A Summit on News, Civic Participation and Democracy

Friday, Nov. 15, 2024
Washington, D.C.

Convenors

Len Apcar, Louisiana State University

Manship School of Mass Communication Endowed Chair

Jennifer Benz, Ph.D. NORC at the University of Chicago

Marjorie Connelly, NORC at the University of Chicago

Jordan Hinkle, NORC at the University of Chicago

Prof. Tom Rosenstiel

Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland

Discussants

Dean, Kim Bissell Ph.D.

LSU Manship School of Mass Communication

Danielle Brown, Ph.D., Michigan State University 

College of Communication Arts and Sciences

Paul Brown, Maryland Democracy Initiative

University of Maryland 

Catherine Chen, Ph.D., Louisiana State University

Manship School of Mass Communication

Letrell Crittenden, Ph.D. American Press Institute

Gary Fields, Associated Press

Patrick Johnson, Ph.D., Marquette University, 

Diederich College of Communication

Dean, Rafael Lorente,University of Maryland

Philip Merrill College of Journalism

Mike McCurry, former White House press secretary

Serge Schmemann, editorial board, The New York Times 

Lena Morrealle Scott, University of Maryland

Maryland Democracy Initiative 

Prof. Johanna Dunaway Ph.D, Syracuse University

Research Director, Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship

Aubrey Rademacher, Administrative & Editorial Assistant

Table of Contents

LSU Manship School of Mass Communication 

Wendell Gray Swtizer Jr. Endowed Chair in Media Literacy

NORC at the University of Chicago

The Democracy Initiative at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy

1. Welcome and Introductions
1.1 Convenors and Discussants Overview
1.2 Opening Remarks 

1.3 Participant Introductions

2. Session 1: Overview of the Survey and Typology

2.1 Study Background and Objectives 

2.2 Key Findings and Public Sentiment

2.3 Typology Breakdown:

2.3.1 The Ambivalent

2.3.2 The Classically Liberal

2.3.3 The Mostly MAGA

2.3.4 The Disillusioned

2.3.5 The Believers

2.4 Group Demographics and Education Levels 

2.5 Public Sentiments Explored:

2.5.1 America's Best Days: Ahead or Behind?

2.5.2 U.S. as the Best Place to Live

2.5.3 Views on Government and Politicians

2.5.4 Perspectives on Change and Reform

2.5.5 Belief in the American Dream

2.5.6 Functioning of Democracy 2.6 News Engagement and Media Trust:

2.6.1 News Consumption Habits

2.6.2 Trust in Personal vs. General Media

2.6.3 Urban vs. Rural Media Perceptions

2.6.4 Terminology: "Press" vs. "Media" 2.7 Attitudes Toward Diversity, Immigration, and Cultural Identity

3. Discussion: Interpretation of Data and Broader Implications
3.1 Community Representation and Media Engagement
3.2 Polling vs. Ground-Level Reporting
3.3 Local News and Media Ecosystems 

3.4 Public Distrust in Institutions
3.5 Disillusionment, Education, and Media Literacy
3.6 Trends in Trust and Polarization

4. Session 2: News and Civic Engagement
4.1 Framing Questions on Media and Democracy 4.2 Identifying Trust Gaps Across Typologies
4.3 Commonalities Between Opposite Ends: MAGA vs. Liberal Trust Levels
4.4 Usefulness and Relevance of Journalism in Daily Life

4.5 Community Listening and Infrastructure Theory
4.6 Critique of Press Forward and Traditional Journalism Models

5. Toward the Future of Journalism and Democracy
5.1 Role of Ethnographic Research in Media
5.2 Reinventing Local News for Utility and Trust
5.3 Education and Civic Literacy as Prerequisites for Engagement
5.4 Understanding the "Why" Behind Public Attitudes
5.5 Bridging Journalism and Education
5.6 Black and Immigrant Community Trust Metrics 

6. Final Reflections and Participant Contributions
6.1 Methodology Questions and Response Gaps 

6.2 Poll Transparency and Media Standards 

6.3 Participant Commentary: Next Research Steps and Journalism Training Needs

Photo credits: Aubrey Rademacher

A Summit on News, Civic Participation and Democracy

 Louisiana State University,

Manship School of Mass Communication

NORC at the University of Chicago  &

Democracy Initiative at the University of Maryland

Friday, Nov. 15, 2024 

Washington D.C

Introduction

Len Apcar

I want to introduce two people who are central to this. First, Jennifer Benz from NORC, and Marjorie Connelly, also from NORC, and a former colleague of mine when we were both at The New York Times.

But I'd like you all to introduce each other, which we'll just start here with Jordan Hinkle, who's also from NORC, and then I'll tell a little bit of the origins of this study, where this came from, and then I'm going to turn it over to Jenny Benz and Marjorie to kind of give you a walk through the report. 

O.K., go ahead Jordan, kick it off.

Jordan Hinkle

I’m Jordan Hinkle, from NORC. I’m an RA1 and helped work on this report.

Serge Schmemann

I’m Serge Schmemann, I’m with The New York Times Editorial Board and was the foreign correspondent most of my life. 

Mike McCurry

I'm Mike McCurry. I used to work at the White House and I'm now retired,  after teaching theology.

Danielle Brown

I’m Danielle Brown, I'm at Michigan State University. I want to retire. I am a public opinion and journalism researcher.

Patrick Johnson

I'm Patrick Johnson, assistant professor at Marquette University, where I study journalism practice and news literacy. 

Lena Morealle Scott

I work at the College of Education at the University of Maryland. I’m a civic educator, a former high school teacher now working in higher education. I’m a proud member of the Maryland Democracy Initiative team, which you’ll hear more about later today. Our focus is on interdisciplinary approaches to strengthening civic participation and democracy.

Paul Brown

Hi, everyone. I’m Paul Brown from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. I’m on the faculty there, running our Civic Innovation Center and collaborating with Lena (Morrealle Scott) on the Maryland Democracy Initiative. Before this, I worked on Capitol Hill for 10 years and later in government relations in D.C. My first job in Washington was clipping newspapers at Congressional Quarterly magazine.

Letrell Crittenden

Good morning. I’m Letrell Crittenden, director of inclusion and audience growth at the American Press Institute. In this role, I work with newsrooms to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, both internally and externally, as well as to enhance community engagement. I’m excited about the next four years.

Rafael Lorente

Hi, I’m Rafael Lorente, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. We’re part of the Maryland Democracy Initiative. Before this, I was a reporter for the Miami Herald and the Sun Sentinel in Florida and Washington

Gary Fields

I’m Gary Fields, with the Associated Press. I’ve worked all over the United States, except for The New York Times. I started my career at a biweekly newspaper in Louisiana, where I’m from, so I have a lot of connections. I’ll likely be reaching out to everyone here over the next four years.

Kim Bissel

Hi, I’m Kim Bissell, dean of the Manship School at LSU. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Len Apcar and Catherine Chen. Len kept me informed about this study from the time I arrived, so I’m excited to be here and learn more about the findings. Before transitioning to academia, I worked as a photojournalist across the East Coast.

Catherine Chen

I’m an assistant professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. My research focuses on opinion and political ideology. Previously, I interned as a journalist for Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong.

Tom Rosenstiel

I’m Tom Rosenstiel, a professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism and a senior fellow consultant at NORC. I’ve been deeply involved in this project—my fingerprints are all over it, and I plead guilty. I grew up in the same town as Len Apcar and Mike McCurry; they’re older than me. I’m currently working on a book about the future of journalism titled, “The Next Journalism.”

Jennifer Benz

I’m Jenny Benz, vice president for public affairs and media research at NORC and Deputy Director of our media partnership with the Associated Press.

Marjorie Connelly

I’m a senior fellow at NORC, working primarily with the AP-NORC Center and on other projects as well. Previously, I was the polling editor at The New York Times.

Apcar

 All true facts. I want to take a moment to thank Aubrey Rademacher. Without her, none of this—tables, coffee, water, tea, or all the logistical arrangements—would have happened. Aubrey is everything I’m not: detailed, organized, and efficient. When you ask her to do something, it gets done. The organization of this conference, while I was teaching full-time, is essentially the work of Aubrey on steroids. Thank you, Aubrey. 

Here’s a brief anecdote about where this idea came from. A couple of years ago, someone asked me what I do. I told her I teach at LSU. She asked what I teach, and I said journalism. Her response: “Oh, journalism.” So, I asked, “Do you read the local paper?” The local paper is The Advocate and it’s quite good.” She said, “No, I don’t.” I asked, “What do you do for information?” Her reply: “I hear from my family and friends what I need to know.”

She wasn’t hostile to journalism but had essentially disengaged from news, civic life, and, it seemed, democracy itself. This woman, educated and a mother, had dropped out. It wasn’t clear what she thought about her responsibilities as a citizen in perpetuating the democratic experiment.

That conversation got me thinking. I reached out to Tom Rosenstiel, who has done extensive polling and research at Pew, and to Marjorie Connelly. We had a conference call, and I asked, “Can this be quantified? Can we examine people who have essentially disengaged from civic life?” My bias, as a former journalist, is that you have to read to be informed on public issues.

Marjorie and Tom assured me this study was doable—we could quantify the disengagement we discussed. It wasn’t overly ambitious, and while the final report has been streamlined from over 100 pages to around 80 or 90, all the key findings are included.

The goal today is to distill the crosscurrents in the data—what it tells us about American society and attitudes toward democracy and civic life. While some discussion of the recent presidential election is inevitable, this isn’t intended as a post-mortem of it.

