The president has COVID-19, but the White House has failed to provide reliable information about his condition. To fill the gap, journalists have turned to doctors.On this week’s Kicker, Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, an emergency medicine specialist and professor at NewYork-Presbyterian / Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, track how our framing can change a medical question into a political question and ask where we should draw the line.
Oct 09, 2020•28 min
As a result of an aggressive disinformation campaign, about half of Republicans believe voter fraud is a major problem. Now that Trump has tested positive for COVID-19, what will the impact be on his party’s push to question the validity of the election?On this week’s Kicker, Yochai Benkler a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Benkler’s study of online media stories a...
Oct 02, 2020•25 min
How did Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg view the press? And how far did the mythology we built around the “Great Dissenter” stray from reality?On this week’s Kicker, Betsy West, co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary ”RBG,” joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR to discuss what it was like to work with Ginsburg, the hagiography around her, and her legacy of optimism.
Sep 25, 2020•23 min
The forcible sterilizations of female detainees at an immigration detention center in Georgia comprise a new level of cruelty. But ICE health care systems are known to replicate those of American prisons, where reproduction injustice is an enduring problem.On this week’s Kicker, Tina Vasquez, a senior reporter at Prism who has covered the Georgia case, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Vasquez’s interviews with ICE detainees and her work to put the latest outrage in context.
Sep 18, 2020•21 min
Editor Sheila Rayam and reporter Georgie Silvarole both grew up in Rochester, New York. So did the city’s former Police Chief La'Ron Singletary and Mayor Lovely Warren. When Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle published a letter from its editorial board calling for Singletary’s resignation following a cover up of Daniel Prude’s murder, it channeled the community’s shock and pain. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Rayam and Silvarole about how they have c...
Sep 11, 2020•25 min
As long-time middle school principal and COVID survivor Lisa Edmiston prepares to reopen her middle school in Astoria, she has worked to manage the fear shared by her staff and students. She has also made arrangements for herself at a local funeral home.On this week’s Kicker, Edmiston, and Michael Elsen-Rooney, an education reporter for the Daily News, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how to assess what city education officials say, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s dismissive...
Aug 28, 2020•22 min
On this week’s Kicker, Professor Richard R. John, a historian and author of “Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse,” speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the intersection between the Postal Service and politics. For decades, the Postal Service -- the internet of its age -- was entwined in electoral politics. That ended, but now Donald Trump has restarted the fight. This episode of The Kicker looks at how reporters should cover the battle.
Aug 21, 2020•26 min
Radio rallies in church parking lots, candidates in their basements, and voters stuck in hibernation. When all that’s left to cover are the talking points, how should local and national political reporters adapt?This week, the national press missed the heartland’s biggest story, a series of storms that devastated the center of the country. On this week’s Kicker, Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa, and Ayesha Rascoe, a White House reporter for NPR, join Kyle Pope, edi...
Aug 14, 2020•23 min
Stephen Sackur and Interviewing Trump by Columbia Journalism Review
Aug 07, 2020•27 min
The uprising to abolish the police asks our country, and the press, to envision a new world. But the news business is not built to accommodate ideas that would transform society. On this week’s Kicker, three longtime writers and speakers on anti-Black racism and policing—Mychal Denzel Smith, Josie Duffy Rice, and Alex Vitale—discuss media coverage of recent protests, trace our use of the word crime, and urge us to focus on local activism.
Jul 17, 2020•38 min
When Nicholson Baker first fell in love with YouTube, it was for its “outpouring of human miscellany” and “first person journalism.” But when CJR asked him to write about YouTube as a purveyor of political information, he stumbled upon a different world—one that, in spite of recent algorithmic adjustments, makes radicalization a frictionless experience.On this week’s Kicker, Baker and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Baker’s YouTube experience, as well as the extraordinary discove...
Jul 10, 2020•35 min
On this week’s Kicker, journalist Jack Herrera and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the gaps in newsroom’s coverage of the defunding debate, and the blind spots journalists still have as a result of the lack of newsroom diversity.
Jul 03, 2020•30 min
Ed Yong on COVID-19 and American fatalism by Columbia Journalism Review
Jun 26, 2020•30 min
People with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Studies show they make up close to half of all police shooting victims. Young black men with mental illness are the most vulnerable group of all, so why won’t the press tell their stories?On this week’s Kicker, Meg Kissinger, an investigative reporter and professor of reporting on the mental health system at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Dr. Stephanie Le Melle, the Director of Public Psychia...
Jun 19, 2020•24 min
As journalists cover the intersection of racist police riots, our president’s instability, and the coronavirus pandemic, we struggle to break the old mold of objective reporting. Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for the New York Times, recently wrote about the terrifying detachment of white police violence, the inequalities the pandemic has underlined, and how Patti LaBelle’s 1985 cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” depicts four hundred years of Black suffering. On this week’s Kicker, Morris ...
Jun 08, 2020•43 min
Police murders of Black Americans, and the resulting protests, are once more at the forefront of the news cycle. The focus constitutes an important opportunity, but journalists who don’t have a nuanced understanding of our country’s systemic, state-sponsored violence against Black people, wrongly report the latest police crimes as a symptom of the Trump regime. On this week’s Kicker, Danielle Belton, editor in chief of The Root, and Alexandria Neason, staff writer at CJR, speak with Kyle Pope, o...
