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

462. Journalists aren’t as good at covering protests as they may believe

Journalists tasked with covering protests tend to think they are doing a better job and providing better information than they actually are, while frequently providing a platform for authority figures and leaving out the voices of those whose lives are tied to the matter at hand.

A new study on the topic, “Perceptions vs Performance: How Routines, Norms and Values Influence Journalists’ Protest Coverage Decisions,” written by Summer Harlow and Danielle Kilgo, looked at coverage of protests that took place in 2017 and focused on print newspapers in Virginia, Texas, Arizona and Missouri. They found that the 100 reporters who responded to their survey believed they had provided strong coverage, but a content analysis indicates there’s more work to be done to really tell the stories of the people who choose to take a stand.

Summer Harlow

“We found that, in general, the mainstream media tends to follow a negative coverage paradigm,” says Harlow, an associate professor at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston. Reporters tend to “delegitimize protesters and focus on violence and marginalizing the voices of the protesters. The substance behind the protest gets lost in the coverage of the disruption they cause to other people’s lives, instead of being the central focus of the story.

“We wanted to get at what are the factors that lead them to do that kind of coverage and help us better understand what changes need to be made,” she says.

The survey also asked journalists whether they themselves had any experience attending protests or doing activism of any kind. Those who said they had “explained it away” and tried to distance themselves and their jobs from those events. Most reporters also said they were supportive, personally, with issues of immigrant and women’s rights but fewer indicated support for protests in which race was a factor, including the removal of Confederate monuments or the NFL kneeling protests over police brutality.

Danielle Kilgo

In taking a second look at the 2020 protests, especially those dealing with issues of social justice and police brutality, things did look a little different in terms of coverage.

“One of the big things is there was an emphasis on police behavior more than we’d seen before,” says Kilgo, an assistant professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “We didn’t see that when we studied this from 2017.”

The reason for this might be rooted in who reporters are trained to trust as a credible source in addition to the ingrained willingness to question people and institutions considered to be positions of authority.

“We need to do a better job being skeptical to authorities and police as they are of non-authorities and protesters,” Harlow says. “Journalists tend to quote officials more than they quote protesters, or oftentimes they don’t quote anyone at all in protest stories. When it comes to who is quoted, when it’s a racial justice protest story, we see officials quoted more than protesters.”

“There are some journalists that aren’t fulfilling their objective goals and contributing to this pattern and portrayal of some protests,” Kilgo adds. “I think there is some intentionality from some journalists. Overall, I think newsrooms, or norms and routines in newsrooms, are dictating what’s happening. Journalists feel comfortable in some institutions. We have to think about that.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Summer Harlow and Danielle Kilgo about their new study, “Perceptions vs Performance: How Routines, Norms and Values Influence Journalists’ Protest Coverage Decisions.” They discuss how reporters are failing to provide strong coverage of protests and continue to place more weight on the voices of authority figures than those standing up for their rights.

413. Long history of bad police responses to protests

Better News: Las Vegas Review-Journal bets big on Mobbed Up podcast

In 2020, the Las Vegas Review-Journal launched Mobbed Up, an 11-part podcast series examining the role organized crime played in the rise of Las Vegas. The idea behind Mobbed Up was to grow audience and revenue for the paper. The Better News Initiative recently spotlighted the Review-Journal’s successful foray into narrative podcasting.

As Mobbed Up’s creators put the finishing touches on its upcoming second season, Jim Prather, the Review-Journal’s executive director of programming, spoke to Michael O’Connell for the Better News podcast.

Jim Prather is the executive director of programming at the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Show Note: In September 2019, Better News interviewed Joni Deutsch about Amplifier, a biweekly podcast produced by WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. Amplifier focuses on the region’s diverse music scene.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund and b) share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies, and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

Better News: Amplifier highlights Charlotte through its diverse music scene

461. The Counter uses food to make news more digestible

Food is political. Full stop.

Kate Cox came to journalism through her father, who worked for the Denver Post for decades, but she didn’t become a reporter herself until after her 40th birthday. She’s now editor in chief for The Counter, a nonprofit food industry and agriculture news site that uses food as an entry point through which other issues and topics can be discussed and considered.

