472. CNN Style explores intersection of news and culture

CNN is synonymous with hard-hitting news and an international approach to it, with correspondents around the world keeping viewers, and readers, informed about what’s happening in the world.

That’s no surprise; that’s the expectation.

The surprise is that CNN Style does much the same, but with a different entry point.

“The North Star for us is a tagline we started using internally: We put culture in context. What that means is, our mission is to help our audience make sense of the world around them through the lens of visual culture, be it art, fashion, design, architecture, beauty. That’s what informs a lot of the editorial decision-making on my end,” says Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN Style’s global editor.

Fiona Sinclair Scott is CNN Style’s global editor.

Historically, the style section of a newspaper, magazine or website might have been where “women’s issues” were discussed. But Scott says her audience is nearly evenly split between men and women.

“We do cater to women, but I wouldn’t say that our coverage is heavily focused on servicing women in particular,” she says. “We do have strong women on the team and we do strong storytelling when it comes to women’s issues, but when you look at our audience, when you break it down, it’s almost a 50/50 split in terms of gender.”

The “tiny, tiny team” was recently honored by the Alliance for Women in Media with a Gracie Award for the best Information/Entertainment Website, something Scott calls a “huge honor. It’s just really great to be recognized by an organization that champions women in particular. It’s such a credit to the team.”

One of the three staff members of the team, Stephy Chung, is the driving force behind CNN Style’s ambitious Hyphenated series.

“It’s a deeply personal series for Stephy. She’s an Asian American. We decided to launch Hyphenated with a focus on the Asian-American experience. She came to me, very clearly, with an idea for the series and was very straight with me,” Scott says. “She said the anti-Asian sentiment and violence we’re seeing in America right now is really worrying. It’s getting worse and the media isn’t covering it the way it should. We need to do something about it.”

Everything covered in Style is really about something else, she says.

“OK, this is a pitch about photography or a new exhibit opening, but is it about more than that? That’s really, as I’ve come to learn, what interests our audience. We have to think of our audience in a digital space. We’re very data-driven and we have to think about what will resonate with our audience based on the data we’re looking at every day.”

The average CNN viewer and reader isn’t looking for content that would traditionally be found in the style section. “That’s about going, hey, listen, I know you don’t care about design, but this isn’t about design. It’s about something else. It’s about embracing intersectionalities and the interplay between subject areas. We think about fashion and the climate crisis. We think about beauty and identity. We think about art and representation. It’s there, it’s in those intersections, we do something I hope people find to be unique and compelling.”

Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN Style’s global editor, says everything going on in politics and news around the world is connected to cultural expressions, including fashion, art and design. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about these intersectionalities and why Style is not just for traditional “women’s interests.”

461. The Counter uses food to make news more digestible

471. Info District: A 21st century model for funding local news

Municipalities across the country have specially designated areas for dedicated uses, from airports and hospitals to mosquito abatement and commercial properties.

Why not do the same for news?

That’s what the Community Information Cooperative wants to encourage and help build. The concept, called an Info District, would create publicly funded areas for the development of local news organizations, and the people who live near and provide money for those districts would have a say in how local information is gathered and shared.

Simon Galperin of the Community Information Cooperative

“Through the co-op, we’re trying to address the local journalism crisis at a variety of levels, including the policy level, the organizing level and on the ground, building something from scratch, what does it take to build a 21st Century news organization from the ground up,” says Simon Galperin, a founding director of the co-op. He came up with the idea of Info Districts at the City University of New York, building on a concept he’d discussed with a friend after failing to prepare for an assignment. “Focusing on infrastructure building is not what traditional journalism training gets you. At some point, and I’m not a religious guy, but at some point it does feel spiritual. It connects so much with me and the people I look at and see as my peers and allies.”

Galperin currently is putting this model to work in his hometown of Bloomfield, New Jersey, where he’s running the Bloomfield Information Project.

“We’re trying to take the lofty ideas and put them into practice,” he says. “They have an open space trust fund. That means the properties in the town get taxed at about $20 per property. The money gets pooled together and there’s a committee that helps purchase and maintain open space. New parks are built this way. There’s an existing infrastructure for civic investment in a public good. (Info Districts are) a similar concept. The governance structure is different.”

Establishing an Info District would also involve plenty of community engagement and input, Galperin says.

