inspiring projects in newsrooms attempting to do just that; look at their list. I find that work heartening, yet still insufficient.

    Journalism is flawed at its core. It is built to seek out, highlight, and exploit — and cause — conflict. Political journalism is engineered to predict, which does nothing to inform the electorate. Instead, in the words of Jay Rosen, it should focus on what is at stake in the choices citizens make. Journalism has done tremendous harm to countless communities that have never trusted its institutions. Journalism — just like the internet companies it criticizes — is built on the economics of attention.

    I do not, of course, reject all of journalism. Yes, I criticize The Times and The Post because they have been our biggest and best and we need them to be better. I also praise excellent reporting there and support it with my subscriptions. I think it is important to understand our history sans the sacred rhetoric publishers use to lobby politicians and courts for protection against new competitors, from radio to television to the internet to AI. James Gordon Bennett, the early newspaper titan said to be the father of modern journalism — thus mass media — once said to an upstart in the field: “Young man, ‘to instruct the people,’ as you say, is not the mission of journalism. That mission, if journalism has any, is to startle or amuse.” There are our roots in mass media. Hear Carl Lindstrom writing in The Fading American Newspaper:

    In its hunger for circulation it has sought status as a mass medium to the point where it is a hollow attempt to be all things to all men. It has scorned competition as an evil, and cultivated monopoly as a virtue. While claiming a holy mission with constitutional protection, it has left great vacuums of journalistic obligation into which competiting mediums have moved with impunity and public acceptance. Today journalism is on the move at an ever-accelerating rate with the daily press showing no apparent concern. This indifference is in accord with its incapacity for relentless self-examination. In this vacant place self-delusion has built itself a nest.

    He wrote that in 1960.

    There are movements to address the mission void in present-day journalism. I helped start one in Engagement Journalism, with my colleague Carrie Brown. There is Solutions Journalism, Collaborative Journalism, Constructive Journalism, Reparative Journalism, Dialog Journalism, Deliberative Journalism … and others. I would like to bring these various ’ives together in a room to see what links them. I think it will be this: They start with listening.

    Journalism is terrible at listening. We train reporters to hit the streets with premade narratives and predictions, looking for quotes to fulfill them. In Engagement Journalism, we teach journalists instead to hear the communities they serve. That does not mean we must listen to every cultist’s crazy theories and fears concocted for media attention. Journalists give them plenty of oxygen already. No, I mean that we need to allow people to be heard regarding their real lives and actual circumstances and concerns. That is a necessary start.

    How do we then reimagine journalism built around helping people understand that they can belong to positive communities of understanding and empathy, they can build bridges to other communities through listening and learning, they can find fulfillment in their own identities without excluding or denigrating the identities of others?

    A few years ago, I participated in valuable diversity training. In one exercise, our trainer told each of us to reflect on our own cultures. I demurred, saying that I had no culture as I am of boring, generic, white-bread, American, suburban stock. She told me I was wrong. Upon reflection, I saw that she was right. She forced me to recognize the power of the cultural default. I’ve learned that lesson, too, from André Brock, whom I quote in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:

    In Distributed Blackness, his trenchant analysis of African American cybercultures … Georgia Tech Professor André Brock Jr. sought to understand Black Twitter on its own terms, not in relation to mass and white media, not in the context of aiming to be heard there. “My claim is ecological: Black folk have made the internet a ‘Black space’ whose contours have become visible through sociality and distributed digital practice while also decentering whiteness as the default internet identity.” That is to say that it is necessary to acknowledge the essential whiteness of mass media as well as the internet. “Despite protestations about color-blindness or neutrality,” Brock wrote, “the internet should be understood as an enactment of whiteness through the interpretive flexibility of whiteness as information. By this, I mean that white folks’ communications, letters, and works of art are rarely understood as white; instead, they become universal and are understood as ‘communication,’ ‘literature,’ and ‘art.’”

    Brock helped me see where journalism is “whiteness as information.” So have Wesley Lowery and Lewis Raven Wallace in their criticism of journalistic objectivity (works I assigned and taught every year).