“The food system is the only one we don’t get to opt out of, we have to deal with it every day,” she says.

Kate Cox of The Counter

When The Counter launched five years ago, there weren’t many other daily news sources on food, agriculture and related issues.

“It was siloed between pictorial-driven Food and Wine, Bon Appetite and the more kind of business-y trade publications that were focused on helping you make money better and faster. To me, they were stories that used food as the lens to cover the political dynamics behind our plates and the economic dynamics behind our plates. We were different at the time in that the mainstream media and general news outlets hadn’t quite figured out yet how well food stories do for them beyond the culinary.”

While other outlets are now picking up on the importance of covering not just foodborne illness outbreaks and supply shortages, “there’s not yet a beat dedicated” to food policy or food politics in most publications, she says.

“We still have that part of the niche pretty well carved out, but it’s a busier place than ever,” Cox says. “As food curious readers find us, what they see is a publication that helps you understand the news through the lens of food, which is a good way for people to receive complex stories about our political structures and economic structures.”

And for those who wonder how food can possibly be political, Cox mentions the Supreme Court case from a few years ago involving a Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

“How is that not a food story,” she laughs. “It’s a central food item that is one of the most symbolic aspects of a wedding ceremony for many couples and, in this case, it boiled down not to just whether the baker would bake the cake, based on their feelings of the social institute of gay marriage, but it ended up being the precedent for another food story from the mid ‘60s, basically whether you were going to consider a recipe a work of art and thereby allow it to be protected and be protected from having to kowtow to some customer’s preference. To me, everything is a food story or somehow connected to food in some way.”

It’s All Journalism producer Michael O’Connell is joined by Kate Cox, editor of The Counter, a nonprofit agriculture and food policy website. She explains how all news can be seen through the lens of food and why it’s the best way to break down political issues because we all have to eat every day.

422. Launching a nonprofit newsroom in a pandemic

460. Knowing your worth in the diverse world of freelancing

Emilia Benton has been running toward her goals for a long time, picking up valuable lessons along the way.

Seeing the editor’s note in each issue of her favorite magazine, Cosmo Girl, inspired Benton as a teenager to write in and ask founding editor Atoosa Rubenstein for advice. “I thought this was a career I would be interested in. She wrote back with a ton of advice, a page worth, which I printed out and put up on my wall,” Benton says.

It was all good advice, encouraging her to write for her high school paper and, if she was serious about pursuing a career in journalism, especially magazine journalism, she should consider going to college near or in New York City, because that would provide the advantage for in-person interviews.

Emilia Benton is a freelance writer.

It’s all advice Benton followed, attending Hofstra University on Long Island, a mere 25-minute train ride to the heart of the city. Two years after graduating, and after internships at a handful of magazines, including Cosmo Girl, Benton returned to her home in Houston looking for something new.

After some time as a copy editor on special projects for the Houston Chronicle and some time with the Texas Medical Center, where she used her editorial skills working on informed consent forms for clinical trials, Benton found herself out of work.

“I had all this time on my hands and had a story idea I wanted to pitch to Runner’s World,” says Benton, an avid runner. “I had never had to submit a story pitch before and I didn’t know how to go about it.”

She reached out to a friend who had connections there and was told who to direct the story to and how to set up the pitch and, despite not really feeling confident in herself or the pitch, Benton sent it off.

“They accepted it and it got a really great response from their audience, which surprised me,” Benton says. “I thought this would be a one-time thing and I didn’t expect to continue to freelance for the meantime. I was able to spend the next year and a half pursuing relationships that allowed me to get where I am now.”

Benton continues to freelance for Runner’s World and other publications, including the Houston Chronicle, but admits sometimes she’ll accept a lower-paying assignment based on the publication and topic.

“Having worked on staff on a publication that has freelancers, I empathize that these places have budgets to work with,” she says. “There are things I take into consideration if the place is offering me too low (a fee). If someone is asking for a 1,000-word article with at least two interviewed sources and they’re offering $200 or less, that’s ludicrous.”