“In Bloomfield, if you taxed everyone $10 per year, that would give us a $500,000 operating budget. What we could accomplish, what a community-run organization could accomplish — I’m not sure if you want to call that (a) small or big (budget) — it would completely change the future of Bloomfield, it would change the future of Essex County, it would improve public health, it would increase voter turnout, it would improve access to information. Having an organization dedicated to encouraging civic engagement by using journalism training, education and organizing, that’s what we need in our communities nowadays. To fund that, ad dollars aren’t going to do it.”

Simon Galperin, founding director of the Community Information Cooperative, explains the concept of an Info District. He talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about how local news initiatives, funded by taxpayer dollars, can help change the future for municipalities across the country.

Better News: Nonprofit newsrooms turn rivalry into revenue stream

470. COVID-19 exposes growing need for mental health reporting

For nine months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Camalot Todd had access to photographers and in-person editors to help her produce in-depth stories on mental health for Spectrum News, a broadcast news station and website in Buffalo, in partnership with Report For America.

That all changed when the world hit pause.

A few weeks before the pandemic hit, Todd had interviewed faith leaders in the Black community about their role in helping to fight the stigma of addressing mental health issues.

Camalot Todd

“One source said these problems have always existed and they haven’t been addressed because the boat is still floating,” she says, with the boat being America as a whole. “No one is concerned about people on the back of the boat because everything’s fine. Two weeks later, COVID happened and you immediately saw the boat start to sink. You saw it when the first data came out about who was dying at higher rates. You saw it three weeks after, when we had three different police departments reporting an increase in overdoses.”

Very quickly, the Las Vegas native (who grew up in Denver) had to learn how to produce video content and record Zoom calls using a makeshift studio in her studio apartment. Instead of having weeks to schedule and record and map out interviews, mental health reporting became a high priority and stories needed to be turned more quickly.

“At the start, a lot (of my reporting) was prevention and resources,” Todd says. “Everyone was a little optimistic, hoping it wouldn’t last past the summer. We were so naive. A lot was, if you’re struggling with mental health, these are the nonprofits doing telehealth services for first responders, here’s where you can get support for children. Then it became more of a, this doesn’t seem like it’s ending.”

While Todd had some training in covering mental health and trauma, including reporting on the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, she says this kind of reporting is “not a skill set a lot of journalists learn. I went to journalism school and took all the classes, talking about trauma reporting and the impact on you wasn’t really mentioned outside of the Dart Center. It was learn as I go. I have been very fortunate because there’s a lot more trainings now I take part in. I was an opioid and addiction fellow for the National Press Foundation this year and that helped me understand how to report on addiction and substance use. It’s a work in progress.”

To help organize and prioritize her pandemic mental health reporting, Todd went old school and put up a chalkboard wall in her apartment, mapping out first the demographics in Buffalo and then the service providers and nonprofit organizations in the region. “I would circle back to the nonprofits and say what are people calling you for, what are the biggest challenges. What are you seeing the most need for? And I’d tackle those (topics) first.”

Camalot Todd is a mental health reporter at Spectrum News 1 in Buffalo through a partnership with Report for America. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about her background covering this topic and how the pandemic created challenges and a greater need for this kind of reporting.

439. How the coronavirus changed journalism

469. The Defiant breaks down cryptocurrency

The financial world is confusing enough for most people, including journalists, to try and understand. Bears, bulls, highs, lows, stocks, bonds; it’s a lot to try and comprehend and it’s very easy to be intimidated.

Throw cryptocurrency and blockchain and Bitcoin and Etherium into the mix and it’s all the more complicated.

Camila Russo didn’t set out to be a financial journalist but taking a finance class during her masters program at Northwestern introduced her to that world, one she quickly found she loved.

Camila Russo is a financial journalist and current editor of The Defiant.

“I actually enjoyed reporting on that side of things rather than politics and foreign policy,” she says. “From there, I realized this was an interesting career path. I applied for a Bloomberg internship, stayed there for eight years and that shaped me as a financial journalist.”

There’s a kind of objective truth in writing about financial matters that isn’t possible in other kinds of journalism, according to Russo.

