As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a Mississippi case that outlaws abortion after 15 weeks gestation, the media’s coverage of abortion, and the language used to describe it, will be back in the spotlight.On this week’s Kicker, Maria Clark, a Louisiana-based healthcare reporter with USA Today’s American South team, and Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior vice president and executive editor at Rewire News Group, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR....
May 21, 2021•27 min
Ruth Margalit is an Israeli journalist living in Tel Aviv. By day, she covers the crisis there for the New Yorker. By night, her young family shelters in their building’s stairwell.On this week’s Kicker, how American framing of this week’s violence conflicts with the rest of the world’s; how Israeli military censors lost control of the narrative; and why Netanyahu’s downfall could be related to his obsession with the media. Margalit in conversation with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR.
May 14, 2021•21 min
Recently, Maria Bustillos had the opportunity to discuss “post truth,” press manipulation, and right-wing media lies with Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and Claire Wardle, the cofounder and director of First Draft, a nonprofit focused on addressing mis- and disinformation. Both scholars spend a lot of time in the muck with Fox News and its feeder conspiracies. “There’s a lot to be angry about,” Wardle said. Donovan: “Thi...
May 07, 2021•37 min
“Nomadland,” a film inspired by and featuring non-actor sources from journalist Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, just swept the Academy Awards. Both book and film explore the life of America’s “new nomads,” who live without traditional housing since losing their savings in the Great Recession. On this week’s Kicker, Bruder joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the process of shepherding a story from magazine to book to film, and the future of American “h...
May 07, 2021•22 min
A discussion on algorithmic design, data discrimination, social media manipulation, and how racism is baked in. The conversation is led by Nehal El-Hadi, a science and environmental journalist whose work explores the connections between body, place, and technology, with guests Chris Gilliard, a writer and professor whose scholarship centers on digital privacy, surveillance, and the nexus of race, class, and technology, and Marcus Gilroy-Ware, a writer and researcher at the intersection of media ...
May 05, 2021•36 min
Special Report: In 2018, David Goren, a radio producer and audio archivist, created the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map to collect the sounds of dozens of pirated broadcasts from across the borough. Pirate stations earn their name by hitching a ride on already licensed radio frequencies that typically cost commercial stations millions of dollars to acquire and set up. Nowhere in the country are there more pirate radio stations than in New York, where they provide a vital service to immigrant pop...
May 04, 2021•33 min
In 2019, in an effort to combat climate silence, CJR and The Nation, in partnership with The Guardian, founded Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaborative aimed at strengthening coverage of the climate emergency. Two years later, Covering Climate Now partners publish coverage of the climate crisis to 2 billion readers. On this week’s Kicker, Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, edi...
Apr 30, 2021•26 min
In the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict, Mel Reeves, the editor of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, and a 30-year member of the community where George Floyd was murdered, tells Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, how he watched police and city authorities depict his home as inherently violent for the national press.
Apr 26, 2021•27 min
Reporters were in Minneapolis covering the trial of Derek Chauvin when news broke about the police shooting of Daunte Wright. On this week’s Kicker, Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress,” joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his work in Minneapolis over the past week, the ways reporters can contextualize so many deaths, and how he will approach next week’s expected verdict.
Apr 16, 2021•16 min
Joaquin Oliver was murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. His parents, Manuel and Patricia Oliver, recognize a pattern, both in how the US media covers mass shootings by rote, and in how Americans are able to look away once the news cycle ends.On this week’s Kicker, the Olivers, who founded Change The Ref, a nonprofit that works to raise awareness about mass shootings through reducing the influence of the NRA at the federal level, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJ...
Apr 02, 2021•27 min
In August 2019, days after 32 people died in the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings, our host Kyle Pope spoke with John Temple. Temple was the editor of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News when the Columbine massacre changed America’s perception of safety forever. Temple told us about the photos he decided not to run that day in 1999, and the one he did, which confirmed a child’s death before police spoke with the mother. In the wake of the horror in El Paso and Dayton, Temple’s thoughts were on the Civ...
Mar 25, 2021•24 min
In the wake of the shootings in Atlanta this week, the media has focused on the killer’s story and struggled to explain why the attacks were racist. The process has dehumanized the victims.On this week’s Kicker, Diana Lu, who writes about Asian American culture and coverage, and Kent Ono, a scholar of Media and Asian American Studies at the University of Utah, where he studies racial representation and Asian Americans in the media, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss the co...
Mar 19, 2021•33 min
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, most media coverage has focused on the ongoing physical health disaster and the need to convince readers and elected officials to take action. But the coverage is also a chronic source of trauma. Now that there is some good news interspersed with the tragedy, we struggle to find a balance.Dr. Alison Holman is a health psychologist and professor at the University of California Irvine’s Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing, whose work focuses on expo...