The variety in her work has also afforded Benton some perspective on the pluses and minuses of working in a culturally diverse city like Houston. While the local broadcast stations employ a diverse range of reporters, “salary growth is still stagnant for people and women of color. That was my experience there. That’s a reason I had to leave my job at the Chronicle. After doing some investigation and talking to coworkers and peers, as a woman of color I was earning a lot less than my white male counterparts.”

She points to the graphics and information posted on social media for Equal Pay Day, a day in late March in which a white woman has earned the equivalent of her white male counterparts in the previous year. The graphics typically show how much less women and people of color earn compared to white men and “you’ll see Latinos are at the very bottom of the chain.”

The disparity doesn’t end there: Benton has noticed her work will be referenced on social media or podcasts but she isn’t named, while similar work by white male writers almost always includes their information. “This is an example of unconscious bias,” she says. “Is there any like of thinking behind it? Is it oh, no one’s going to know this writer? That contributes to the problem. I don’t bring that up to harp on my follower counts, but being mentioned by name could make or break being noticed by someone in the industry and getting an opportunity.”

It’s All Journalism producer Amelia Brust talks with freelance reporter Emilia Benton. They discuss their shared love of running and how Benton has learned how to be a successful freelance writer by doing.

445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut

459. Politico project shows just how white and male statehouses remain

Politico published a data-rich project in February demonstrating just how white and male state legislatures remain even after decades of people pushing for more diverse representation in government.

“We wanted to see what sorts of people were in those power centers and decided to take a data-based approach to doing that,” said Angela Greiling Keane, a managing editor who oversees Politico’s state-based teams.

Angela Greiling Keane

Late last summer, Politico launched a project called The Fifty, which focused on governing outside of Washington, D.C., both locally and statewide. Through that project, the Politico team began to see that many of the big decisions starting to be made post-pandemic were in the statehouses.

“I was curious about the state legislatures,” Greiling Keane said. “When you look at them, it’s fairly obvious that they’re not as diverse as the country.”

This sparked a couple of questions. First, what data was available that could shed light on the lack of diversity in state government? And second, if the legislatures aren’t as representative of the states in which they’re located, what does that mean for the people who are being governed?

Politico’s research team began scouring the country looking for data that could answer these questions.

Renuka Rayasam

One of the first data sets they identified was a survey the National Conference of State Legislatures conducted every five years to examine the demographic breakdowns of the legislatures.

“Through our reporting, we uncovered other groups who have also started tracking this,” said Allan James Vestal, Politico’s senior news applications developer.

Renuka Rayasam, Politico’s Texas-based correspondent, was brought in once all of the data had been compiled.

“It’s a dream thing for a reporter that I had all this data in front of me, and you could look at all these trends and you could very easily zero in on where the focus should be,” she said.

Not only did the data help Rayasam, fellow reporter Nolan D. McCaskill, and graphics reporter Beatrice Jin identify which states and topics they should look at, it allowed them to begin to exploring the “why” behind the story.

Why state legislatures are still very white — and very male is the end result of the Politico’s team effort, a project that uses data-based reporting and visualizations to examine the lack of diversity in state legislatures and what that means for the public they represent.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Angela Greiling Keane, Renuka Rayasam, and Allan James Vestal about Politico’s data-rich project, Why state legislatures are still very white — and very male, which examines how statehouses are less diverse than the communities they represent.

412. Critical thinking is an essential skill for journalists

458. How service journalism helps solve community problems

At the root, most journalism is some kind of service journalism. But only by listening to the audience can journalists really provide the service they believe they offer.

“We’ve had this ‘teacher at the front of the class’ mentality,” says Megan Griffith-Greene, the service features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “‘We’re going to tell you what’s important and you’re going to sit there and listen and then we’ll move on.’ That perspective has been pretty white and male and kind of elitist and it’s failing. It’s not working. It doesn’t serve people.”

Service journalism, Griffith-Greene says, can fill this gap and more newsrooms are realizing the value and importance of what had previously been “maligned” and considered the stuff of women’s magazines.

Megan Griffith-Greene is the service features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

She defines service journalism as helping people solve problems. “As journalists, I think we’re very good at pointing out problems. We’re less good at helping people solve them.