    Brock also made me see how the internet has helped me belong. I long was a loner; journalists fancy themselves that: separate, apart (and let’s admit it, above). I live in a town disconnected from many of my neighbors. But on the internet, I have found myself connected with many communities.

    Every year in the Engagement Journalism class I had the privilege of teaching with Carrie Brown, we would ask students what communities they belong to. The answers inevitably began with the obvious: “I’m a student.” “I live in Brooklyn.” But then someone might say, “I struggle with mental health issues.” A few students later in the circle, another students would echo that. Thus a connection is made, empathy established, a community enabled. Not all communities are bounded by geography; online, they might exist in any definition, anywhere.

    Such conversation and connection can occur only in an environment of trust, but today we live in an environment of distrust — and that is the fault, in great measure, of media and politics manufacturing disconnection and fear. That is what journalism must fight against: a darkness not of information but of the soul. I return to Lenoir and Anderson in Paris:

    Technical solutions to political problems are bound to fail. Historical, structural, and political inequality — and especially race, ethnicity, and social difference — needs to be at the forefront of our understanding of politics and, indeed, disinformation. The challenge for researchers, and our field broadly, is to engage in politics by generating ideas and crafting narratives that make people want to live in a more just world, not just a more truthful one.

    The same should be said of journalism. How might we do that?

    Journalists might see ourselves as conveners of conversation (see, for example, Spaceship Media).

    We might see ourselves as educators, defenders of — yes, advocates for — enlightened values of reason, liberty, equality, tolerance, and progress. It is not enough to expose inequality, we must defend equality.

    We might see it as our task to build bridges among communities — to make strangers less strange, to help people escape the filter bubbles in their real lives.

    We might understand the imperative to fight — not neutrally amplify — the dark forces of hate, fear, and fascism.

    We must pay reparations to the communities our institutions have damaged by finally assuring that their stories are told — by themselves — and heard.

    We could reject the economics of attention and scale of mass media and rebuild journalism at human scale, valuing our work not through our metrics of audience but instead as the public values us.

    As I leave my last job and the last year, I am reflecting on where to turn my attention next. I spent a dozen years at the end of my time in the industry working to make journalism digital, a task that should be self-evident but even so, is far from done. I spent eighteen years in a university exploring new business models for news, though I fear that trying to save established journalism ends in protectionism. My proudest work has been teaching and learning Engagement Journalism and it is there — in listening to communities — where I wish to devote myself.

    I also believe it is critical that we understand journalism now in the context of a connected world and call upon other disciplines — history, ethics, psychology, community studies, anthropology, sociology — to understand the internet not as a technology but as a human network. That is the subject of my next book. That is what I have been calling Internet Studies: examining how we interact now and what reimagined and reformed institutions we need to help us do that better. Somewhere in there, I believe, is the essence of a new journalism, a journalism of education, a journalism of belonging.

  • Our movement

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    Every year at this time, I am impressed with the imagination, invention, daring, and mission of our Social Journalism graduates at the Newmark J-School as they reimagine and reinvent journalism. I am particularly impressed this year as they were hit with the pandemic, forcing them to take their work of showing up and listening indoors and online. In this, the last week in the term, we watched 2020’s graduates and next year’s students present their work with communities. 

    These students consistently push the old, sealed envelope of journalism. Examples: A few are experimenting with fiction as journalism. One planned a play to educate tenants about their rights in evictions. Some reached their communities with posters on phone polls. One enabled refugees to take their own pictures so they could tell their stories rather than having them told by others. One tried to get newspaper publishers to print absentee-ballot applications (the papers refused). One made a zine with political cartoons to educate journalists. One made a guide for young Latinx journalists to help them get their stories told in newsrooms. More than one realized that to gain the trust they were asking for, they needed to be open about themselves; one offered her community an opportunity to ask her anything, another tells the story of his addiction. One got dragged out of a meeting by a mayor because of her reporting; the mayor was soon defeated. One created playlists to help people with depression as her journalism. 