May 29, 2020•20 min
When Adam Piore set out to profile MSNBC, he discovered a community of viewers who feel that, just by watching cable news, they are participating in our democracy.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Piore and Betsy Morais, our managing editor, to ask why cable networks abandoned their “just the news” stance to emphasize opinion and commentary, and how they will struggle to cover 2020 in the midst of a public health crisis.
May 22, 2020•21 min
As COVID-19 death rates in some native communities soar, and federal care package payments to Indigenous tribes lag behind those to state and municipal governments, why does the US trail so far behind other colonizing countries in its news coverage of its first peoples?On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Hopkins, special projects editor of the Anchorage Daily News and recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for public service, and Jenni Monet, an independent journalist and a tribal citizen of the Pueblo ...
May 15, 2020•22 min
Investigative journalist Giancarlo Fiorella was watching when the Associated Press reported a plot to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. What Fiorella could not believe was that, after the planned coup was revealed, Jordan Goudreau, a former green beret and sometime security guard to President Trump, decided to go through with it anyway. Equating himself to Alexander the Great, Goudreau sent his men across hundreds of miles of open sea, towards certain failure.On this week’s K...
May 08, 2020•25 min
As tens of thousands of Americans die of COVID-19, fear and uncertainty devolve into paranoid tribalism. At our most extreme, one side believes science is sacrosanct, and the other claims the pandemic is a plot to destabilize the president. Political commentator Charlie Sykes was once at the center of the American conservative movement. Now he opposes Donald Trump and the right-wing media that enable his cult of personality. On this week’s Kicker, Sykes, founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwar...
May 01, 2020•27 min
The intersection of conflict, climate, and disease has never been more apparent, and neither has public need for “journalistic rigor and urgency.”On this week’s Kicker, E. Tammy Kim, a freelance reporter and essayist, and Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for The Nation, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what COVID-19 and the climate crisis reveal about the problem of social systems that are exclusionary by design.
Apr 24, 2020•20 min
Religion is difficult for journalists to cover, in part because it lies beyond observation and resists narrative. On this week’s Kicker, Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion writer for the New York Times, speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how, as we live in a time of enormous loss, we can report on spirituality and death.
Apr 17, 2020•18 min
Punished for wearing masks, or for asking to have their temperatures taken, our aging prison population is denied basic social distancing, hygiene, and cleaning supplies they need to defend themselves against COVID-19. Governor Andrew Cuomo has not responded to letters from advocates for the inmates, and he claims, falsely, that he lacks the authority to fix the issues.Journalist Rosa Goldensohn, of The City, reports on inmates still forced to congregate, or to sleep in beds 16 inches apart. Ste...
Apr 10, 2020•21 min
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 press conferences rely heavily on data, as does press coverage of the pandemic. But when CJR’s Amanda Darrach got sick, she learned how misleading those numbers are. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Darrach about how we should cover the trauma of COVID-19.
Apr 03, 2020•15 min
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Kim Bui, director of audience innovation at the Arizona Republic, has looked to her readers to help guide the paper’s coverage. Bui says she texts with her readers and works in real time to find the answers they need.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Bui and Mathew Ingram, CJR’s chief digital writer, on how newsrooms have struggled to create a two-way conversation with their readers in the past. Without time for cautious p...
Mar 26, 2020•17 min
When an outbreak like the Covid-19 pandemic hits, local journalists serve as first responders for global surveillance efforts. Elisabeth Rosenthal was a young physician when the AIDS epidemic hit New York City; she later covered the SARS crisis in China for the New York Times. Samantha Pak is senior editor at the Kirkland Reporter, the local paper covering Life Care Center nursing home, where 19 residents have died from the coronavirus. On this week’s Kicker, Rosenthal, who is editor-in-chief of...
Mar 12, 2020•23 min
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump didn’t visit towns like Storm Lake, Iowa in 2016. This election cycle, things are much different. Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times, and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing, has interviewed 15 presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. On this week’s Kicker, he talks to Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about what national political reporters get wrong and what they...
Mar 05, 2020•22 min
Kadir van Lohuizen reports on the climate crisis with the same techniques he brought to his work as a war correspondent. His photography, video, and written work focus on the point of conflict between the crisis and human life. This week, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with van Lohuizen about what kind of climate disaster coverage inspires real action.
Feb 28, 2020•20 min
Jess Brammar is the new editor in chief of HuffPost UK. She is also 7 months pregnant. When it comes to family leave policy, American news outlets lag behind their European counterparts. On this week’s Kicker, Brammar joins Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss that difference and how family leave might just give newsrooms the diversity they need to survive.
Feb 20, 2020•16 min
In China, journalists are conditioned to keep their online activity apolitical. But the coronavirus outbreak took censors by surprise. In the panic, editors were temporarily emboldened. Han Zhang, who is on the editorial staff at the New Yorker, sat down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the flow of outbreak information in the Chinese media, how many coronavirus fatalities may go unreported, and her last interview with citizen journalist Chen Quishi, before he disappeared.
Feb 13, 2020•20 min