“You’re reporting on numbers, things you can quantify and prove,” she says. “I started to realize the market provides us a more objective way of looking at things. A price is the condensation of thousands of things. The price of a company’s stock, whether it’s going up or down, it’s reflecting the opinion of thousands of investors around the world. The same with government bonds. Bonds from Argentina have super high yields; that’s a way of saying the policies its government is doing is impacting the country in a negative way. That’s more objective than finding analysts to comment on a story. You can show with numbers what’s going on with a country or a company.”

Russo is the founder and current editor for The Defiant, a business news site, newsletter, and podcast about decentralized finance, primarily focusing on the rapidly expanding world of blockchain cryptocurrencies.

“Blockchains are decentralized and distributed networks,” Russo says. “This means they are networks of people who are running a software all over the world and there’s no hierarchy to those individuals, who are nodes of the network. It’s this system not run by a central party, it’s run by nodes running a software globally. These participants are incentivized in currency. Cryptocurrency, the way it’s produced involves a lot of cryptography, so that’s basically it. Networks and participants of the network are incentivized to run and confirm transactions in the network by earning cryptocurrency.”

The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, followed by the Ethereum blockchain and its currency, Ether, and now there are others, including DogeCoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke “underpinned by a meme that Elon Musk tweeted,” Russo says.

Camila Russo is the founder and current editor of The Defiant, a business news site, newsletter, and podcast about decentralized finance. She talks with It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about the clarity of financial reporting and explains how blockchains work.

468. Bitchin’ Pitchin’ creator talks freelance tips, moral and ethical convictions

Abby Lee Hood does not hide who they are.

A self-declared “leftist journo,” Hood is a Tennessee-based freelancer and creator of the Bitchin’ Pitchin’ monthly newsletter who tries to find story angles through frameworks, including making national news local and local news relatable on a national level.

Recently, they emailed a state senator on several pieces of anti-transgender legislation, something that is happening around the country.

“His response was, that’s biased, you’re an activist and you’re prejudiced because you used ‘anti-LGBTQ,’” Hood says. In their experience, “you’re going to get called an activist if you’re anything other than far right. It’s important for me to live by my personal morals.”

Abby Lee Hood is a freelancer who writes the Bitchin’ Pitchin’ newsletter. (Photo by Jenn Curtis)

That particular piece is an example of taking a national story with local ripples and exploring it.

“Even though it’s happening on a nationwide level, I’m always looking for how does that impact the business community here? How does that impact transgendered Tennesseans? What are the businesses in Tennessee who are donating to candidates and legislators who are pushing these bills? You can find a national story that applies to your local audience and vice versa.”

Hood says most of their freelance work comes from successful pitches, but not everything. But does the up-front identity of being a “leftist” ever hinder them from finding work, or publications willing to pay for it?

“I know my ethics and I know my morals,” Hood says. “It doesn’t concern me, but it does concern others. They’ve reached out to people I work with. … The thing about being a leftist journalist, I have lost work. People have decided not to work with me. One of the editors I work with frequently said, when I first pitched her, someone said don’t work with them because they’re an activist. I know there are people who come to my (Twitter) profile and go ‘No thank you.’ To them, I say good riddance. I’m grateful for the work I do have, I get by and I do OK. There’s a certain amount of privilege to say good riddance to those people. … I wouldn’t want to work with them anyway.”

Hood says the “leftist” tag really translates more to trying to highlight voices that might be overlooked or marginalized from other reporters.

“I tend to focus a lot on the working class and how the news affects the working class,” they say. “You’ll find no Karl Marx in my writing.”

Abby Lee Hood, a freelance writer and creator of the monthly Bitchin’ Pitchin’ newsletter, joins host Michael O’Connell to discuss tips for successful freelance pitching. They also explain what it means to be a “leftist journo” and the freedom that comes from being upfront about their morals and ethics.

467. TikTok Used To Expose Abuse Of Domestic Workers

TikTok isn’t just about dances and lessons and poking a little fun at the world.

For domestic workers in the Persian Gulf region, TikTok has been a way to say in the open, to the whole world, that which has previously been shared only in secret.

Louise Donovan is an award-winning journalist who, like so many people, found herself unexpectedly at home and cut-off from her usual sources and stories last year during the pandemic. Now with the Fuller Project for International Reporting, a non-profit newsroom that often partners with news organizations around the world to shed light on stories affecting women, Donovan saw an opportunity to build on her previous work about domestic employees.

