The Kicker

This week, the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression convened. The 6-3 “super-majority” is poised to roll back decades of law. On our latest episode of the Kicker, Jay Willis, the editor in chief of Balls and Strikes, a site that launched last month promising “progressive, bullshit-free commentary” about the legal system, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss vital rulings that missed the news cycle, and why conservative justices have been so critical of the media.

Medhi Hasan has built a global reputation on devastating interviews. Now on MSNBC and Peacock, is he a corrective to the equivocal tendencies of the American press?Jon Allsop profiled Hasan for our latest issue. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to detail how Hasan’s approach can be seen as “an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms."

Adam Piore spoke to 50 current and former staffers at the Wall Street Journal on how the paper’s editors limit subject matter and political coverage in an effort to hold on to their traditional audience.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Piore discuss his findings, the Journal’s obsession with the New York Times, and what it all means for the journalists who work there.

In his five-plus decades of photographing performative wealth and celebrity at events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, Larry Fink perfected the art of taking “candid pictures of very non-candid people.” On this week’s Kicker, Fink joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss coverage of last week’s Met Gala, how journalism can learn from his ability to capture the space between posed photo ops, and why now, against the backdrop of a global pandemic and extreme economic inequality, the time for risk-free activism and the fetishization of wealth is over.

For CJR, Jon Allsop followed the weekend’s deluge of September 11 anniversary coverage—where it excelled, and when it lacked self-awareness. On today’s Kicker, he joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what the media got right and what it didn’t.

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousness of what scholars call the “gender binary.” Bringing an intersectional perspective, and looking at examples from women’s sports, they invite journalists to speak truth to the power that is exercised, often violently, through an insistence on “normative” ideas of gender and sexuality. Guests: Zach Stafford & Jack Halberstam

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deported wholesale to vulnerable nations. In this episode, a scholar sheds light on the invention of the “illegal alien,” its use and manipulation for the past 140 years (and counting) to exclude and exploit people of color and more recent notions of who and who is not deserving of legal admission into the United States. Guest: Mae Ngai

Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. Some 50,000 well-paid jobs were gone. There was a concurrent rise in anger as the workers and their children struggled to survive with minimum-wage jobs or in the gig economy. Youngstown represents the widening chasm of class division in the United States. Journalists need to understand how class informs politics and culture. In this episode we talk with a labor studies expert about how to cover the working class.Guest: Sherry Linkon

There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They are Empire Slayers — why else would “Star Wars” and its fight against the Galactic Empire have such a hold on the popular imagination? In this episode, two scholars explain how, from the nation’s birth, imperial expansion — first westward into Indian Country and later, overseas —was a defining character of these United States. The echoes of empire can be heard in today’s news. It’s impossible to talk about immigration, drone strikes, the attacks on Asian Americans, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, etc., without understanding the history and projection of American power. What would journalism informed by the history of empire look like? Guests: Daniel Immerwahr & Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez

Whiteness in America isn’t just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with being part of that supposed norm. And becoming white – not in terms of pigment but of social status – is a choice that nearly every immigrant or refugee group in America has had to embrace or reject. We talk with two scholars in the field of Whiteness Studies about how understanding the construction of white identity in this polyglot country gives us keen insights into its troubled racial history.