“Good service journalism is really hard to do,” she says. “It’s really hard to do a good job with this, to provide a good and useful resource for people. It’s not as easy as I think people assume.”

The core of service journalism is finding what people need to know in their daily lives, what information they need to make decisions, and helping them find and utilize it, she says.

“There’s a shift to being more listening focused, more community focused; listening to what people tell us, that this is the information we need and centering our reporting on that,” Griffith-Greene says.

This also helps make reporters essential to the communities in which they live and work. “It feels like an obvious place to start, but what do you need? What do you need help with and how can we be an access point,” she says. “We have access to a range of experts. We can help people solve those problems. We’re uniquely positioned to help people solve those problems. It’s an important step in building trust and becoming essential to our communities.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks with Megan Griffith-Greene, service features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They discuss what service journalism means, how it can help reporters better understand their communities and why it’s no longer the territory of women’s magazines.

#359 Reporter uses pop-up newsrooms to amplify Philly’s unheard voices

457. New Humanitarian’s mission-centric focus a model for other newsrooms

A brochure left on her desk by her father changed the direction of Heba Aly’s life.

Born to Egyptian parents in Canada, Aly’s heart had two passions: journalism and human rights.

The brochure was for an internship in Senegal, writing for a United Nations-founded publication that covered international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance, originally to Rwanda following the genocide there in 1995. Aly is now the CEO of The New Humanitarian, formerly called IRIN, and remains as passionately committed to providing mission-based coverage of international crises.

Heba Aly is the CEO of The New Humanitarian.

“We began as an information coordination product under the helm of the UN. We’ve evolved to become the bona fide newsroom we are today, moving toward a more journalistic approach, growing offices around the world from an East Africa focus and incorporating more storytelling,” she says. “The mission of informing how the world responds to crises has remained.”

As a general reporter with the CBC in Canada, she was never able to dive too deeply into a story or an issue, but that kind of reporting is at the core of The New Humanitarian.

“We have a depth of knowledge that allows our journalism, we hope, to be much richer and ring much more true because we follow it day in and day out,” Aly says. “We know what matters, we know the community that follows it.”

But what really sets her newsroom apart is that it is a nonprofit and writers are not unduly influenced by advertisers.

“We’re driven by a mission, not profit,” she says. “We’re free from the pressure of getting eyeballs for the sake of it. We face pressure from donors in the way advertisers will put pressure on the way you do your job, but we have fared much better in the current environment compared to commercial outlets because we have a loyal audience that cares deeply about what we do.”

Aly said she believes this model will continue to gain strength and support going forward and that, in no small way, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped to underscore this.

“Our audience tripled during the pandemic because people yearned for information about the humanitarian crisis. That’s not just the international policy makers that usually dominate our audience but even people in countries,” she says. “In Tanzania, we did a piece on how the true toll of the virus was being hidden. That was shared widely across the country because people were looking for information they could trust and they couldn’t trust the government. I think, on a global level, there’s a renewed recognition of this kind of work.”

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell is joined by Heba Aly, CEO of The New Humanitarian, an independent nonprofit newsroom covering humanitarian crises. She discusses how her publication handled the COVID-19 pandemic and why her newsroom might be a model for other outlets as advertising dollars shrink.

Better News: Nonprofit newsrooms turn rivalry into revenue stream

Erica Perel and Chrissy Beck

Chrissy Beck is the managing director of The Chronicle at Duke University and Erica Perel is the former general manager at The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina. Their newsrooms teamed up to create the Rivalry Challenge around the annual Duke-UNC basketball game, turning it into a revenue maker for both nonprofit newsrooms.

Chrissy and Erica wrote about the Rivalry Challenge for API’s Better News initiative.

The Better News podcast is a partnership between It’s All Journalism and the American Press Institute to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable strategies and tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole. Sign up for the Better News newsletter to receive news about the latest resources, case studies, and insights. For more news about the It’s All Journalism podcast and future episodes of Better News, sign up for the weekly IAJ newsletter.

Editor’s Note: Erica Perel is now the director of the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The center runs the UNC Table Stakes program.

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