The Kicker

Radio rallies in church parking lots, candidates in their basements, and voters stuck in hibernation. When all that’s left to cover are the talking points, how should local and national political reporters adapt?This week, the national press missed the heartland’s biggest story, a series of storms that devastated the center of the country. On this week’s Kicker, Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa, and Ayesha Rascoe, a White House reporter for NPR, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss journalism’s struggle to avoid the mistakes of 2016 while in the midst of a pandemic.

Stephen Sackur and Interviewing Trump by Columbia Journalism Review

The uprising to abolish the police asks our country, and the press, to envision a new world. But the news business is not built to accommodate ideas that would transform society. On this week’s Kicker, three longtime writers and speakers on anti-Black racism and policing—Mychal Denzel Smith, Josie Duffy Rice, and Alex Vitale—discuss media coverage of recent protests, trace our use of the word crime, and urge us to focus on local activism.

When Nicholson Baker first fell in love with YouTube, it was for its “outpouring of human miscellany” and “first person journalism.” But when CJR asked him to write about YouTube as a purveyor of political information, he stumbled upon a different world—one that, in spite of recent algorithmic adjustments, makes radicalization a frictionless experience.On this week’s Kicker, Baker and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Baker’s YouTube experience, as well as the extraordinary discoveries he made for his new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.

On this week’s Kicker, journalist Jack Herrera and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the gaps in newsroom’s coverage of the defunding debate, and the blind spots journalists still have as a result of the lack of newsroom diversity.

Ed Yong on COVID-19 and American fatalism by Columbia Journalism Review

People with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Studies show they make up close to half of all police shooting victims. Young black men with mental illness are the most vulnerable group of all, so why won’t the press tell their stories?On this week’s Kicker, Meg Kissinger, an investigative reporter and professor of reporting on the mental health system at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Dr. Stephanie Le Melle, the Director of Public Psychiatry Education at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and New York State Psychiatric Institute, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about how to report on police violence against black sufferers of serious mental illness.

As journalists cover the intersection of racist police riots, our president’s instability, and the coronavirus pandemic, we struggle to break the old mold of objective reporting. Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for the New York Times, recently wrote about the terrifying detachment of white police violence, the inequalities the pandemic has underlined, and how Patti LaBelle’s 1985 cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” depicts four hundred years of Black suffering. On this week’s Kicker, Morris joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his piece and how to cover the heartbreak and rage sparked by the murder of George Floyd.

Police murders of Black Americans, and the resulting protests, are once more at the forefront of the news cycle. The focus constitutes an important opportunity, but journalists who don’t have a nuanced understanding of our country’s systemic, state-sponsored violence against Black people, wrongly report the latest police crimes as a symptom of the Trump regime. On this week’s Kicker, Danielle Belton, editor in chief of The Root, and Alexandria Neason, staff writer at CJR, speak with Kyle Pope, our editor and publisher, about the history of protest in America, how coverage of the latest murders ties into the COVID-19 pandemic, and why this is not just a story about Trump’s attempts to incite violence.

When Adam Piore set out to profile MSNBC, he discovered a community of viewers who feel that, just by watching cable news, they are participating in our democracy.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Piore and Betsy Morais, our managing editor, to ask why cable networks abandoned their “just the news” stance to emphasize opinion and commentary, and how they will struggle to cover 2020 in the midst of a public health crisis.