Why Do We Need More Investigative Journalism?

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Asa: We produce a product that is painful to consume, and then we wonder why nobody wants to pay for it. The focus on the negative a hundred % of the time has led to a huge decline in people trusting institutions,. And so that number of people who think others are good now has fallen to about 12%. A lot of that is due to what we see in journalism. What we see of people we don't know is what the media shows us. It's showing an existence proof for one solution. Once you see one solution, it's much easier to start to see two, ten, 15, a hundred solutions.

What is the goal of our digital information environment? Is it simply to inform us, or also to empower us to act?

The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) understands that simply reporting on social problems rarely leads to change. What they’ve discovered is that rigorously reporting on responses to social problems is more likely to give activists and concerned citizens the hope and information they need to take effective action. For this reason, SJN trains journalists to report on “solutions angles.” More broadly, the organization seeks to rebalance the news, so that people are exposed to stories that help them understand the challenges we face as well as potential ways to respond.

In this episode, Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of SJN, and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, former manager of SJN’s Complicating the Narratives initiative, walk us through the origin of solutions journalism, how to practice it, and what impact it has had. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin reflect on how humane technology, much like solutions journalism, should also be designed to create an empowering relationship with reality — enabling us to shift from learned helplessness to what we might call learned hopefulness.