One housekeeping note: Aubrey, LSU, and I would like to keep an audio recording and transcript of today’s discussion. Afterward, we’ll send you a copy of the transcript for review. You’ll have the opportunity to rephrase, delete or modify anything you’re uncomfortable with. This will allow for complete candor while ensuring everyone’s comfort. We plan to publish the transcript, likely on a website and potentially in booklet form, to share with other research universities.

If everyone’s OK with this approach, we can begin. Let’s start with Jenny Benz and Marjorie Connelly, who will walk us through the highlights of the report. Thank you.

SESSION 1 Overview of the Survey and Typology 

Benz

 Thanks, everybody, again for coming out this morning to join us today. We're really excited to present the results of the study. As Len (Apcar) mentioned, this work is highly relevant for both journalists and researchers as we work to understand the public’s perspectives on these critical issues and think about how to approach the study and reporting of civic and news engagement moving forward. Our objective for the study was to take a deep dive into understanding the public's mood leading up to the election. We aimed to focus on long-standing, systemic issues facing the public, rather than the day-to-day news cycle or evaluations of specific candidates. The research was designed to uncover the drivers of civic cynicism and to gain insights into Americans' outlook on the future of the economy and the country.

We also wanted to understand what this level of civic cynicism means for both civic engagement and news engagement. Our underlying goal was to explore the public mood—looking at attitudes toward systemic issues that persist across time

To do this, we examined several interconnected domains. Existing research in sociology, political science, and communications has often explored the causal impacts of one domain on another, such as how social trust influences attitudes toward diversity or how political trust shapes news consumption. What we aimed to do was dig deeper to understand how these domains interact within individuals to shape their overall outlook and engagement.

This approach allowed us to capture a more holistic view of the public's mindset and the ways these factors contribute to broader trends in civic and news engagement.

We saw that ahead of the election, the research was conducted in the summer of 2024, Americans were feeling a pervasive sense of distrust and pessimism. There was a lot of cynicism around American institutions and democracy, and a lot of pessimism around the future of the country and the future of the economy.

A few key stats here that are particularly telling of some of these findings at a top-line level: only about a quarter of the country thinks that the country's best days are still ahead of it. 

Just one in 10 feel like the government actually represents them. Many Americans had lost faith in our core, fundamental principles of democracy. Seventy percent in the survey feared, at least somewhat concerned, that there would be political violence and that we couldn't have a peaceful transition of power after the election.

And a quarter of Americans felt that the country needs a complete and total overhaul to get itself back on track. Many of these measures were trends that we had looked at in the past, and this level of cynicism and pessimism had really accelerated even over the last two decades.

We also found that this cynicism was shared by people across the political spectrum. This was not something that was unique to Democrats or Republicans. It was not unique to people who are highly engaged and people who aren't highly engaged, nor did it vary much by people who are interpersonal or trust one another and their communities.

As Len (Apcar) said, this wasn't necessarily done to try and understand the election outcomes specifically, but looking back at it, it really demonstrates the headwinds that Harris's campaign was facing as she was messaging about a positive, opportunistic outlook and economy grounded in restoring America's core institutions. In fact, as we'll see, the public had no faith in those institutions and was very pessimistic about what the country's outlook was.

One of the things that we wanted to understand was that the data showed just how widespread this pessimism was. We also saw in the data that pessimism had some unique characteristics for different types of people. There were basically different flavors of cynicism across the American public. To try and figure that out, we conducted population segmentation using the data, and the data revealed these five different groups of Americans.

The segmentation was based on people's demographic and socio-economic characteristics, as well as their trust in institutions, attitudes towards democracy, and trust in one another. We found these five different groups, and we'll walk through each of them in a moment. Each of them really does have its own flavor of the cynicism that we found. These are the five groups as we've named them, as well as their corresponding share of the American public. As we dig into each of them, you'll see that they really do help us understand this notion of the broader civic mood that helps shape the outcome of the election and to understand where the country is leading into the next four years. It really does shed light on some of the deep-rooted distress and varying perspectives on change and the future of the country.

I'll walk through some high-level characteristics of each of these groups, and then hand things over to Marjorie, who will go through some of the data and comparisons of the groups in more detail. 

The Ambivalent

We’ll start off here with our group that we call “The Ambivalent." This group is fairly typical of an "average American." They make up 29% of the population and are fairly average or middling in terms of their levels of cynicism, their sense of group identity, and their confidence in institutions and the people running them. They largely mirror the American public in terms of demographics, although they are slightly more politically moderate than the country overall. They’re generally disengaged civically and in terms of news, but they do have trust in some institutions, and they tend to get their news mainly from a mix of social media and traditional outlets

The Classically Liberal

This group is predominantly white, college-educated, and very Democratic-leaning. It has high levels of trust in scientific institutions and local government institutions but is quite deeply dissatisfied with the state of politics in the U.S. It is not a particularly diverse group by any number of measures, but its members are champions of diversity and immigration in the country. 

They are generally more trusting of journalism and tend to get most of their government news from digital news sources.

The Mostly MAGA

This group represents about 21% of the country. It’s made up of Trump supporters and champions of many aspects of the MAGA movement. The group skews older, is mostly made up of white Republicans, and has strong Christian affiliations. Its members are very dissatisfied with both the political and economic systems in the country and are highly, highly critical of immigrants and diversity initiatives. They exhibit higher trust in organized religion and the military, as well as local government. Their news primarily comes from cable news sources, and they are quite negative toward the press and its role in democracy.

Rosenstiel

But they’re pretty highly educated and heavily engaged in news, right?

Benz

Heavily engaged, yeah, but in their own news outlets that they trust personally, not in the institution generally.

Chen

 Is there a slide on education levels? 

Connelly

No, but I have it over here.

Benz

 I think they might be the second most-educated group after the classically -liberal group, if my memory serves. 

The Disillusioned 

This is the group that was probably the biggest ‘X factor’ in the election. It's the most cynical of all the groups that we uncovered. It represents 15% of the country. This segment is less engaged civically and in electoral politics, and these people are the most likely to think that the country's best days are behind us, and that the American dream is no longer something that's in reach for most people. They’re the only group in the study where a majority of people said that the only way to get the country back on track is if we can have the complete and total upheaval of the country's systems. They are very distinct, still from the mostly MAGA group in that they are more tolerant of other groups. They don't skew in any partisan direction, and they're among the most racially and ethnically diverse groups out of all five of the segments. They also tend to be on the younger side as well.

The Believers

Finally, The Believers are our eternal optimists. Unfortunately, they're also the smallest group that we covered in the study. They have a high level of trust in the government and in the media. They have a high level of trust in each other. They still have a fairly optimistic outlook about the country and the economy. They lean slightly Democratic, but not a ton. They skew a bit older and are religiously diverse, and people in this group do tend to rely on traditional broadcast news for most of their government information. They continue to hold generally more positive attitudes about the press and see a fundamental role for the press in our democracy.

Breaking Down the Groups

Connelly

 I'm going to go into some of these aspects of their demographics. At first, you can see that the Disillusioned is the most diverse group, and that the Mostly MAGA and the Classically Liberal are most likely to be white.

But then when we look at religion, the Classically Liberal and the Mostly MAGA are very different. The Classically Liberal group is the largest group of people who say they have no religion. They're mostly secular, whereas the Mostly MAGA people are the most likely to be Protestant. The Believers actually are the most likely to have more diverse religious affiliations than other groups.

On Politics

Politically, the Classically Liberal and the Mostly MAGA were almost complete opposites. The other groups tend to be more centrist, except the Believers, as Jenny mentioned, who are slightly more Democratic, but not as much as the Liberals. Somebody asked about education; I don't have a slide on education, but the Classically Liberal and the Mostly MAGA are the most likely to have a college education or more, but the Classically Liberal are a little bit more educated.

Are America’s Best Days Ahead or in the Past?

Now, I have some slides that break down some of our questions we asked about whether people thought that the country's best days are ahead, behind, or neither. We found that less than a quarter of people think America's best days are ahead of us. The Believers, as you'll see over and over again, are the most positive about things, with more than half saying they think the best days are ahead of us, whereas most of the other groups think it's behind us. And the Disillusioned, as you can see, is absolutely the most pessimistic.

Education and Wealth

Fields

Can I ask a question on the Disillusioned? Do we have an education level on them as well, because they're more likely to be independent, they don't seem to have a whole lot of feelings about either of the two established parties, and they're going to be the largest demographic group.

Connelly

They are the least likely to be college educated. Now, some of that might be because of the youth. They're younger, but they are definitely less educated. Only about 17% of them are college graduates or more. Whereas, for example, the Classically Liberal group is more than half, and the Mostly MAGA group is close to half. The Believers are about 40% college educated. So, some of that may be due to their youth, but they are less educated.

McCurry

 How deeply did you go into the non-college-educated versus college-educated? That seemed to be the most significant divide.

Connelly

 We saw other differences as well, like age and party identification. There are lots of different demographic differences. But yes, we have data on education. The previous report will include a chart on how education levels work and whether people are not college educated, have only a high school education, or less than high school. We’ve broken it down for each typology. 

Rosenstiel

 But education is not the magic bullet that explains everything, by any means, because you’ve got a lot of education in the Mostly MAGA group, who are really angry about replacement theory and diversity. There’s a deep racial dynamic in that highly-educated group that defines them in ways that make them different from the other cohorts. And then you've got the Ambivalent group, which isn’t that educated but is fine with a lot of points that Mostly MAGA people are not.

