The Kicker

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.

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.

New vaccines, same story by Columbia Journalism Review

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 publisher of CJR, on how our coverage of sexual assault makes it easier for voters to slough off and why she knew coming forward to tell how Trump raped her in the mid-nineties would rouse his base.

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.

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 and social media posts that referred to the risk of voter fraud, all posted between March 1 and August 31 this year. His team found that Trump is central to the dissemination process, and that, in the media’s effort to remain neutral, we adopt and amplify his framing.