Mediating Democracy

12 June 2024
By Paul Schmelzer

With trust in both the news and government at historic lows, how are Carls in journalism covering a monumental election?

American flag displayed on a digital billboard in an open field surround by mountains
Paul Shambroom, Colorado Springs, CO, 650 votes difference out 208,032 total, -0.325% margin, from Purpletown (Tasora Press, 2024)

While months away, the 2024 election is already one for the record books. It’s the first involving an indicted candidate: Donald Trump faces 88 felony counts across four criminal cases. The main contenders are the oldest in U.S. history. It occurs against a globally historic backdrop: by year’s end, four billion voters in 76 countries will have participated in elections. And here at home, the stakes are higher than ever: a majority of voters—72 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans—believe democracy itself is at risk, depending on who wins in November.

But for journalists there’s another daunting historical fact: trust in both the media and in institutions, including the government, has never been lower. A recent Pew study found that just 16 percent of Americans say they trust the federal government always or most of the time. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults say they have “not very much” trust in the media, while 39 percent—a record high—say they have “none at all,” according to Gallup research.

Given the uphill trust battle news outlets face, how are conscientious journalists approaching coverage of this consequential election? We connected with five alumni to find out.

Democratizing Information

How did we get here? The short answer: the internet.

A Pulitzer-winning opinion writer, associate editor at the Washington Post, and a PBS NewsHour contributor, Jonathan Capehart ’89 got his start in news at Carleton’s KRLX. Back then, news of note would arrive at the station via the United Press International’s wire service. 

“And only we had it,” Capehart says. “It was a very narrow news landscape.”

Jonathan Capehart in the radio studio
Jonathan Capehart ’89 on the air at KRLX, 1987. Today Capehart writes for the Washington Post, hosts The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC, and provides commentary for the Friday political segment on PBS Newshour. | Photo courtesy the Carleton College Archives

“The upside of the internet was the democratization of information,” he says. “Today my own mother has as much access to information as I, a snot-nosed, 19-year-old news director at KRLX, did—as much as the editor of the Washington Post or the New York Times. As journalists, we want people to have access to that information and know what’s happening. The downside is that, with all that freedom, people gravitated to their own silos and got information from sources that didn’t challenge them but instead confirmed their own worldview.”

Stephanie Curtis ’92, director of programming at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), calls this phenomenon “the one-two punch of Roger Ailes and social media.” The Fox News founder “turned politics into a sport, into something where it really becomes a huge part of your identity.” Then on platforms like Twitter, people built bespoke news feeds that reinforced their identities instead of offering critical perspectives or broader context.

“It’s not just people organically looking at the news and deciding they don’t like us,” explains Danielle Kurtzleben ’05, a political correspondent at National Public Radio (NPR). “It comes from the candidates as well. I work hard to show no favor to either party, but if you’re telling it like it is, it is very much true that the Republican party is much more likely to tell you that I’m untrustworthy than the Democratic party.” (She notes that her viewpoints here are her own and are not a reflection of NPR positions or policies.)

Over time, such statements shift perceptions. “When you have eight years of being referred to as the ‘enemy of the people’”—as Trump has done—“there’s a corroding effect, where people doubt the credibility and legitimacy of what we do,” says Eric Wieffering ’82, managing editor and vice president at the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune.

Candidates also contribute to distrust when they opt to speak only to friendly media outlets, Kurtzleben adds: “If you never see Ron DeSantis or your state’s governor quoted anywhere other than Fox News, then maybe you won’t trust the outlets where you never see him.”

News Deserts and the Nationalization of News

Another complicating factor: the implosion of the news industry. The 2023 State of Local News study, put out by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, reports that newspapers are vanishing at an astonishing rate—more than two a week—with nearly 2,900 papers having closed since 2005.

“Residents in more than half of U.S. counties have no, or very limited, access to a reliable local news source,” writes report author Penelope Muse Abernathy. “There are 204 counties without any local news outlet and 1,562 counties served with only one remaining local news source, invariably a weekly newspaper.”

And what disappears when these local outlets shut down? News people trust more. According to a recent Gallup/Knight Foundation survey, “more than twice as many Americans report high emotional trust in local news than in national news.”

With declines in hometown news, residents rely on national outlets, which can lead to low engagement with issues at play in local elections. Kurtzleben witnessed this effect while covering the GOP caucus in her home state of Iowa. “There used to be a lot more talk on the campaign trail about the farm bill or ethanol or farm subsidies, because these are all huge in Iowa,” she says. “That stuff is not talked about much anymore, except as throwaway lines in a rally speech. Instead, you hear nationalized talking points tailored to the state”—often hot-button issues like transgender athletes or immigration.

As a result of this nationalization of news, “fewer and fewer voters are going to name off the top of their head ‘Here’s a thing that’s going on in my backyard.’ Instead everybody will talk about what they saw on the [national] news.”

“It scares me to see local outlets fading away because that is a kind of darkness,” Kurtzleben says, riffing on “Democracy dies in darkness,” the Washington Post tagline. “It’s really bad for democracy.”