    They serve a grand diversity of communities: black, transgender women; disenfranchised voters; tenants at risk of losing their homes in the pandemic; black women victimized over their natural hair; people going hungry in one American city; Kashmiris under occupation; Syrian refugees; victims of gun violence and advocates for gun safety; teachers; young journalists; people who buy weed; residents of Louisiana’s cancer alley; people with depression; recovering addicts and people who care for them; healthcare workers; caregivers; school social workers; people with intellectual developmental disabilities in group homes suffering abuse; feminists protesting the murders of women in Mexico; the incarcerated and their loved ones; trans sex workers; hair braiders; the Venezuelan diaspora; bicyclists. 

    What was particularly gratifying this year was that — given we were on Zoom and not in a too-small room — well more than a hundred people came to hear the graduates present their final project and among them were dozens of alumni of our still-young Social Journalism program. They came to give their support and admiration, which, thanks to Zoom, they could share as chat. 

    Our alumni are phenomenal. They are our Trojan horses who are changing newsrooms, where they are quickly employed, with their learned skills — social, data, reporting, investigation, product, entrepreneurship — but more than that, their worldviews, their vision for what journalism can and should be. As the director of our program, my brilliant colleague Dr. Carrie Brown, says, these alums preach the gospel of Social Journalism more eloquently and effectively than we do. 

    And what is that gospel? That we start not with content but with communities. That we first listen to communities so they are heard on their terms. We empathize with their needs and reflect our understanding back to assure we have listened well. Then we imagine what journalism we might bring to serve them. We believe in journalism as service, not product. As you can see above, we find and work with an incredible richness of tools to perform that service, beyond publishing stories. We try to build bridges and understanding. And we constantly question our assumptions about journalism, unafraid to challenge the shiboleth of objectivity, recognizing its roots in systemic racism and our field’s damage to communities, and questioning the high heresy of journalism as advocacy for those we serve. 

    This is our mission. This is our movement. This is how our students and graduates are reimagining and rebuilding journalism. 

    We accepted our first students in January 2015, only nine months after our dean, Sarah Bartlett, challenged me to envision a new degree based on my thinking about a relationship-based strategy for news and we were lucky enough to hire Dr. Brown to build and lead it. Here is the Social Journalism class of 2020. 

    I am prouder of nothing else in my career more than helping to start Social Journalism. May my tombstone carry the hashtag #SocialJ. 

  • What Makes a Community?

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    Facebook wants to build community. Ditto media. Me, too.

    But I fear we are all defining and measuring community too shallowly and transiently. Community is not conversation — though that is a key metric Facebook will use to measure its success. Neither is community built on content: gathering around it, paying attention to it, linking to it, or talking about it — that is how media brands are measuring engagement. Conversation and content are tools or byproducts of real community.

    Community means connecting people intimately and over time to share interests, worldviews, concerns, needs, values, empathy, and action. Facebook now says it wants to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.” I think that should be meaningful, lasting, and trusting interactions among people, plural. Think of community not as a cocktail party (or drunken online brawl) where friends and strangers idly chat. Instead, think of community a club one chooses to join, the sorts of clubs that society has been losing since my parents’ generation grew old. Meetuphas been trying to rebuild them. So should we all.

    What if instead of just enabling people to share and talk about something — content — Facebook created the means for people to organize a modern, digital Rotary Club of concerned citizens who want to improve their circumstances for neighbors, geographic or virtual? Or it provides pews and pulpits where people can flock as congregations of shared belief. Or it opens the basement in that house of worship where addicts come to share their stories and needs. Or it creates the tools for a community of mutual support to reach out and lift each other up. Or it makes a classroom where people come to share knowledge and skills. Or it creates the means to build a craft union or guild for professionals to share and negotiate standards for quality. Or it builds the tools for citizens to join together in a positive social movement…. And what if journalism served these communities by informing their conversations and actions, by reflecting their desires, by answering their information needs, by convening them into dialogue, by helping to resolve instead of inflame conflict?

    That is community. That is belonging. That is what Facebook and media should be enabling. I’ll reprise my definition of journalism from the other day as the imperative Facebook and news share:

    Convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.

    How can we convene communities if we don’t really know what they are, if we are satisfied with mere conversation — yada, yada, yada — as a weak proxy for community?

