The Kicker

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: “This job is hell.”

“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 “houselessness” in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

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 and politics.

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 populations. Goren estimates that New York has about a hundred pirate stations, transmitting from rooftops and attics to listeners seeking news from around the city and back home, as well as entertainment and religious programming. The broadcasts bypass socioeconomic barriers and provide a means to seize control of the flow of information. But they are now at risk of extinction: Before Donald Trump left the White House, he signed the Pirate Act, which increased the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to fight pirate operations through mandatory sweeps in cities with high concentrations of pirate radio use. Pirate stations today face fines of up to two million dollars. “The people running these stations, they don’t have two million dollars,” Goren said. Broadcasters that don’t make it onto his sound map could be lost forever.

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, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss what they’ve learned about how to tell climate crisis stories that land with impact, how the scientific weight of COVID-19 coverage can further climate coverage, and why covering the climate crisis is journalism, not advocacy.

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.

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.

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 CJR, discuss how the media can drive urgency in the fight for gun control.Please visit inevitablenews.com to sign up for our virtual Gun Violence News Summit, which takes place on Tuesday, April 6. Join Kyle, the Olivers, and industry leaders from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Trace, The Guardian, and others to determine a path forward in the face of never-ending gun violence and mass shootings.

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 Civil Rights movement, on the fight for abolition—the times in our history when journalists have taken a moral stand.As we take stock of the devastation in Atlanta and Boulder, and of the ways in which the news cycle failed, especially Atlanta’s victims, here again are John Temple and Kyle Pope.

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 coverage of the horror in Atlanta so far, and the origins of anti-Asian racism and sexism in the American press.