Fields

Is it also broken down economically and kind of adjusting for our American caste system, that the lowest quintile folks probably are going to be disbelievers because they realize they’re not going to be moving up in American society?

Rosenstiel

 Yes and no. The MAGA people are rich; relative to these others they’re doing well.

Paul Brown

Education is also correlated with the professions. In youth voting, humanities students vote differently than STEM students. There is a real gap between people who go into STEM professions and those who go into the humanities, so some of that may be reflected in the profession you choose. You could have a college degree, be credentialed, but have a different orientation toward democracy.

Danielle Brown

How much younger is younger? Because the Disillusioned group is younger. I was wondering, by how much? 

Connelly

 The entire study is adults, just to be clear. 

Danielle Brown

Right, but versus the older MAGA - what is their mean age versus the Disillusioned?

Connelly

The MAGA group, almost half of them are 60+, whereas the Disillusioned, only 15% are 60+. In fact, about 3 in 10 are under 30. Overall, it’s like 20% are under 30 of the sample. Then almost everybody else is in the general 20s, except mostly MAGA, which only 8% are under 30.

Fields

So then under 30 - that's coming up now - they’re going to do worse than their parents did.

Connelly

And looking at them economically, they are the least likely to have a large income, but again, that could be because of their youth. But also, yeah, the Believers, who are very positive, don’t have a large income either. That may be because they’re old and on Social Security, I don’t know.

Is the U.S. the Best Place to Live and Work?

We asked a question about people's opinions on the United States, whether they think America is the best place, if it’s good but other countries are also good, and if most other countries are better than the U.S. And you can see that, for the most part, people think the U.S. is good, but there are other countries that are good, particularly the Ambivalent and the Classically Liberal. The Disillusioned: over half say there are other countries better than the U.S. right now. So, that’s one of the few questions that we can see, and there will be a couple more that show how the Disillusioned are so negative, while the Believers are much more positive about the United States.

Paul Brown

Can I ask a question about this? When they say other countries, do they identify what type of systems? 

Connelly

We don’t ask. We don’t know which other countries they’re talking about, you know, like Norway. And that’s actually a good point. Actually, perhaps next time we ask something like this, we might follow it up with a question like, "OK, what countries are you talking about?" For either one—what countries are better, much better than us, or which countries are just as good as we are?

Rosenstiel

Hopefully in the second or third session, we'll talk about what other research this suggests.

Then And Now: Questions About Government and Politicians

Connelly

When we were putting together the questionnaire, we had some ideas about what we wanted to ask, and we often tried to find questions that had been asked in the past. Partially to see if there were any changes. Also, it's sometimes a good idea to use questions that have already been used so you can see how they work. We don’t have a lot of trends, but we have the top line on the website, and that top line has all the trends for any question that exists, so you can see that. But this is the one that I eventually pulled out. 

The GSS, or General Social Survey, which has been done by NORC every two years since 1972. I didn’t go back that far, but it’s a very well-respected survey. We copied some of the questions, and you can see the question on whether people think politicians are in it for self-serving reasons.

Twenty years ago, 46% of people agreed with that. Less than half. The latest poll we did shows 70% say politicians are just in it for themselves. We also asked whether people believe most of the time you can trust people from the government to do what’s right. Again, 20 years ago, a third agreed with that. Now only 19% agree. So, at least you can see the trend over time, how things have gotten a little bit more cynical and more pessimistic about politicians.

Now, we asked how much change people want to see in the country, and as Jenny mentioned, the Disillusioned are the only group that wants complete and total upheaval. They want something completely changed, whereas the rest, like 30% of the MAGA folks, say they would like upheaval. If we asked this question today, I don’t know what we would get, but most people say they want some change, they just don’t want to throw everything away. 

The believers are actually the most likely to say no to change. You’ll see that over and over again. As Jenny said, they are the most positive about almost everything we asked about.

Rosenstiel

But before we move on to that slide... everybody thinks there needs to be big change, and the disillusioned think it needs to be total. The small amount of purple is the underlying dynamic here: the Believers, who are like — I don't even know, these people who believe in everything and are positive about everything. 

Even for them, a plurality thinks, "We really need a lot of change." Even among the most optimistic group, there’s still a sense that change is needed, though not in the total, upheaval way that the disillusioned view it. 

Is the American Dream Realistic?

Connelly

Besides the government, we wanted to see how people felt about themselves. On the notion of the American dream. we asked, depending on how people define it, do they think they have achieved it, are they on their way, or is it completely out of reach? Most people, 61%, say that they either have achieved it already or they're on their way. However, 69% of the disillusioned say it's completely out of reach. So, there's a substantial number of people who think it's out of reach, even among the classically liberal and the mostly MAGA groups. Only about 15% of the believers say it's out of reach while the majority still feel that the American Dream is attainable, a significant portion of people feel it’s not.

On Democracy?

Next, we looked at whether democracy is working. Even though the disillusioned are the most negative group overall, when it comes to democracy, we see a similar pattern. The classically liberal and the mostly MAGA groups also have a large majority saying democracy isn't working very well in the U.S. In another question, we asked if democracy in the U.S. was the greatest thing, and most respondents agreed that democracy has its problems, but it’s still good.

It's only the disillusioned who are really calling for a change in government. About 45% of them say we should try a different kind of government, even throwing democracy out. The rest of the groups, however, believe that democracy could be tweaked but should be kept in place.

News: Reading ,Viewing and Trust

We also explored how people consume the news. Over half of people say they actively seek out the news, but there are differences in how the groups engage with it. For instance, the classically liberal and the mostly MAGA groups—despite their political differences—are similar in how they actively seek out news. On the other hand, the ambivalent and disillusioned groups are much more likely to encounter news passively, such as hearing about it from someone else.

We also asked about people's perceptions of the news media. We borrowed questions from the API survey and asked respondents about how they feel about the news they consume versus the news media in general. Across the board, people valued the news they personally consume much more than they do the media in general. However, even among those who favor their specific news sources, there’s a recurring theme: the media isn’t seen as entirely reliable or purely focused on delivering the truth.

When asked whether the media covers various aspects of news accurately, we found that most people felt it was not done very accurately, particularly when comparing urban to rural perspectives. Interestingly, only the classically liberal group had a large percentage saying that the coverage of events like January 6th was mostly accurate, while other groups, especially the MAGA group, did not share that view.

Johnson

In the full report that was sent to us, sometimes the word media was used, and sometimes the word press was used. 

Connelly

It was because of different questions that had been asked in the past. Some said, ‘the press,’ but we tried to keep it the same rather than changing. We kept it the same if they used press before. 

Johnson

 Because when you kind of talk about, like, different views of news media, and then how some are more attracted to, say, traditional broadcast, which also could be cable. I'm sure one of those five groups is attracted to cable -- a certain station a lot. 

But I think there's a nuance to the question of the press versus the word media broadly.  Maybe I just overthink things, and it is my job to. But if someone were to say, hey, ‘what are your feelings about the press?’ I'm thinking about, for me in Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Journal. If someone says media, I'm thinking of a much larger ecosystem of which, yeah, I don't trust the larger ecosystem as much. If I'm thinking about the press, I'm thinking something far more institutionalized at large. 

Connelly

But if it says news media, you're not thinking like you know about Twitter. You're thinking about, you know, online or encompassing your local newspaper. 

Johnson

 I'm thinking of some of the younger ones, if you say news media, they're actually thinking Twitter.

Rosenstiel

When we asked about the news, we asked about the news media you use most often, and then we ask people to name it, so they have it in mind, and then they're answering all the other questions to that specific news media outlet. So, we think, you know, it could be that Twitter is the news media that they use most often, because that's what's in their head. 

Connelly

And, also, the questions that used the word ‘Press’ were older questions. We wanted to see if there has been any change in people's trust. And we didn't find a lot of change. You know, people didn't have a lot of trust.

Online, though, the top line will have the transfer to previous times. Now, we also asked how often do you follow the news about the government or public affairs? 

And you'll see that the believers, of course, but the classically liberal and the mostly MAGA are almost the same in that they do it all or most of the time, whereas the disillusioned, a third of them hardly ever are paying attention to what's going on in the government. 

And we were just talking about these questions, we found that most people have little trust in them; the media, the press or confidence in the news media.

Is Diversity Important?

It's just a sort of negative feeling. They may watch it all the time, but they don't have a lot of trust in it. We have a few questions on diversity and how different types of diversity are good for the U.S. image. But this overall question was, does it make the country better or worse? And you got what Jenny was mentioning, overwhelmingly, the classically liberal say it makes the country much that much stronger. 

And the believers also are a large group. And, you know, most other people say, well, moderately stronger or, you know, but the mostly MAGA and the disillusioned are more likely to say, it makes it weaker, or they could be neither helping or hurting, which might be also socially more acceptable than saying it's making it weaker. 

Crittenden

Were you able to specify the regions where people were answering from? One thing I wonder is, for folks who don't value diversity, are they in diverse areas?

Connelly 

We can specify the regions of the country, like the Northeast or the South, and we can look at urban versus rural or suburban areas, but we don't know whether they live in a city that's all white or in New York City, which is much more diverse.

We have some follow-up planned with respondents, and that's one of the questions we can ask—where they live, what city or town, and then delve deeper into their views on diversity.

Fields

When you do that (call respondents) it's not just about diversity. It’s about integration. New York is diverse as hell, but it is not integrated.