    While doing research for another project on the state of the mass, I recently read the 1959 book by sociologist William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, and reread Raymond Williams’ 1958 book, Culture & Society. I found lessons for both Facebook and media in their definitions of connected community vs. anonymous mass.

    Kornhauser worries that “there is a paucity of independent groups” [read: communities] to protect people “from manipulation and mobilization.” In a proper pluralist and diverse society, he argues, “the population is unavailable [for such manipulation] in that people possess multiple commitments to diverse and autonomous groups.” To communities. “When people are divorced from their communites and work, they are free to reunite in new ways.” They are feed for trolls and totalitarians.

    Thus we find ourselves working under a false definition of community — accepting any connection, any conversation, any link as qualification — and we end up with something that looks like a mob or a mass: singular, thin, and gross. “The mass man substitutes an undifferentiated image of himself for an individualized one,” Kornhauser says; “he answers the perennial question of ‘Who am I?’ with the formula ‘I am like everyone else.’” He continues:

    The autonomous man respects himself as an individual, experiencing himself as the bearer of his own power and having the capacity to determine his life and to affect the lives of his fellows…. Non-pluralist society lacks the diversity of social worlds to nurture and sustain independent persons…. [I]n pluralist society there are alternative loyalties (sanctuaries) which do not place the noncomformist outside the social pale.

    In other words, when you cannot find a community to identify with, you are anonymously lumped in with — or lump yourself in with — the mob or the mass. But when you find and join with other people with whom you share affinity, you have the opportunity to express your individuality. That is the lovely paradox of community: real community supports the individual through joining while the mass robs of us of our individuality by default. The internet, I still believe, is built so we can both express our individuality and join with other individuals in communities. That is why I value sharing and connection.

    And that is why I have urged Facebook — and media — to find the means to introduce us to each other, to make strangers less strange, to rob the trolls and totalitarians of the power of the Other. How? By creating safe spaces where people can reveal themselves and find fellows; by creating homes for true communities; and by connecting them.

    That is what might get us out of this mess of Trumpian, Putinistic, fascistic, racist, misogynistic, exclusionary hate and fear and rule by the mob. There’s nothing easy in that task for platforms or for journalists. But for God’s sake, we must try.

    Now you might say that what is good for the goose is good for the nazi: that the same tools that are used to build my hip, digital Rotary Club can be used by the white supremicists to organize their riot in Charlottesville or advertise their noxious views to the vulnerable. Technology is neutral, eh? Perhaps, but society is not. Society judges by negotiating and setting standards and norms. A healthy society or platform or media or brand should never tolerate, distribute, or pay for the nazi and his hate. This means that Facebook — like Google and like the media — will need to give up the pretense of neutrality in the face of manipulation and hate. They must work to bring communities together and respect the diverse individuals in them.

    “An atomized society invites the totalitarian movement,” Kornhauser warns. In mass society, the individual who does not conform to the group is the cuck; in totalitarian society, he is a criminal. In pluralist, open, and tolerant society, the individual who does not conform to someone else’s definition of the whole is free to find his or her community and self. That is the connected net society we must help build. Or as Kornhauser puts it, in terms we can understand today: “A pluralist society supports a liberal democracy, whereas a mass society supports a populist democracy.” Trump and his one-third base are built on populism, while the two-thirds majority (not “the mass”) of the nation disapproves. But our platforms and our media are not built to support that majority. They pay attention to Trump’s base because mass media is built for the mass and conflict and platforms are built as if all connections are the same.

    In the end, Kornhauser is optimistic, as am I. “[T]hese conditions of modern life carry with them both the heightened possibility of social alienation andenhanced opportunities for the creation of new forms of association.” We can use Facebook, Twitter, et al to snap and snark at each other or to find ourselves in others and join together. The platforms and media can and should help us — but the choice, once offered, is ours to take.

    I’ll end with these words of sociologist Raymond Williams:

    If our purpose is art, education, the giving of information or opinion, our interpretation will be in terms of the rational and interested being. If, on the other hand, our purpose is manipulation — the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, know, in certain ways — the convenient formula will be that of the masses….