Louise Donovan is a reporter for The Fuller Project.

“Previously, domestic workers would use WhatsApp individually to talk with their family and friends back home,” she says. These women typically come from Asian and African nations and move to Saudi Arabia and Qatar for employment, but their working conditions are such that their bosses can steal and keep their passports and refuse them the ability to change jobs or visit their families without permission.

“Most foreign domestic workers in the gulf are sponsored through a system that gives their employers almost total control over them,” Donovan says. “They’re very vulnerable. These abuses have been documented a lot before. It’s nothing new that their sponsorship system is quite exploitative. What was different was that not a lot of women previously were taking to a very public platform to talk about it.”

Unlike Facebook or other social media platforms, TikTok is much more public — the option to talk privately just doesn’t exist in the same way. People from anywhere can see anyone’s video based on however the TikTok algorithm is working that day.

Donovan didn’t have a source tell her to look at the platform to find these women telling their stories; she just decided to look around and see what she could find.

“Some were using it like everyone else, to have fun and pass the time, but others were using it to document these abuses and these exploitative working conditions they face every day. I wanted people to know that there were women raising awareness of the issues they face, very bravely. They wanted to tell women at home, who might want to head to the Middle East, about the realities, but they were also telling women around the world” about their lives and the dangers they lived in.

Louise Donovan, an award-winning journalist with the Fuller Project, joins host Michael O’Connell to talk about her reporting on domestic workers using TikTok to raise awareness on their abusive conditions. She explains how these concerns were previously shared privately, on WhatsApp and other platforms, before the pandemic.

445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut

466 Prison Journalism Project helps inmates share their stories

A “divine” meeting between Shaheen Pasha and Yukari Kane forged a powerful friendship and partnership that gave rise to the Prison Journalism Project, an initiative to help people who are behind bars and have a passion for writing to find a wider audience and change the conversation about life in prison.

“All the issues we care about, homelessness and drugs and mental health and public school education, it’s all really tied intricately to the state of incarceration,” Kane says.

Shaheen Pasha of the Prison Journalism Project

She had never covered the criminal justice system or anything pertaining to it before she was offered the chance to teach journalism to inmates at San Quentin. “I thought I’m going to do something outside my box. It was completely perspective changing.”

For Pasha, who had experience covering court cases, it was a personal experience that brought her to develop a passion for this work.

“It wasn’t something I thought much about beyond what happened in a courtroom,” she said. “But then I became one of the millions of Americans who has a loved one behind bars. My best friend was arrested and sentenced to 150 years in prison in New Jersey. Suddenly, I had to think about someone I love whose life is behind bars. I went to visit him shortly after he was sentenced and it was this moment where I was looking at someone who I knew, super intelligent, who had so much he could offer the world, and he was languishing.”

Pasha also taught journalism in prisons after becoming a professor — at first, when she called what she wanted to do “journalism,” her request was denied, so instead she suggested she’d teach “media writing” and they agreed.

Yukari Kane of the Prison Journalism Project

“Our mission is to train writers who are incarcerated and those whose lives are impacted,” Kane says. “The formerly incarcerated, friends, family, people who work (in prisons), and help them find a larger audience” through the Prison Journalism Project.

They offer the program in two parts, a handout-based correspondence course and editorial work.

“We want to put out relevant stories,” Kane says. “We also want to provide an opportunity that’s a lower bar than other publications (for the writers to become published authors). In addition, we work one-on-one with some writers to get essays and articles published elsewhere. We want to do more with other media organizations to get stories out.”

While they do need to work within the restrictions established by each prison, they also want to make sure people have the chance to tell their stories.

“We don’t want them to do anything that would put them in any kind of jeopardy. We’re very much aware of the environment they’re in. They have agency,” Pasha says. “They feel this is a way for them to get their voice out and they’re fully conscious of what the repercussions may be.”

Shaheen Pasha and Yukari Kane, co-founders and co-executive directors of the Prison Journalism Project, join It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell to explain their initiative. They work with inmates to help those with an interest in writing learn how to tell their stories to a wider audience.

456. What Is Life shares stories of prisoners facing life sentences

465. How newsrooms should handle requests to unpublish stories

When news was only available in print publications or on fleeting broadcasts, it mattered little when someone’s arrest or misdeed was reported. There might be a hubbub for a few days, then things would go back to normal.