Crittenden

Another step beyond that is looking at how recently communities have changed. If you're talking about a place like Springfield, Ohio, where there's tension as a result of diversity, that may also play a role.

Benz

That's what the political science literature shows - the trails. It's more about the change. You can be in a community that's only 5% non-white, but if it goes from five to seven, that impacts your views a lot more than being in a community that goes from 60% to 70% because it's about that sort of perception of how much your world is changing in your community.

Connelly

And we have some other questions in the report that ask people how they feel about immigration, immigrants, and whether the country should be a Christian culture. We see very similar breakdowns: the classically liberal are very positive on immigrants, while the mostly MAGA are negative. However, some things don’t line up. For example, the believers are not super positive; they tend to favor the idea of a Christian culture. So, while there are differences, for the most part, the breakdowns are similar to the diversity question.

We’ve been trying to think about what this all means. In later sessions, we’ll talk more about that, and Len (Apcar) will cover it.

These findings provide examples of why Kamala Harris had trouble gaining traction and how her efforts weren’t enough to overcome the pessimism Trump has instilled, which resonates widely across the country. It’s not just about Republican versus Democrat, as even places that are strongly partisan, like New York City, shifted somewhat. This shows that it’s not just a party issue.

One question moving forward is: where do we go from here? What new questions should we ask? Some of those have already been mentioned, but we’ll develop more for further research. Additionally, for journalists, how do you cover a president who’s been covered before while navigating increasing distrust and negativity toward the press? These are the challenges going forward.

I’ve mentioned the full report, which I believe was emailed to everyone. The NORC website will host the full report, including the top-line results with every question, wording, and complete results, as well as the press release. I think they’ll also put this PowerPoint on the site afterward. LSU will have all the same documents available.

Thank you! If anyone has additional questions, we’re happy to answer them. Many have already been addressed, but if there’s anything else, let us know.

Discussion

Fields

As one of the journalists trying to convince my employer, the Associated Press,  that we need to actually get out and off the East and West Coasts, what suggestions do you have for selling the idea that the best approach might not be to convince people but rather to simply be there and talk to folks in places like Idaho, Nebraska, and the Dakotas? 

Tom Rosenstiel

I’ll take a whack at that because this is a topic I talk about in my classes. I’ve also been influenced by two people who had very different perspectives on this.

One of my good friends during my career was Jim Carey, a professor at Columbia University, who was very skeptical of polling. Jim used to argue that the problem with polling is it turns the public into an abstraction that pollsters create. You don’t actually know what people think; you only know what they think about the specific question the pollster framed for them. The logic of that question is imposed on the voter, who may not naturally think in those terms.

If you’ve ever been a political reporter or done qualitative research, you know that when you talk to people, they don’t always fit into those predefined boxes. For example, I covered Jesse Jackson and found voters who supported both him and George Wallace, which seemed contradictory. Understanding why that happened required talking to them directly.

David Broder, a long-time political reporter for The Washington Post, believed the only way to truly understand voters was to sit with them, have conversations, and figure out not just what they thought, but why they thought it and where those ideas came from.

On the other hand, another friend and influence in my career, Andy Kohut, the founder of the Pew Research Center, believed in the importance of a scientifically representative sample. He argued that talking to just 30 people gives you anecdotes, but not the kind of data needed to draw meaningful conclusions.

I think the truth lies somewhere in between those two perspectives. In journalism, especially as newsrooms have shrunk, we’ve leaned more toward Andy’s approach, relying heavily on polling. Polling has been incredibly useful — it has allowed us to aggregate data and identify groups, such as Asian Americans or Hispanic voters, on a national scale. But it’s also come at the cost of depth. Polling creates categories and abstractions, like “Hispanic voters,” which don’t fully capture the nuances within those communities.

In the past, political reporters would talk about specific communities, like the Polish community in Chicago, and gather insights from local ward bosses. That kind of granular understanding has been lost with the rise of polling.

So, to answer your question: I think it’s essential to blend qualitative and quantitative methods. Polls can give us maps and broad overviews, but they only offer a limited understanding of what voters are really thinking. To truly grasp the attitudes and motivations behind, for example, opposition to DEI initiatives, you need to deconstruct the data and then actually go there—spend time with people, listen to them, and understand their perspectives in context.

In short, it’s about using polling as a starting point but not stopping there. Combine it with on-the-ground reporting to fill in the gaps and get a fuller picture of what’s really going on.

Johanna Dunaway

The question about trust in media versus trust in the outlet people use reminds me of an old finding about Congress and representation. People often loved their own congressperson but mistrusted Congress as a whole.

This tells me that people don’t feel represented by any media outlet except the one they personally choose, which I think relates to the thinning out of local newsrooms across the country. It highlights the importance of being in the middle of these communities, understanding where people are coming from, and how that shapes their answers. It’s partly a local representation issue but think about it in terms of media.

Paul Brown

Chris Dodd mentioned that when he started in Washington as a senator from Connecticut, there were six local Connecticut media outlets with Washington bureaus. By the time he left, there was maybe one — or none.

Now, everyone sees the news from Washington through a hyper-charged, national political lens. Outlets like Axios and Politico are chasing the same stories, but none offer a local perspective. People might still trust their local newspaper, but that newspaper isn’t reporting from Washington anymore. Instead, they’re hearing about national politics from sources like Fox News, without a local lens to help them make sense of what’s happening.

This lack of a local perspective stems from economic decisions media companies make. Investing in Washington reporting may make sense economically, but it doesn’t provide coverage that resonates with people locally.

Benz

What Johanna mentioned ties into a larger issue: the national conversation about public opinion and voters’ views is hyper-focused on two groups—the “classically liberal” and the “mostly MAGA.” These groups dominate the narrative, but they only make up 43% of the population.

That leaves the majority of Americans—those who fall into other typologies—feeling unrepresented. They look at the coverage and think, “My attitudes aren’t quite this or that.” They’re somewhere else along the spectrum, but the polarized nature of the news mirrors the polarization in the country, leaving their perspectives out of the conversation.

McCurry

I have a question on methodology. How confident are you in getting accurate samples of people? Many don’t return phone calls or respond to polling. Is this a little bit of fiction — just amalgamating the people who actually respond and missing those who don’t want to participate?

Benz

The sampling for this is based on a very robust, probability-based, nationally representative panel that NORC runs. For non-respondents who won’t return phone calls or go online, we send materials and, if needed, send face-to-face interviewers to their door to recruit them onto the panel.

I’m not a huge fan of using “horse-race” metrics, but the panel has performed well in national predictions, such as Trump winning. More importantly, this panel captures attitudes often missed in standard media polling. For example, about a third of respondents expressed beliefs like replacement theory—views typically associated with those less likely to respond to polls.

There’s no doubt there’s a non-response problem systematically associated with some voters more than others. But we do extensive work in modeling and weighting to ensure the responses we get are scaled appropriately to represent the larger population.

McCurry

Can we call into question quick tools used by media organizations that lack robust methodology? How can people trust the information when it’s not an accurate reflection?

Benz

 There are metrics for evaluating polling organizations’ transparency, such as the American Association of Public Opinion Research, which offers a sort of “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for transparent methodologies.

Organizations like FiveThirtyEight grade pollsters, but their grading is often based on “horse-race” polling, which isn’t NORC’s focus. Unfortunately, it largely falls to the news consumer to discern trustworthy polling data. In my opinion, the general public isn’t equipped to make those judgments effectively right now.

McCurry

That would be a worthy exercise, to kind of establish some standards and have some ratings and full seal of approval for certain kinds of public opinion research. 

Connelly

Some information: if you are reading a poll that does not tell you what the questions are or give any information on its methodology, yeah, I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. I would not trust that. Even if they give you a plus or minus, that’s not necessarily valid.

When I was vetting polls at The New York Times, I would get polls from reporters, mostly non-political reporters, a thing would have a plus or minus. I’m like, but it’s not a probability sample! How do you have a plus or minus on that? Then I’d call them, and they’d go, ‘Well, yeah, you’re right.’

So, you have to be careful about what you’re paying attention to. Some of the big pollsters, the big names you know, have really good, solid methodology, but some others are a little shaky.

McCurry

 But the polling shapes public perception, and voter behavior -

Crittenden

Does it?

McCurry

And that’s a problem.

Dunaway

I think it shapes what elite’s think, though, which I think might even be the bigger problem. 

Connelly

Which is also why it’s good if a news media organization, newspaper, or website like ABC or CBS has people that vet polls. They often don’t report on polls that lack transparency or proper methodology. Even Fox has a department that vets their polls—they actually have a very good polling department.

That’s the thing. I know who vets the polls for ABC, and they usually look at that kind of thing. Now, that doesn’t mean every media outlet does. You’re right—you can hear about polls that make me think, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you used that.” But a lot of respectable news outlets really do check and avoid using fly-by-night polls.

Rosenstiel

What about The New York Times and The Washington Post, who have these massive day-by-day polls. Do they have a lot of junk polls flooded into the mix? 

Connelly

 I don't know. The department that used to vet them is no longer there.

Lorente

But we're also assuming that people are going to the news media to get their polls. That's not necessarily the case. 

Fields

Yeah, they’re reading the campaigns on the polls a lot of times, just confirming what they already believe. The polls don’t lead the people; the people lead the polls.

Lorente

I want to follow up on Gary’s (Fields) question about going out or away from the coasts. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of us going there — there’s just nothing out there (news outlets) in many cases. Tom and another faculty member who studied Maryland’s ecosystem found that there are no news outlets in many of the rural parts of the state. And guess what? For the university, the kids from there aren’t here either. They’re not our journalism students.