    To rid oneself of the illusion of the objective existence of ‘the masses’, and to move towards a more actual and more active conception of human beings and relationships, is in fact to realize a new freedom.

  • Democracy Dies in the Light

    5 comments on Democracy Dies in the Light
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    When the nation’s representatives pass sweeping tax legislation that the majority of voters do not want and that will in the long-run harm most citizens — helping instead corporations, a small, rich elite (including donors), and the politicians themselves — there can be only one interpretation:

    Our representatives no longer represent the public; they do not care to. American democracy has died.

    Democracy didn’t die in darkness. It died in the light.

    The full glare of journalism was turned on this legislation, its impact and motives, but that didn’t matter to those who had the power to go ahead anyway. Journalism, then, proved to be an ineffective protector of democracy, just as it is proving ineffective against every other attack on democracy’s institutions by this gang. Fox News was right to declare a coup, wrong about the source. The coup already happened. The junta is in power. In fact, Fox News led it. We have an administration and Congress that are tearing down government institutions — law enforcement, the courts, the State Department and foreign relations, safety nets, consumer protection, environmental protection — and society’s institutions, starting with the press and science, not to mention truth itself. The junta is, collaborative or independently, doing the bidding of a foreign power whose aim is to get democracy to destroy itself. Journalism, apparently, was powerless to stop any of this.

    I don’t mean to say that journalism is solely to blame. But journalism is far from blameless. I have sat in conferences listening to panels of journalists who blame the public they serve. These days, I watch journalists blame Facebook, as if the sickness in American democracy is only a decade old and could be turned on by a machine. I believe that journalism must engage in its own truth and reconciliation process to learn what we have done wrong: how our business models encourage discord and reduction of any complexity to the absurd; how we concentrate on prediction over information and education;how we waste journalistic resource on repetition; how we lately have used ourfalse god of balance to elevate the venal to the normal; how we are redlining quality journalism as a product for the elite. I don’t believe we can fix journalism until we recognize its faults. But I’ll save that for another day. Now I want to ask a more urgent question given the state of democracy.

    What should journalism do? Better: What should journalism be? It is obviously insufficient to merely say “this happened today” or “this could happen tomorrow.”

    What should journalism’s measures of value be? A stronger democracy? An informed public conversation? Civil discourse? We fail at all those measures now. How can journalism change to succeed at them? What can it do to strengthen — to rescue — democracy? That is the question that consumes me now.

    I will start here. We must learn to listen and help the public listen to itself. We in media were never good at listening — not really — but in our defense our media, print and broadcast, were designed for speaking. The internet intervened and enabled everyone to speak but helped no one listen. So now we live in amid ceaseless dissonance: all mouths, no ears. I am coming to see that civility — through listening, understanding, and empathy — is a necessary precondition to learning, to accepting facts and understanding other positions, to changing one’s mind and finding common ground. Thus I have changed my own definition of journalism.

    My definition used to be: Helping communities organize their knowledge to better organize themselves. That was conveniently broad enough to fit most any entrepreneurial journalism students’ ideas. It was information based, for that was my presumption — the accepted wisdom — about journalism: It lives to inform. Now I have a new definition of journalism:

    To convene communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation.

    Journalism — and, I’d argue, Facebook and internet platforms — share this imperative to reduce the polarization we all helped cause by helping citizens find common ground.

    This is the philosophy behind our Social Journalism program at CUNY. It is why we at the News Integrity Initiative invested in Spaceship Media’s work, to convene communities in conflict into meaningful conversation. But that is just the beginning.

    Clearly, journalism must devote more of its resources to investigation, to making sure that the powerful know they are watched, whether they give a damn or not. Journalism must understand its role as an educator and measure its success or failure based on whether the public is more informed. Journalism and the platforms need to provide the tools for communities to organize and act in collaborative, constructive ways. I will leave this exploration, too, for another day.