But in the digital age, where the internet is forever, how do newsrooms go about handling requests to remove articles, some of which might be years old? Is there an obligation to take down or alter a story that is, and was, factually accurate?

Newsrooms used to be more “hardliners” about unpublishing or altering in any way stories that had been accurately and factually reported, says Deborah Dwyer, a 2020-21 Reynolds Journalism Institute resident fellow at the University of Missouri, who spent her time there working on tools to help newsrooms address such requests.

Deborah Dwyer discusses when newsrooms should unpublish the news.

“Unpublishing sounds like a simple word and it has connotations that are inaccurate,” she says. “It’s a wicked problem. (Unpublishing is) the act of deleting, obscuring or significantly altering (a piece). It’s not just removing, which is why it’s contradictory, and it’s factual content. This is content that was accurate when it was published. It may have changed since then.”

A request to unpublish a story differs from a correction because the material in question was not wrong. “It has to be in response to a third-party request, typically prompted by personal motivations like embarrassment or privacy concerns,” Dwyer says. “The phenomenon of unpublishing is something that has arisen because of pressure from outside the newsroom, typically members of the public, to unpublish content about themselves. It can come from within the news organization and that’s really difficult — I know of situations where a publisher stops by and says an advertiser has made a request.”

The alteration being requested might not mean the wholesale deletion of an article; it might be removing a quote, taking out a name, graphic, photo or portions of a broadcast, she says.

“Radio and broadcast organizations have a whole ‘nother set of issues they have to deal with, especially when it comes around transparency,” Dwyer said. “It’s not just about removing and it’s not just a post-publication issue. There are some pre-publication practices journalists could begin to implement that would really help on the back-end.”

Dwyer says this brings up some ethical questions — most of these requests are matters of public record and will remain verified facts, something reporters will argue are protected by the First Amendment. “The legal system leans more heavily these days on protecting personal privacy and it’s not as lenient with the press as they once were,” she says. “Many news organizations have legal people who, especially larger ones, that may get involved in unpublishing decisions. … News organizations need to be making these decisions but they need to be made with a clear set of policies that are well explained to the public and are implemented consistently.”

There are good reasons to object to altering an article, she says, even if that would have been unheard of or unthinkable previously. “The information is available. What you’re talking about is practical obscurity. The information has always been available at the police station. It was available but obscured because no one was going down there to look it up. … Now you don’t have to do any of that. It’s the accessibility. When it is amplified by a news organization, that is what’s going to hit the top of Google search results. That’s what is driving this conversation. … The public doesn’t see this as a police issue or a criminal justice system issue, they see it as a news issue and you’re not allowing me to live a fruitful life today because of the person I was five years ago.”

Editor’s Note: For those wishing to learn more about unpublishing the news, Deborah Dwyer recommended reading Kathy English’s 2009 report: The Longtail of the News: To Unpublish or Not To Unpublish.

Deborah Dwyer, a 2020-2021 Reynolds Journalism Institute resident fellow at the University of Missouri, joins Michael O’Connell to discuss her work, building tools to help newsrooms deal with unpublishing requests. She talks about the ethical conflict some newsrooms might have over this topic and how journalists can help make it easier to comply.

453. Making sure Wikipedia shows that Women Do News

464. How Spiro Agnew’s crimes became relevant again

The Robert Muller investigation into former President Donald Trump was often compared to the Watergate scandal of former President Richard Nixon.

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and her former producer Michael Yarvitz went a step further: they wanted to look into the only sitting vice president ever to leave office in disgrace.

Michael Yarvitz co-authored the book Bag Man with Rachel Maddow.

Their book, Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, examines the missteps and blunders of Spiro Agnew.

“We started talking about trying to find a story from history that we could tell that could resonate with the moment we were living in, this not unprecedented but rare occurrence where a sitting president or vice president is under criminal investigation,” says Yarvitz, who also co-wrote and served as executive producer of the affiliated Bag Man podcast. “It’s a fairly short list.”

They quickly decided to focus on Agnew because, he says, “Neither of us knew too much about the Agnew story, as most people generally do not, and we looked at it as, this might be an interesting historical parallel to what we’re now experiencing with the Trump presidency.”