So, when I look at diversity in my college of journalism, the students don’t fully represent the Black population of Maryland. They don’t represent a lot of things — they also don’t fully represent the rural population of Maryland. And if those kids don’t come to journalism schools, they’re not going to go back to work in news organizations in those areas that don’t even exist anyway.

Fields

If I could actually ask, coming back to the disillusioned, which happens to be younger people who think that the American dream is O.K., happens to think that democracy should be blown up, and maybe we should try something else. How do they actually feel about things like DEI, like affirmative action? I know how the MAGA’s feel, but how does the coming generation that is going to take this thing over feel?

Benz

They're more tolerant, much more tolerant than the MAGA group overall.

Rosenstiel

 Do we have that number?

Connelly

Keep talking, I’ll find it.

Johnson

But I also think about what that speaks to— I taught high school for a decade, and we spent a lot of time asking questions to people who have been incredibly established within the American system. As a millennial who graduated during the first major economic struggle, I think we are the least economically wealthy people nowadays. I feel like we don't —  though it's harder because we have different parameters — we're not asking questions of the youth who, when I think of the way the American education system has changed and might drastically change in January, there aren't systems in place that provide a substantial opportunity for children and adolescents to learn these things.

If you're being educated in a system that doesn't actually provide you with the opportunity to understand what a poll is—when your brain is actually most malleable, around 25 or 26, but after that, it’s harder for your brain to absorb this kind of information— you can't retain and process this kind of education in the same way. This kind of education needs to be situated within the K-12 system, where kids are drastically not paying attention to news literacy.

In America, as a system, people read at an 800 Lexile level, which means they are reading at an eighth-grade level. Why are we — Illinois is one of the only places where news literacy or media literacy is required by the state, which means civic literacy is also tied to that. But we’re not paying attention to why this matters. I like the idea of calling them disillusioned, but I think they’re disillusioned because they’ve never had the opportunity to even know.

When they’re constantly being told climate change isn’t real, and that we’re rolling back those things, they start thinking, "Why should I bring a child into this world?" I’m only 35, and I’m not having kids right now—not because I’m disillusioned, but because I’m incredibly aware of the current state of things. There are ways in which the system has been set up where these are the messages they hear, but they’re often not provided with the basis of education to be able to answer questions on polls or even read a poll properly.

They are going to be the ones reading, answering, and contributing to the conversation in the future. If we’re not paying more attention to them, to the systems they have in place, and to what kind of training teachers are receiving. I always get told in the JMC – journalism and mass communication -- community that it’s weird that my background is entirely in education, yet I’m in a journalism school. My argument is that journalists are the second greatest educators in the world. So why aren’t we training them to educate differently? And why aren’t we paying attention to teacher education?

Why is this work not being recognized?

It’s because these aren’t just social studies teachers; they’re history majors or even math and science teachers. None of them are receiving the proper education to pass on civic knowledge, which makes me think we’re not paying attention to the right things. We’re asking people who are civically illiterate to answer questions about the civic outcomes of a nation. This leads into not just the level of engagement of a citizen but the literacy of a citizen. If we’re asking them these kinds of questions, I’m not sure if they’re actually literate enough to answer them.

Crittenden

 I always have a problem with this idea that we have a public that doesn’t understand, broadly speaking, how the government works. They may not know the minutiae; they may not know this particular law or that particular law, but I think we discredit the public's ability to understand what’s happening in their own communities. I think we discredit the public’s understanding of what’s important to them.

In fact, I’ll take a step back. I don’t think we know much about the public anyway. I don’t. So when we’re talking about these rural communities, yeah, we’re not getting out into these rural communities to talk to anybody. I’m from Central Pennsylvania, from a small town called Chambersburg, which brought the world Doug Mastriano, a state senator and former Republican candidate for governor. If you actually look at the local news, the public opinion section of that paper never covers him. We don’t understand how this individual rose to power. We don’t understand why people like him, because we don’t have news in this area, and we don’t actually go out and talk to people in these areas.

So, even with the election, do we really know why people make the decisions they actually make? I don’t think we fully do, because we’re not actively engaged in centering community voices, either in our journalism or, in many cases, in our research. I don’t think the polls really tell you much. Not that the polls don’t tell you anything, but on the converse, do people even care about these polls? If we teach people how to read polls, is that going to have any impact, particularly with disillusioned groups or other people who get all their media from digital or social media? They’re not reading these things.

So, I think that I could go on and on, but I just think the system is, in many ways, flat-out broken.

Schmemann

 Can I just push in there? Because I agree with you. I read this poll with great interest. It breaks down all the categories, names, and percentages, but I have to say that not much of it came as a surprise. Instinctively, this is probably how we might have broken down our impression of the public. Certainly, on The Times editorial board, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out where people stand, why they’re voting the way they are, and how we should approach them. What this poll tells us is who thinks what, but not why. And I guess that’s our follow-up. We now have to figure out why people think the way they do.

For example, The Times was also discussing getting rid of endorsements, with the presumption being that people distrust the mainstream media because we’re not perceived as fair. Endorsements make us seem unfair. We have absolutely nothing to base this on. There are no studies. It’s all just trying to listen, to hear. We honestly don’t know why people are so hostile to the press and to the media.

I tend to agree with the notion that a big part of the reason is because small papers have collapsed. I started in a small paper, and we were trusted because the News Tribune in Woodbridge, New Jersey—better known as Exit 11—was trusted by the community. People read us, and they knew us. One day, I covered a strike. I said something wrong, and I had four flat tires. The reaction was immediate and direct, and we were trusted. We were the ones who then moved on to wire services and larger papers. Shared ethics were key, and people learned to read newspapers in Woodbridge. Everybody read a local paper in the evening and a big New York daily in the morning.

I think what this poll doesn’t show us is, in many of these categories, what came first: the distrust or the reason for distrust. That’s something we have to study. Maybe some of the reactions we find throughout the poll are justified. We treat them as a mood—saying the public has turned cynical or pessimistic. But maybe they have every good reason to have turned cynical.

So, I think the poll is great as a starting point, but every question I’ve heard raised is really a follow-up. We have to find out why. To me, one of the solutions might be to try to find a way to recreate the local paper. It’s left an enormous gap in our lives and in our education.

Fields

What I was telling Len when I came in was that I started at The Times in Natchitoches, Louisiana. It was a bi-weekly paper, and I helped run the press with five typewriters. I mean, we were in high cotton when I got a computer. So, it was hard to call me fake news. If you saw me everywhere, if you saw me with your kids, if you saw me trying to help get kids into college, and living in a community where I was in a bum apartment—one so bad that even the rats wouldn’t come because it was too low-brow—it's hard to look at me and say, “You’re fake news.” I mean, I lived next door to you! It was almost impossible for someone to say that.

Now, I’m trying to figure out how to get back out into the community in such a way that we stop getting surprised by elections. I wasn’t surprised by this last one. I spent weeks down in Macon, Georgia, and started realizing how many people weren’t actually going to vote—period. If you’re poor and living in a homeless shelter, you don’t care about a polling place or voting. You’re worried about eating.

 I ran into that group and that population. I just want to know: how do we replicate that? How do we connect with these communities before the election, not just after the fact? How do we stay connected with the communities around the U.S. to understand what’s going on with them before we keep getting surprised? Since 2016, I’ve been traveling, and since then, I haven’t been surprised by an election yet.

Lorente

What if we think too highly of ourselves? What if it’s not about trust in us? What if it’s just about trust, period? We keep thinking about whether people trust journalists or not, but what about the broader picture? They don’t trust the vaccine, they don’t trust their neighbor, they don’t trust the cop, they don’t trust the prosecutor, they don’t trust the defense attorney.

Schmemann

 I think that’s another thing. I would have liked to see more trends on politicians, but I didn’t see many other fields in which you mapped the trend.

Rosenstiel

Well, we’ve got them in the report; they’re just not in the slides. So, our schedule here calls for a break at 11:30. The questions you guys are raising are exactly the ones we want to talk about.

Danielle Brown

I do have a follow-up. Most of my work is in Midwestern Black and immigrant communities, and we often look at different kinds of trust between institutions. The media is the middleman, right? In these communities, news is not trusted, but it's trusted more than Congress, more than Trump and Biden, and more than local government. It's not that they trust their doctor, but they trust the hospital more. When we talk to people, we see differences in trust across institutions.

If the government screws us over, the media follows in terms of trust deficits. There’s a connection between trusted media and other institutions that needs to be examined. In Michigan, when we started asking questions about the war in Gaza, we saw how everything the government did influenced shifts in trust for the media, especially national media. It wasn’t The New York Times or the Associated Press they trusted, but local stations like ABC in Detroit. Their overall use of the media fluctuated in a way that mirrored how their trust in other institutions shifted. We need to consider these interlinking trust deficits to truly understand how we can do better.

Fields

What was the most trusted thing? I’m not talking about the media, but what did people actually trust? 

Danielle Brown

For Black people, for the last three years, we've asked about trust in institutions and individuals. The most trusted institutions in most states are professional healthcare institutions, which was surprising in some places and less surprising in others. The individuals they trust most are Black journalists.

Rosenstiel

More so than community leaders than those intermediary types?

Danielle Brown

Yes, more so than community leaders and local news. We asked questions like, “Do you trust journalists? Which ones? Do you trust Black journalists? Do you trust journalists who share your identity? Do you trust the national media?”