    We are in a crisis of democracy and its institutions, including journalism. The solutions will not be easy or quick. We cannot get there if we assume what we are living through is a new normal or worse if we make it seem normal. We cannot succeed if we assume our old ways are sufficient for a new reality. We must explore new goals, new paths, new tools, new measures of our work.

  • Empathetic journalism for the right

    11 comments on Empathetic journalism for the right
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    I’ve said — to the horror of surprisingly few journalists I know — that the mere fact of Donald Trump’s candidacy is evidence of the failure of journalism to perform its prime function: informing the public.

    Here I want to ask what we could do about that. I’ll explore ways to better reflect and inform the worldview of the petri dish that bred Trump: the angry, underemployed, conservative, white man. I’ll argue that the answer begins with empathy — empathy not with Trump’s racism, misogyny, and hatred, of course, but with the real lives of at least some of the people who are considering voting for him.

    Of course, it’s true — and I want to underscore this — that many unreflected and under-served communities deserve to be addressed ahead of angry white men: African-Americans of many ages and locales, Latinos of many diasporas, the disabled of many needs, LGBTQ people, women, youth. But none of those communities fostered the movement of Trumpism, which — no matter the electoral outcome — will continue to fester after November. They have spawned a civic emergency. The phenomenon must be confronted. Decent Americans of the right need to be better informed, for ignorance breeds hate. The first step to doing that is not lecturing but listening.

    I’ll explore four paths: (1) reflecting communities, (2) diversifying media, (3) serving people, and (4) convening communities. My thinking here is greatly influenced by what I have learned from teaching Social Journalism alongside Carrie Brown at CUNY.

    Reflect communities: I wrote recently that as an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter, I now know better what it feels like to find myself not reflected in media. I’ll repeat that my experience is, of course, trivial next to that of minorities and under-served communities who should have received more attention for generations. But this moment has helped me better understand how journalism also failed conservatives by not reflecting their worldview, circumstances, needs, and goals. Because media demonstrated that we did not hear, care about, or understand them, they did not trust the rest of what we had to tell them. Because we did not better reflect their lives, we could not help other communities and political leaders understand, empathize with, and grapple with their needs.

    In Social Journalism, I have come to call this task externally focused journalism: We tell your story to the rest of society so others can understand and take into account your needs in negotiating policy and politics. That is what journalism has always done and will continue to do. It is helpful. However, externally focused journalism also can be exploitative: the journalist helicopters in to grab a good but random story and then leaves with no assurance of change. This is why I also emphasize the need for internally focused journalism; I will get to that below.

    If you want to better understand the rocky soil that fertilized Trump, I recommend reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a highly personal tale that also explains the context of declining hope for a large class deep inside America. At the same time, to understand what necessitated #BlackLivesMatter, I recommend Between the World and Me by my former CUNY J-school colleague Ta-Nahisi Coates.

    These books are credible, eloquent, and effective because they spring from experience. They demonstrate why American newsrooms must diversify their staffs. But it’s not as if every slice of the nation will be represented in every newsroom. So it is vital that we also teach journalists how to seek out, listen to, and empathize with people who are not like them. That, we’ve learned, is the essence of Social Journalism: taking a caring heart and an anthropologist’s cool eye and ear to observe and listen to a community’s situation so we can improve the connections that community has with others and improve the relationship of the journalist to the community — to say: “I want to understand you.”

    As an example of such journalism, I commend to you New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein’s recent story: Torn Over Donald Trump and Cut Off by Culture Wars, Evangelicals Despair. As Slate says, it is written with gentle empathy. I don’t agree with the stands against gay marriage taken by the people in the story. I don’t need to. Thanks to Goodstein’s story, I can at least understand their world a bit better. Assignment editors should have been devoting journalistic resource to just such stories during this election, and to reporting on the issues that matter to many communities across this land. That would have given us all a better understanding of what is at stake in the political struggle over the nation’s future. It would have been a better use of resource than predicting the horse race day after day.