Mar 15, 2021•23 min
Refusing to learn female reporters’ names, to speak on the record, to refrain from embarrassing comments. The Andrew Cuomo that political reporters know is entirely different from the pandemic persona during the worst moments of the coronavirus crisis.On this week’s Kicker, Josefa Velásquez, the Albany reporter for THE CITY, who has covered Cuomo for a decade, and Michael Powell, a New York Times national reporter who covered the collapse of both Rudy Giuliani and Elliot Spitzer, join Kyle Pope,...
Mar 05, 2021•28 min
Last year, Michael Tubbs was the focus of an HBO documentary, "Stockton On My Mind," that followed his experience trying to reinvent Stockton, California as the city’s first African-American mayor. Within a few months, however, with his campaign for re-election coming up, Tubbs was subjected to a targeted disinformation campaign, by a fake news website called the 209 Times. Named for the area code of Stockton, the 209 Times claims to be "an independent community driven grassroots news source." I...
Feb 26, 2021•23 min
Burmese journalist Swe Win has survived an assasination attempt and detention by his own government. Now he leads his Yangon-based news outlet Myanmar Now from exile, and his newsroom is in hiding.On this week’s Kicker, reporter and essayist E. Tammy Kim, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speak with Swe Win about journalism under threat in Myanmar, and why he so desperately wants to return despite the threat.
Feb 16, 2021•33 min
On this week’s Kicker, Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018), joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss how the events of January 6th are already being misrepresented in press coverage and how reporters should be framing the ongoing threat.
Feb 05, 2021•25 min
GameStop, Reddit, and who hacked the system by Columbia Journalism Review
Jan 29, 2021•22 min
Shirish Dáte had a front row seat to the chaos of Trump’s presidency and famously asked Trump whether he regretted having lied so many times to the American people. Dáte was also in attendance at the first, radically different press briefing on inauguration day.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Dáte, HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent, discuss what needs to change in the way the press corps covers a presidency, and why the destruction of the Republican p...
Jan 22, 2021•26 min
In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, journalists struggled to cover the devastation in a way that resonated, much as they do with the Covid-19 pandemic today. In “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter who Revealed it to the World,” Lesley Blume tells the story of how New Yorker journalist John Hersey cracked the code.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Blume discuss the problem with coverage that focuses too much on numbers, science, and policy, a...
Jan 19, 2021•33 min
When Trump gave the go-ahead for his mob to storm the Capitol last week, it manifested more as a media event than an organized political coup. As Trump loses power, his followers doubtless will fight harder for relevance and air time.On this week’s Kicker, Davey Alba, a New York Times technology reporter covering online disinformation and its global harms, and Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and an adjunct professor at Portland State Univers...
Jan 11, 2021•34 min
Five lost lives by Columbia Journalism Review
Dec 21, 2020•35 min
Lisa Edmiston, a middle school principal in Queens who is sick for the second time this year, talks to CJR Editor Kyle Pope about urgent inequities within the city’s public schools. The media has devoted its energy to the debate over whether to keep schools open. But that obscures an even bigger story that Edmiston says isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
Dec 11, 2020•19 min
The media’s diversity efforts have been underway for decades, but very little has changed, and diversity rhetoric often becomes dehumanizing. As new union negotiations press the issue, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Maya Binyam, a senior editor of Triple Canopy, an editor of the New Inquiry, and a lecturer in the New School’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program, and Betsy Morais, managing editor of CJR.
Dec 04, 2020•33 min
New vaccines, same story by Columbia Journalism Review
Nov 20, 2020•26 min
The media did better work covering Trump than in 2016, but did that reporting have any impact on the real world?On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, sits down with CJR’s public editors—Ariana Pekary for CNN, Maria Bustillos for MSNBC, Gabriel Snyder for the New York Times, and Hamilton Nolan for the Washington Post—to discuss what it would take to rebuild the influence of good journalism.
Nov 13, 2020•33 min
Trump told us, ahead of time, he would claim victory in the election regardless of how America voted. On this week's Kicker, Masha Gessen, a New Yorker columnist and author of "Surviving Autocracy," talks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the continuing dangers of autocracy in the US.
Nov 06, 2020•25 min
In 2016, Donald Trump told rally attendees that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters. Since then, disqualifying pieces of investigative journalism have glanced off without impact on him or his base.On this week’s Kicker, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, assess how the media has navigated through all of this, less than a week before election day.
Oct 30, 2020•29 min
Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon have written the CJR newsletter, “The Media Today,” since its inception in the wake of the 2016 election. On this week’s Kicker, they speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what journalism should become when the torrent of Trump news is gone.
Oct 23, 2020•32 min
Most sexual assault coverage in America is told from the attacker’s perspective. Survivors’ physical appearance is described in detail, and the actual assault is sexualized. But in E Jean Carroll’s masterly series for The Atlantic, “I Moved on Her Very Heavily,” Trump’s survivors remain firmly in charge of their own stories, focusing their conversation on his crimes and his impact on their lives.On this week’s Kicker, journalist and author E Jean Carroll speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publish...
Oct 16, 2020•25 min