We also looked into trust in social media influencers, as this plays a big role. We’ve done interviews to understand why this is happening, which goes beyond what political experts typically analyze. There’s a trust in individual, identity-based figures that can serve as a bridge between Black and immigrant communities, such as Black journalists.

Lorente

Just to clarify, Black journalists over other journalists, or Black journalists over Black doctors, etc.?

Danielle Brown

 Black journalists over other journalists.

Session 2

News and Civic Engagement

Profs. Tom Rosenstiel and Len Apcar

Co-Moderators

Opening remarks and session overview

Tom Rosenstiel

 I want to kick off with two thoughts. One is to dive deeper into attitudes about the press, which are aggregated. There’s a lot we don’t know, but hopefully, as Letrell (Crittenden) says, this gives us indications of where to go further.

There’s something interesting in a couple of these slides. The first is about the media people use most often—whether national or local. This shows what they rely on. Do they think the media deal fairly with all sides? Classic questions we used to ask. Even among the disillusioned, about half think the media are fair.

But when you get to news media in general, the numbers aren’t great, except for the believers. It's almost split even, with a slight lean toward fairness. Then, when you look at the media in general, 64% of the classically liberal, highly educated people in this room think the media are biased.

The ambivalent, who aren’t sure about anything, are split. The disillusioned, who aren’t engaged with the media, think it’s unfair and biased, but they don’t consume much of it. The MAGA group, the true media haters, have 90% who think the media are biased.

What’s interesting is how similar the MAGA and classically liberal groups look on many metrics. They’re both unhappy, but they attribute their unhappiness to different causes: MAGA to what they see as left-wing media, and the classically liberal to the biases of Fox News. The MAGA group blames immigration, and the classically liberal probably point to the large number of Trump supporters.

This is a classic Andy Kohut question. Andy Kohut, from Gallup and Pew, would call this a push question. He’d ask, "Where do you think the media stand, good or bad?" The media people follow most often protect democracy—only a small majority of the classically liberal think that. When you get to the media in general, no one thinks that. The MAGA group, the true media haters, 73% think the media are hurting democracy.

The question I want to kick off with is...What should people who study media focus on now?

There’s been a lot of research on trust for a long time, but where should we go next? We’ve been studying trust for a decade—how long have we been doing the same things over and over? We can’t keep repeating the same approaches. What new direction should we consider? Can I say “we”? I mean, everyone.

I actually love Letrell (Crittenden)’s idea of going to places and talking to people in a concrete way. It really takes an ethnographic approach, as opposed to just relying on surveys.

Where Should the Media Go Next?

Apcar

I thought one of the strongest things The Times did in this campaign, before the election, was Patrick Healy, whom I invited to come down here. He did 60-some focus groups and published snippets of many of them, if not all. A lot of them appeared in the Sunday opinion section, where small focus groups around the country talked directly to people.

One of the best pieces of journalism was done by Dan Balz of The Washington Post. He did a piece in Pennsylvania, where he spent several days crisscrossing the state, talking to people in very small groups, probably randomly selected from diners, book clubs, farmers, and various small community groups. He took a pulse on not just the candidates but also the media and the American dream, which I’d like to revisit, because democracy and media are, to me, deeply interrelated.

Rosenstiel

How is that different? What do you pick up that you think we need to see more of.

Community Journalism: Bridging the Gap

Crittenden

 Letrell Crittenden, American Press Institute

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Bisport, Pittsburgh over the last several years, which has involved community listening sessions and interviews with community members. I was telling this to Anika—we’ve created a community advisory committee made up mostly of African-American residents, though not exclusively, from different neighborhoods in the city.

Right before the election, newsrooms came along and said, “We’d like to have a conversation about the election. What are your thoughts?” 

The committee members said, “No, no, no. We don’t care about the election. Our needs right now are a mental health crisis in this city. There’s massive homelessness, people committing suicide, and general depression. This is what we need to talk about.”

Next month, they’re going to hold a listening session focused on mental health. I mention this because, going back, I’m someone who, if you're familiar with communication infrastructure theory, believes that journalism is a tool of communication. It’s not an institution—it’s a tool to help inform people. And if that tool isn’t useful to people, they won’t use it. If I don’t have a George Foreman grill, I can still make my turkey burger.

I think what has happened is that journalism has distanced itself from communities for so long that it has become useless to people's lives. It’s no longer a useful tool, and some of that has been, quite frankly, voluntary.

If you go back to the '80s and '90s, there were voluntary circulation cuts in rural areas and communities of color—probably your MAGA and disillusioned groups from that survey. A lot of it was driven by economics, but the fact is, there were no journalists in the community, simply talking to people and figuring out their information needs.

This is essential because communities understand that if they don’t turn to journalists, they’re still going to get information. They have community organizations, family, churches, and other institutions. But the more journalism disconnects itself from these communities, the less useful it becomes as a tool. From my standpoint, I believe in community-engaged journalism that centers community voices, where journalists find ways to talk with people, and in some cases, involve them in the selection of news or in identifying what’s important. That makes journalism useful.

That’s exactly what’s been happening in Pittsburgh. They’ve decided to gather great information from community members and step back, letting them inform what’s important. It’s actually working. There are even threats that I wouldn’t necessarily want to be involved in, just from people sharing information within the committee. The whole idea of communication infrastructure theory is that journalism’s connection to information, community members' connection to information, and community organizations’ connection to information, all work together.

This is happening organically in this committee, where people are sharing information with each other. For me, there needs to be as much engagement and community listening as possible. My concern with initiatives like Press Forward is that while I believe we need more journalists—25,000 would be great—if those journalists replicate the same practices that led to the disenfranchisement and neglect of the communities that aren’t being heard, it won’t solve anything. We need to be very careful that we’re not just investing in journalists but also investing in community journalism.

Local News Models

Rosenstiel

You just teed me up perfectly for our colleague from Michigan. When someone mentioned reconstructing what’s missing, here’s my take: local news suffered because it was a failed product. It failed in the market. Why did it fail? Well, one of the things that made local news outlets indispensable was the journalism-adjacent content. You couldn’t rent an apartment without looking at listings, know what was on TV without the schedule, or figure out what movies to see. Newspapers also gave you grocery coupons. There was all this stuff that wasn’t strictly journalism, but it made the paper useful in your daily life.

We, as journalists, didn’t think much about helping people in that way. We over-romanticized the idea that we were watching out for the powerful on behalf of the public. As Jim Carrey used to say, we practiced journalism in the name of the public, but the public was a bystander to what we did. That worked in the 20th century model because we attracted attention mostly through alarmist coverage and sensational stories, then rented that attention to advertisers for profit.

Now, we can’t rent attention to advertisers. We have to create journalism that people find so useful that they’ll pay attention to it and then pay for it. Whether it’s through community foundations, subscriptions, or other forms, journalism has to help people live their lives. This aligns with an economic model theory that reinforces your point—we need to listen to understand what people need in their lives. We can’t just cover city council meetings the way we always have. If they weren’t relevant, they weren’t helpful. A lot of accountability journalism hasn’t been helpful either; we’ve amplified voices that didn’t serve anyone.

Tom Rosenstiel, University of Maryland

Philip Merrill College of Journalism

I don’t want to go on too much here, but I think recreating an older system is doomed to fail. The big risk with Press Forward is that it is going to invest $500 million to replace what’s gone, and in three years, all that money will be wasted. You've done more work on this topic than I have. What do you think?

Danielle Brown

 Respond to your original question about where we go from here—how new media can either protect or hurt democracy—I think the harm media has caused can't just be replaced by the solution of putting journalists into communities.

Danielle Brown, Michigan State University

Patrick Johnson, Marquette University

The legacy of harm the media has contributed to over time won't be rewritten by simply saying, "We're going to place journalists in your community now." There will still be trust issues with journalists, and media in general. It won’t work just by doing that, which is why community journalism is a great direction. However, we also need to pay attention to who the trusted messengers are in the community—people who may not fit the traditional media mold. These could be religious leaders, journalists who have left their local media outlets (which happens often), or individuals connected to other prominent institutions tied to their identity.

Press Forward doesn’t really recognize those figures as part of the media ecosystem, and academia doesn’t acknowledge them as such either — they're often left to sociology discussions. So, we need to rethink the traditional concept of journalism and how we recognize “journalists.” We already include columnists and editorial writers, but when are we going to drop the rigid boundaries around who counts as a journalist? We should also recognize individuals who broadcast through social networks, even if they aren’t traditionally-trained journalists. The key is educating those engaged in social networks about their role in shaping public discourse and how they can align with democratic values.

One other thing I see on the chart is that people tend to trust the media they watch, but they believe other media is destroying the country. This third-person effect—where people trust their own media but criticize others—is common. It’s particularly strong among those aligned with political parties, but it’s present across all categories. Breaking or at least educating people about this third-person effect could help, but I’m not sure how to fully disrupt it. However, one step could be educating people about which media aligns with democratic principles so they can make more informed decisions.

Finally, I don’t think everyone fully understands what democracy is or why journalism is an essential part of it. If everyone understood what journalism was supposed to do in a democracy, they wouldn’t trust figures like Tucker Carlson. If they grasped the purpose of journalism in democracy, it would be clear that those two things shouldn’t align.

 So, part of our work should be breaking down the tenets of democracy that resonate with the public and identifying where there’s miseducation or misunderstanding about journalism’s role. Is democracy about my voice overpowering yours because I don’t think your voice matters? That’s not democracy. When we look at educational differences, we can see how this understanding shapes groups and their relationship to media.