    To see how true to life Goodstein’s story was, I called one of her sources, Pastor Ryan Jorgenson, who emphasized to me that her reporting and the story were effective and empathetic. He had only three additional observations: First, his parishioners noted that the Times headline — “Evangelicals Despair” — is oxymornic; if you understand evangelicals, they said, you would know that because of their faith they do not despair. Second, though Jorgenson said the photographer shot the life of the church, the photo editor in New York selected only photos that reflected the headline — despair. Third, though he was glad that the story quoted him saying Jesus’ name, Jorgenson was disappointed though unsurprised that it did not quote scripture as the best explanation of evangelical thinking. (“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair.” 2 Corinthians 4:8.) When was the last time you saw the Bible — or the Koran — quoted in media? Note well that it is the structure of news organizations — namely, editing — that can separate the journalism from the community it would cover. Our processes interfere with empathy.

    When this election is over and when we enter into a post mortem for the truth, we need to examine how existing media can better reflect the many diverse communities that make up America: their lives, worldviews, concerns, needs, goals. But that will take us only so far.

    Diversify media: Not only must newsrooms be diversified but the landscape of media should be diversified. There is not enough — there is almost no — major conservative media that is responsible, fact-based, and journalistic. We in liberal media — and, yes, for God’s sake, let us be honest enough to confess that media are liberal — left a vacuum that was readily and eagerly filled by the far and alt right, by political movements masquerading as media: Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge, et al. Fox News just turned 20 years old; see what it has done to civil discourse and democracy in a generation.

    The closest thing the right has to a responsible major media outlet is the Wall Street Journal but it’s still a business newspaper, its coverage is locked behind a pay wall for the well to do (not many Trump voters), and it is owned by the proprietor of Fox News and the New York Post. No, it won’t do.

    So I have an odd suggestion: liberal media and liberal funders should invest in responsible conservative news outlets staffed by journalists and commentators who share a conservative worldview: an intelligent and reasonable Fox News, a right-of-center New York Times, an American Telegraph, and a civil and honest Rush Limbaugh.

    The idea of “balance” in any one media outlet has turned out to be as deceiving and bankrupt as the idea of “objectivity” — indeed, worse, for false balance is used to justify friction and fighting on the air and the damaging, uninformative scourge of the “surrogate” in this election. After helping tomanufacture the Trump phenomenon, CNN actually believes hiring Corey Lewandowski provides balance. That’s not about informing the public. That’s not about journalism. That’s about producing entertainment.

    No, there needs to be balance in the ecosystem of news: different perspectives, experiences, and worldviews represented and served by their own outlets. What enables each of these entities to work legitimately under the banner of journalism? Intellectual honesty: the willingness to share uncomfortable truths; an ethic built on facts; a mission to inform.

    Yes, I had hoped that blogs, my beloved blogs, would provide an outlet for such diversity of viewpoint. To an extent, they have and I still celebrate that. But this, too, is not nearly enough.

    Keep in mind that if reasonable people do not start media to serve reasonable conservatives, the market will be dominated not just by the present noxious media movements but soon possibly by one even worse: The Trump News Channel. Beware!

    Why bother? you ask. Surely I don’t think that we are going to be able to turn all of Trump’s 40-odd million voters into informed, reasonable neighbors who now see the error of his ways. No, I don’t. But if we could better inform a quarter, a tenth of them, imagine the benefit. When decent and smart conservatives set about the task of detrumpification and rebuilding their party and movement from the ashes, where can they turn? Today, all they have is a news hell. That is what we have left them. We have a responsibility to serve them.

    Serve people: What does journalism serving people mean? It doesn’t mean talking to or about them. That is externally focused journalism. Journalism as service means helping people improve their lives and communities by serving their information needs so they can solve their problems and meet their goals. That is internally focused journalism.

    For the sake of example, let’s take one adjective from my earlier characterization of Trump’s angry, underemployed, conservative, white, male constituency. Take “underemployed.” How could journalism better serve people — any people — who need jobs?

    In the old days, we in the news business exploited unemployment by charging high rates to advertise jobs. We considered this a good because it supported journalism. But once my friend Craig Newmark came along as — in his description — a philanthropist of classified ads and more importantly once the net killed the middleman, newspapers’ jobs classified business (which could earn any one metro paper in the U.S. upwards of $30 to $50 million a year) collapsed.

