The Kicker

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.

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.

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.

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 covered the protests so far, the experience of watching disinformation evolve in real time, and what their newspaper’s role can be in the fight against police brutality.

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 attitude towards education unions, and the pandemic’s effect on the culture of the Department of Education.

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.