Journalism’s Role in Democracy

Fields

 I think one of the key points, relating to what the drill was discussing and what you're saying, is defining democracy. The definition of democracy really depends on who you are; it's an individual perspective. For example, one person I work for defines democracy as the peaceful transfer of power. My definition, however, is shaped by my experiences, like being a traffic cop - And that’s very different.

The only way we can truly understand people’s definitions of democracy, and how to engage with them, is to go into their communities and ask them directly. For instance, a community might say, "One of the big issues we face is that a disproportionate number of people of color are being stopped in traffic, and here’s how it's affecting them." In that community, that’s their definition of democracy. It’s not just about elections or how journalists cover democratic processes — it’s much more personal.

The definition of democracy is such a gray, cloudy concept when we throw it out there. I’m on the democracy team at AP, and sometimes I’m still unsure about what it really means.

Johnson

I think one of the key points is defining democracy. The definition of democracy really depends on who you are; it's an individual perspective. For example, one person I work for defines democracy as the peaceful transfer of power. My definition, however, is shaped by my experiences, like a traffic stop. And that’s very different.

The only way we can truly understand people’s definitions of democracy, and how to engage with them, is to go into their communities and ask them directly. For instance, a community might say, "One of the big issues we face is that a disproportionate number of people of color are being stopped in traffic, and here’s how it's affecting them." In that community, that’s their definition of democracy. It’s not just about elections or how journalists cover democratic processes—it’s much more personal. The definition of democracy is such a gray, cloudy concept when we throw it out there. I’m on the democracy team at AP, and sometimes I’m still unsure about what it really means.

Teaching Journalism

Crittenden

I was at the JEA conference, which was a high school journalism event in Philadelphia, and I was really disturbed by how mechanical journalism education is. The focus was all about how to take a photo, how to produce a story, but when I gave a presentation on community engagement, community asset mapping, and similar topics, I realized I was probably the only one talking about anything like that. But that, I believe, is the essence of journalism. To your point, we don't train journalists on how to talk about the soft skills of their craft.

Apcar

 It's very true. One of the hardest things I face as a teacher, especially in skills classes, is getting undergraduate students to actually talk to people. Not texting, not emailing—just going out and having face-to-face conversations. It's a big challenge. The idea that they would simply get in their car or walk down the street to talk to someone is terrifying for them. If they don't get a response through email or text, they freeze. But if they just go to the community center, for example, they’ll meet people and learn things about the neighborhood that they wouldn’t discover otherwise.

There's something about texting and the phone that has shut down the practice of cold calling. If the phone rings, they immediately think something is wrong—like a family emergency. There's also this strange culture among undergraduates where, if there's a major tragedy—like a murder or a rape—they are extremely reluctant to contact the victim's family. They are terrified, no matter how much training you give them, and they assume it’s an invasion of privacy. They don't see it as their role.

A great example was when a tragic incident occurred on campus. A student was drunk, assaulted, left by the side of the road, and then killed by a passing car. When we asked the student newspaper to talk to the family of the girl who had died, the response was, "We can't invade their privacy."

Paul Brown

I want to say something to that, because I agree that is an issue, and certainly the sort of human-to-human communication is just really hard. But I would also say that some of that reluctance goes back to what Tom said earlier that we took advantage of those people. That was our business model. And so to some extent, there's a backlash to our own behavior historically, because we knocked on anybody's door and made anybody miserable and stuck a hammer in their face. 

Journalism and Mental Health 

Johnson

I think, though, journalists also don't communicate very well. If 80% of the population isn't talking to them, then clearly they're not walking down the street and talking. Being from the Midwest, we get people coming and talking to us quite often. But on the flip side, journalism has never been seen as a tool of care. In journalism schools, we’re not necessarily teaching what it means. We say journalism is for providing information, but why can't it be a tool to operate with care? To be honest, I think one of our greatest failures in journalism education, and in the profession itself, is mental health and wellness. 

I was just on the phone with a queer journalist talking about their mental wellness. They said that when they go into a newsroom, they’re told to stay away from social justice issues because they’re gay. They constantly deal with the trauma of "coming out" every time they report. I can tell you it's one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Every time I start in a newsroom or interview someone, there’s this sense of coming out again. We're not teaching care. This also applies to how we glorify conflict reporting and war. Marquette is the home of the Foley Foundation. James Foley, an alum, was the last person to guest lecture in my journalism class before he was taken as a prisoner of war and beheaded. We have an entire curriculum about how to develop a safer practice. So, I don’t think it’s that journalists are afraid. Yes, technology changes the way we communicate, but one of our greatest failures is that we aren’t community-engaged because we’ve never taught care. Just cold calling someone doesn’t necessarily mean we care. 

Patrick Johnson, Marquette University

We don’t care for people; we care for a system, an institution, that we’re trying to protect. But I don’t think we care for people, and that includes the students we’re training to be part of this profession. They don’t want to be a part of it, not just because they won’t make money, but because of the war stories our adjuncts tell. Yes, 80-hour work weeks sometimes, but I remember the first ride-along I did. I can still tell you where the bullet holes were in the man on the street of Water Street in Milwaukee. That didn’t make me think, "Yes, please, let me be a crime reporter." I was a sophomore in college, and there was no system to support me after seeing a man with eight bullet holes in his body. 

If we’re going to become a system that works in tandem with these communities, we can’t just say they don’t want to do something. They want a job that’s trustworthy, equitable, and care-based—one that elevates the idea of caring for people. We need a trustworthy, equitable, and care-based system that elevates the idea that these people, these communities who are traumatized by journalism, actually cared about again.

Fields

One thing I'd like to say as a journalist is, if we're teaching students and not telling them, keep your humanity, we're doing it wrong. I never stopped being human when I knocked on the door. The first question I always asked myself was, "How would you feel if somebody in your family had just gotten killed?" and then, "Hi, I'm here to talk to you." 

I always wanted to treat people the same way I would want to be treated. You don't leave your humanity at the door just because you're a journalist; you take it with you. I can't express enough that this is how we should be doing our jobs. If you're not doing it this way, I don't blame people for being upset or angry when we show up. And if a door gets shut in your face, remember, there's someone who knows that person. I've been to 400 homicide scenes in my career, and there's always someone who will want to talk about that person because they don't want the narrative to be that they were a bad kid or that we saw this coming. Everyone you encounter is human, has good qualities, and someone loves them.

Schmemann

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I'd like to speak a little in defense of journalists, a word we never used. We call them reporters. The notion that reporters are at fault for what has happened to journalism, or for the lack of community engagement or sensitivity, I don't know if it's the reporters. People who go into journalism tend to care. They're not looking to become millionaires, at least the ones I know. They feel they have a mission to help spread correct information. And when the economic conditions were better, newspapers were an institution that tried to make money with reporters who were compelled to be more sensitive to the community. If that’s what drew readers, you did what you thought readers needed. There was plenty of community engagement where it was possible. I'd be curious to know if your students who attended this seminar on mental health were paid to report on it, whether the reports appeared anywhere, or if it changed their reporting. 

Because if they don’t have a job, there's nowhere for that work to appear. I’m not sure that real journalistic education happens once you're out there. You can learn the basics, like how to write a lead, but you'll never learn how to do an obituary. One day you do it, and you realize people want to talk about the loved one who just died, and then you learn how to do it. That comes with the job. I don’t think reporters were responsible for the collapse. It was an economic issue. Advertising went elsewhere, and there was no money to pay.

To me, the challenge now is finding a way to create outlets that would hire reporters. There’s no shortage of dedicated people who want to be reporters; I get plenty of emails from students who want to get into it. But there’s nowhere for them to work. You talk about watching media—that’s TV, that’s entertainment—but there are so few outlets doing on-the-spot reporting. I don’t know where you’d get a job. There are plenty of nonprofits and new models being created, but I think the conversation should focus on that, not on trying to create a new kind of reporter or presuming that reporters have lost their humanity. I don’t think they have. The real problem is much more economic: finding a new model to get the news to the people.

McCurry

I don’t have anything profound to say about what’s been discussed, but I do have one idea. If we want to hire some of these young journalism students, double the size of the sports page in every newspaper and print every high school sports result with the names of outstanding players nominated by the coaches. Send these young reporters to actually have contact with the coaches. I think that would make a big difference in circulation. It does.

If you assign someone to know every single coach and athletic director in every high school in their circulation area, and they have a relationship where the coaches call them and they call the coaches, that’s journalism. It’s reporting on things people care about.

Paul Brown

The longer I sit here, the more questions I have, but I want to focus on two. First, I’d like your perspective on the Baltimore Banner as an example. Is it working? What’s happened to The Sun? The other question is for the journalism deans and faculty: how are ethics and values taught in journalism schools? I think it’s an issue with education in general, around learning critical thinking and developing empathy. Lena (Morrealle Scott), this is her life's work. How do you help students understand other people—not just skills, but the values that inform their judgment?

Crittenden

I can answer the second one really easily. The accrediting body that accredits journalism programs requires it, and it's pretty thorough about beating you up if you don't. And I say that as one of the people who beats people up for it.

Rosenstiel

 I teach a class in critical decision making, where a student runs these organizations for the semester, and they're confronted with all these different things, everything from what's your social media policy for your staff?

Lorente

For those who don't know, the Banner is a digital-only, nonprofit established by a former Maryland legislator, who is the CEO or president or something of Choice Hotels, and tried to buy the Baltimore Sun from Alden, and they wouldn't sell it to him, so he got mad and created a competitor. Tom can explain.