    Now I would suggest that a news operation should create a data base ofevery job available — for free. Let’s not just post short, uninformative ads (which said so little because we charged so much). No, collect data about every job and every job requirement: what skills are needed and what prior jobs people held to prepare them for posts like these. Let’s create a matching service that collects job-seekers’ skills and qualifications. Let’s create a service that helps the unemployed see what skills they need to get jobs. Let’s consider creating online education to help people build skills; that is one way we can make money.

    Do media have the power to solve unemployment? No, of course not. But we can help. That should be our goal always: to contribute to solutions. The real benefit of doing this is that we can build trust. We can show that we do have the interests of the underemployed at heart. Then perhaps we can begin to have discussions with them based on facts over emotions. They might listen when we show them that their competition for work may not be immigrants but technology. We can have an informed discussion about the jobs that would be lost if foreign trade were curtailed. Maybe then they’d be more informed and less prey to the fear-mongering, bigoted, xenophobic likes of Trump, Breitbart, and Drudge.

    Convene communities: At a news editors’ convention in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I helped run an exercise in so-called human-centered design. After listening to some folks from gentrifying neighborhoods in the city, the editors in the room could clearly see something that was missing: conversation among the communities there. They could also clearly see the need and opportunity: convening those communities into dialogue.

    Let’s say that we have diverse newsrooms that do a better job of reflecting communities’ concerns. Let’s say we have a more diverse media ecosystem that better serves many communities. Let’s say that media outlets do a better job of serving their communities and building trusted relationships with them. All this does only so much good if communities become more isolated.

    Our next job in media is to convene communities into conversation. I’ve learned this in our Social Journalism classes at CUNY, where our students have taught me that serving a community also means connecting that community with others.

    Thus media should convene and inform conversations among whites and blacks, young African-American men and police, immigrants and the native-born, evangelicals and liberals, consumers and corporations, left and right.

    A week ago on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd teased a conversation between Michael Moore and Glenn Beck. Oh, no, I thought: here comes the ultimate cable-news war segment, the return of Crossfire — war! But no, it was the opposite. The segment was thoughtful, even peaceful. Michael Moore lamented the large swaths of America who believe they are unheard (see above). Then Glenn Beck appeared — separately — saying he didn’t necessarily want a record of agreeing with the prior guest he would not name, but he did agree with Michael Moore about the frustration of the unheard Americans. Watch. Here we saw a moment of bridge-building. That, too, is a responsible media’s job.

    I’m pursuing this because I’m suffering an existential crisis as a journalist, ashamed of the role my profession and industry have played as Trump’s publicity agents, worried about the record-low measures of trust in American journalism, and most of all deeply disappointed by the only measure of journalism’s impact that matters: whether the public is informed.

    We must begin by confessing the problem — and indeed the emergency. I recently attended two journalism conferences — one for the old newspaper industry, the other for the newer digital news industry — and neither tore open the agenda to grapple with this civic and journalistic emergency. In media, I see many specimens of its denial of responsibility.

    I do not think we can just make incremental fixes to our old ways — a little more investigation, a little less sexism, a tad more intelligence, another dash of honesty (finally calling lies lies). We must fundamentally reinvent journalism: its relationship with the communities it serves, the forms it takes, the business models that support it.

    Where to we start? Not with story ideas and pitches, not by assigning a reporter to a new beat, not by allocating space in a paper to more stories — all the things we used to do. I would start by sending a team made up of the smartest and most open-minded people from editorial, technology-design-data, and business (because this needs to be sustainable) to spend time with the community they will serve. I’d give them strict instructions: Listen. Observe. Don’t talk. Don’t test your ideas. Don’t interview them to get quotes. Just watch and listen. Learn about their problems and goals. Find out how they try to accomplish those goals now and what frustrates them. Ask what they believe they need to know. Listen for where they’re confused, wrong, worried, and curious. Empathize. Don’t come back until you can give me insights about their lives and needs. Bring me evidence of what you find out. Then build a new journalism around them.

    If we can do this — better informing and building trust even with Trump’s community — we can do the same for any community.