Just Do the Work

Stephanie Curtis
“Our goal is to grow Minnesota as a news ecosystem,” says Stephanie Curtis ’92, who sees both partnerships with outlets like Sahan Journal and the hiring of new reporters in rural areas as key ways to grow trust. | Photo by Jaida Grey Eagle

John Harris has worked in journalism every day since leaving Carleton in 1985. “I graduated on Saturday and started as a summer intern at the Washington Post on Monday.” He stayed there for 21 years before co-founding Politico, where he now serves as global editor in chief, in 2007.

“I can’t point to any period in my lifetime when the media broadly was beloved,” he says. He doesn’t worry about distrust because, with so many outlets, formats, and business models lumped under the term, “the ‘media’ is nothing but an abstraction. It’s not our job to be beloved, but it is our job to meet our responsibilities as we define them to our audience, to tell the truth with as much discipline, creativity, and, at times, courage as is necessary.”

Capehart agrees. “All we can do is: Do our jobs. Folks can mistrust the media all they want, but if reporters and outlets are doing their level best to report the news as it is, then they’re on the right side of the issue.” He adds, “Folks just have to understand that we don’t get it right all the time, but if we don’t, we’re duty bound to get it right the next time. And there are a lot of people in this profession who believe that in their bones.”

Kurtzleben echoes the sentiment. “I’m not sitting writing a story going, ‘How do I get people to trust me more?’ I can’t do my stories with any thought in mind other than just: do the story as well as you can.”

At the midwest’s largest newsroom, that means following ethical journalism guidelines and offering a calm counterbalance to inflammatory, partisan news. “You don’t counter [distrust] by yelling back,” says the Star Tribune’s Wieffering. “You do it by showing it through your work and being as transparent as possible about how you do the work you do.”

To that end the paper will be adding extended bios for political reporters, to demonstrate reporters’ expertise, and continuing to publish “utility pieces”—stories that explain political processes, which have among the outlet’s highest levels of user engagement.

The Star Tribune is one of some 70 newsrooms nationwide participating in the Advancing Democracy Fellowship. Run by Solutions Journalism Network, Hearken, Trusting News, and Good Conflict, the program seeks to shift “political reporting away from horse-race narratives focusing on candidates and opinion polls toward stories that prioritize the key concerns of communities, and highlight problem-solving approaches to address them, as well as be more transparent and nuanced in their reporting.”

The paper is also hiring new reporters in Rochester, St. Cloud, and beyond, along with a columnist who’ll travel the state looking for rural stories; and it’s formed a voter panel that it’ll check in with throughout the election to hear perspectives from across Minnesota’s racial, political, and geographic landscapes.

A Systems Approach to Media

MPR’s approach is similar. Informed in part by work with Press Forward, a national initiative aimed at revitalizing local journalism, it too is adding reporting staff in underrepresented areas. “[CEO] Jean Taylor’s dream is to have more journalists per capita in Minnesota than in any other state,” says Curtis. “Our goal—and I know the Star Tribune is thinking the same thing—is to grow Minnesota as a news ecosystem.”

Case in point is MPR’s partnership with Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom founded in 2019 to cover Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. “It was incubated here,” Curtis says. While an MPR reporter, founding publisher Mukhtar Ibrahim shared his idea for the site with management. “We gave them a bit of money, we gave them some office space, and now they’ve got 22 people working there.” (Among them is Curtis’s husband, Michael Tortorello ’94, who serves as the organization’s chief growth officer.)

Today MPR and Sahan share each other’s stories and collaborate on events, including panel discussions that have tackled community concerns, from the impacts of national immigration policies on Minnesotans to issues around safety and mosques. It’s a win-win relationship. Some speakers might not have agreed to participate in these discussions had Sahan Journal not been involved, Curtis says, and the collaboration has helped change the mix of those in attendance.

“There were people in the audience who are not MPR listeners, who were interested in the topic as immigrants themselves or because they work with immigrant communities,” she adds. “We broadcast across the state, and Sahan doesn’t have that reach right now, so we gave a platform to voices and they gave us journalism we wouldn’t otherwise be able to get.”

A Shared Responsibility

Eric Wieffering
“You don’t counter [distrust] by yelling back,” says Eric Wieffering ’82, vice president and managing editor of the Minneapolis-based StarTribune. | Photo by Jaida Grey Eagle

Media outlets, rightfully, are at the center of concern about distrust. But let’s not leave out another part of the equation: “The democratization of information puts more of the burden on the news consumer,” Capehart says. Fact-checking, understanding framing (what’s included in a story and what’s left out), identifying the ideological stance of a website, knowing the difference between opinion and reportage, and questioning the credibility of sources are all skills that could use strengthening.

He’d like to see a required course for first-year college students called News 101. In it, students would dissect stories on the same topic as reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal to see how they’re different. “That’s not to say that those aren’t objective news reports, but it is a way of understanding there are subjective ways of looking at stories, and it all depends on who’s the reporter, who’s the editor, and what’s the bent, if there is one, of the publication.”

The fundamentals of journalism remain strong, Capehart believes. “It’s just that outside pressures make it difficult for news consumers to see real journalism because of algorithms and silos and other things.”

“Journalism is the only profession protected in the Constitution, and it’s protected because the founders said that an informed citizenry is vital to a democracy,” he adds. “So we’ve got the freedom of the press part down so far. It’s the informed citizenry part that is lacking.”

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