As the Mueller investigation went on, people asked whether a sitting president could be indicted on criminal charges, something Mueller himself felt restricted from answering. The generally accepted answer — that a president cannot be indicted while in office — originates in a pair of memos from the Justice Department and the Office of Legal Counsel during the Nixon/Agnew administration, during the Watergate investigation, effectively saying that while a president can’t be charged, a vice president can.

“There’s a straight line from the Agnew crisis to Robert Mueller effectively saying my hands are tied, I can’t indict Trump even though there are potential crimes committed here,” Yarvitz says.

Yarvitz and Maddow took their book idea to the MSNBC executives and, once it was given the go-ahead, they spent months reviewing documents in the Nixon Library in California, Agnew’s archives at the University of Maryland and the papers from George Beall, the U.S. attorney in the case, at Frostburg State in Maryland.

Then, for the second phase of their research, they dug deeper.

“It took some legwork to figure out where everyone is,” Yarvitz says. “It’s 45 years after the investigation has been completed. It was tracking down who’s still alive to talk about it and where are they, can we go visit them. That was a process unto itself. We ended up going and visiting each one of these guys involved in the investigation and sitting down for hours, reliving what it was like to go through it. We found some stuff in the archives that even these guys didn’t know about.”

Michael Yarvitz, co-author with Rachel Maddow of Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the book and its accompanying podcast. He explains their research process, including sharing new information with people who prosecuted former Vice President Spiro Agnew.

442. 2020 Lookback: America from Canada’s perspective

463. Few Americans support journalism’s core values and mission

A representative national survey found only 11 percent of Americans support what journalists perceive as their core mission and values, to objectively report on the news and the lives of people in communities across the U.S.

The Media Insight Project, in collaboration with the Associated Press’ NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, and the American Press Institute, conducted the survey of more than 2,000 people in two halves, conducted a year apart.

Jennifer Benz

“We were setting out to try and understand how the public views what journalists see as their core mission,” says Jennifer Benz, vice president of the NORC. “What we really wanted to get at was understanding if some of the lack of trust in journalism has to do with how people view journalism values and whether the way journalists define their mission is leaving out certain types of people in the country, whether there are, therefore, ways we can change the way we tell stories, or frame stories, or pick the stories we tell in the first place, that would broaden the audience and help establish trust in segments of the population we’ve been missing.”

The debate about trusting the media and how people feel about journalism has been stagnant for some time, adds Tom Rosenstiel, API’s executive director. Journalists are accused, by liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, of biases — they’re pushing a liberal agenda and helping the Democrats or they are reflecting only the point of view of the establishment.

“We were struck by research that began a decade or so ago that has had a big impact on social psychology, that’s called moral foundational theory,” he says. Researchers “identified five moral instincts, core foundations of moral thinking that influence people,” including questions about how much a person believes in authority, loyalty, how much importance they put on care and fairness.

“The idea we had was, ‘Gee, there are these core journalism values all journalists know. What if we replicated moral theory work and asked people about journalism core values and see where they land in support or skepticism of those values?’” Rosenstiel says. “We wanted to see if we could open a new door into understanding trust.”

Tom Rosenstiel

Respondents were first sent a validated questionnaire in fall 2019 designed to measure their personal moral foundation profile; a year later, the same people were sent two news stories to read, including a version that added some detail and information that might tap into those moral foundational values that aren’t always included in coverage.

The journalistic values identified by the organizations issuing the survey include believing people in authority should be watched and reported on; society works better if things are transparent and out in the open; society is benefited if journalists are social critics and act as searchlights; the more facts obtained the closer a story is to the truth; and it’s important to offer a voice to those not in positions of power.

“One of the sort of key findings that we saw in the data is that not all Americans universally embrace those core journalism values,” Benz says. “This idea that when a journalist says, ‘I’m just doing my job,’ part of the trust problem may be that many Americans are skeptical about what that job of journalism should be.”

Jennifer Benz, vice president of the Associated Press’ National Opinion Research Center’s Center for Public Affairs Research, and Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, discuss a new survey in partnership with their organizations and the Media Insight Project. Their survey of more than 2,000 people found only 11 percent of Americans support what journalists believe are the core values of their mission.

#351 Mistrust of the media isn’t new, but it’s getting worse

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