Rosenstiel

They decided to go big fast, staffing up to 75 people quickly to cover both the city and county of Baltimore. They didn’t take the more classic startup approach of getting good at a few things first and slowly growing. Instead, they aimed to compete directly with the Baltimore Sun, which led them into a strange mode of newspaper behavior. The Sun is a traditional newspaper, while the Banner is not, so the Banner doesn't have to follow all the same rules as the Sun. However, as the Banner grows, they’re moving into the suburbs, having saturated their subscription base in the city.

What makes the Banner interesting is that it, along with Memphis, might be one of the few places with a startup trying to be a full metro news organization. Most other news startups are small and focused on specific topics like the arts. The Banner has a billionaire owner, and it operates under a model where the goal is to break even, which is similar to both profit and nonprofit models in these contexts. In my thinking about how journalism needs to evolve, I reference Clayton Christensen’s, the  business school academic and author on the concept of "the job to be done," which he developed while analyzing McDonald's milkshakes. When they studied milkshakes, they found that half were sold in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. In the morning, people bought thick milkshakes for breakfast because they lasted longer, while in the afternoon, they bought thinner milkshakes for their kids. Christensen argued that the “job to be done” in the morning was a breakfast substitute, and in the afternoon, it was a treat for kids. 

Journalism works the same way: we write stories without considering what the audience needs or how the story helps them. Many stories we write are not helpful because we don’t think about the impact, and for years, it didn’t matter because the revenue model didn’t depend on it.

Crittenden

I think we need to move away from nostalgia about the past, even though the loss of local news has been traumatic. There have always been communities, especially communities of color and rural areas, that have never been well served by news. This has led to a lack of trust and a disinterest in consuming news. Why should people trust something that has never served them? In my hometown, when I was 16, I called a newspaper hotline to call out the publication for being racist, and it worked. If journalism is not useful in people's daily lives, you can’t expect to get the audience back. News organizations need to reckon with the fact that one reason people don’t value the news is because the news didn’t value them.

Dunaway

The listening and community engagement aspects keep coming up, which I think is a good thing to keep identifying. I agree that we need more listening and more engagement with all local communities, not just some, and definitely not in a racist way. However, I don't think we need to get rid of some version of local news. Instead, I believe we need more connective threads.

A major problem with the disappearance or decline of local news is more about elite accountability than about consumer demand. Studies of legislators show that they often don’t know what their constituents want. They aren’t good at representing them unless they are told. This is not an ethics issue but an information problem—legislators wildly misunderstand what their constituents need. Over time, this problem has worsened, partly because there aren't enough people on the ground reporting about what communities want and need. Historically, some communities have never had their needs represented, but even at the community level, the hope lies in having people working to connect those areas, do the listening, and engage with them.

So while I agree with exploring new approaches and models, I don’t think we should abandon the idea that we need people locally talking about communities and communicating those needs to the broader public. Our representatives, for better or worse, are working in districts with 635 or 735 people per representative, and they need help parsing the information. Local leaders, like city council members and school board members, also need that information source.

Rosenstiel

 It seems like there's a virtuous circle between what Letrell is talking about — going in and understanding what people need — and what democracy means to them. This would circle back to the leaders who represent them, and they might represent them better if they knew what the people actually cared about, right?

Dunaway

The only consistent news consumers we know for sure are local leaders, candidates, and politicians. They have to pay attention because that's how they figure out what they're supposed to do and how they read the room. At this point, it's more of a vehicle for leads. While the model is flawed in many ways, it still has its own separate value in informing those who are supposed to represent us.

Generational Changes in News Consumption

Chen

I am teaching a News Media and Government course this semester, and I found that among Gen Z students, the top source they cite for news is YouTube. They no longer get information from traditional news outlets. Instead, they say they get news from Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and other late-night shows. This trend is predominantly seen with Gen Z. I'd like to hear journalists' and journalism faculty's perspective on Gen Z being the future, and how they feel about this generation getting news from YouTube and late-night shows. 

Danielle Brown

In my research, I found that for Black communities, Trevor Noah was a prominent source of news, particularly in 2021 and 2022. However, after he stopped his job, he disappeared from surveys entirely, which was very devastating for me. The same thing happened with Don Lemon. There's power in television and journalism that we often underestimate, and this relates to the question of how we're using the press and media. Television journalism, in particular, has a larger reach and influence. It's also free for most people, as they have access to it without worrying about subscription models.

While it may be considered entertainment, television reprocesses news in a way that helps people engage with an overwhelming amount of information. As I mentioned earlier, I don't have time to read an entire newspaper every day, and I wouldn’t expect others to have that time either. These entertainment aggregators are crucial in the digital age for processing the vast amount of information available. If we don't recognize their importance, we risk pushing people to rely on just one outlet, which can be a significant problem. This may lead people to only engage with one outlet, limiting their perspective, and that can be frustrating.

These aggregators are essential for understanding how news is processed differently. For me, email aggregators were helpful years ago, pulling together news from multiple sources to prepare me for what I needed to know. Students need something similar, but not another email.

Hinkle

I think the reason people are gravitating toward YouTube, TikTok, and similar platforms is because of the growing paywalls on major news sites. When the costs went up for subscriptions, I started losing trust in these sites. It's frustrating when you have to pay for each one, especially since many people don't want to spend time navigating through multiple websites just to get to a story.

I experienced this a lot when writing my thesis a couple of years ago. Every time I needed access, I'd either go to the library to check if they had a subscription or end up paying for it myself. For others, these small obstacles can add up, especially when they don’t have credit cards or feel like they can’t afford it. These barriers often go unnoticed, but they come together to make the process cumbersome. That’s why younger generations, in particular, are turning to free platforms like TikTok or YouTube. You can watch late-night shows, get news, and be entertained all without having to worry about subscriptions. Honestly, it’s more entertaining, too. It’s easy and accessible, and that’s becoming a big factor in news consumption today.

Apcar

Did you start to actually dive deeper into reading, like subscribing to The New Yorker or another traditional paper, or did you avoid the subscription model because you didn’t want to pay for it?

Hinkle

 I think I'm more of a second one, mostly because, this is me personally—the whole paywall thing makes me feel achy inside. I feel like everybody should have free access to everything. Information should be free forever for everyone to see.

Fields

 How do you pay the people who collect that information to make it available to you?

Apcar

Students come to me and say, 'I don't think I can make a living in this business,' and then they don't want to pay for it.  Or worse, they’re applying for an internship at one of the paid publications, and they don’t want to buy it. 

Johnson

I think it’s also how the news speaks about younger generations. It’s not just about utilizing their language or adopting an entertainment-style approach. There’s a need for that, but it’s also about who we allow into the space to speak to and about them. Not every journalist goes to journalism school.

 I teach ethics, and that's primarily what I teach. But many of the people working at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and Fox didn’t go to journalism school. Many of CNN's anchors, for instance, come from Ivy League institutions that don’t even have journalism programs. This highlights the need for education within the industry. Journalism education isn’t just about K-12 or college; it also includes training and development, which is why I value the work you do and why I love working with Trusting News. It’s about providing more professional development on how to behave better.

If Gen Z doesn’t think they can make money in journalism, they won’t enter the field. And if they don’t, then the language of journalism won’t reflect them. I’m not much older than Gen Z, and I feel it’s important to have someone in the room who can voice that. This is especially true for Black journalists. The more we push them out, the fewer their stories are told. Telling them to be objective often means not covering things that are personal to them.

As a white person in the newsroom, I can cover almost anything, but if I’m told I can’t cover the Equality Act because I’m gay, then what’s the difference between that and me saying I can’t cover the economy because I’m white?

If we don’t welcome Gen Z and people from our communities into journalism, it becomes a question of care. And how does this information not only get to them but also represent them? This involves welcoming them into the space where they can exist.

Community-Oriented News

Crittenden

 One last point I want to make is about care. One of the main reasons people are turned off by the news is because it’s so negative. For instance, if I look at the news in Philadelphia, it might impact the way people view the city. If I were to turn to Fox 29, I would get the impression that I should be dead because the city is portrayed as so violent that stepping outside feels dangerous.

 My children, who play in their backyard and go to the park, don’t have their experiences covered in the news. The same thing happens in Pittsburgh. Why would I want to consume that kind of news, especially now? I think I’m doing news avoidance right now. Why would I want to be terrified every time I open a page? This is probably a big reason why Gen Z feels the same way. So, I think there are people working on reimagining journalism as a source of joy, and I believe that’s another important area that needs attention. 

 Fields

Our whole model has been based on "if it bleeds, it leads," and on scalp hunting—focusing on who did what and trying to bring someone down. What we haven’t done is recognize that we’re our own worst enemies. I saw this at AP, with solutions-based reporting. Not everyone’s world is screwed up.

 When I was at USA Today, I tried to propose something because I had come back from the LA riots and spent time in the community of South Central. There were all kinds of programs there run by individuals. One man, Simpson, had a conflict resolution program where he worked with kids from gang-affiliated neighborhoods, teaching them how to resolve conflicts without violence. The gangs even cut a deal with him: any kid who graduated from the program wouldn’t be recruited. That was just one program. There are millions of initiatives like that across the country that we could be covering at AP.

During the height of COVID, we started a series called "One Good Thing," where we ran stories every day about people making a positive impact, helping others get through the pandemic. It was one of our most-read segments. But we stopped doing it, even before COVID was over. The religion team, and we, just stopped. We could have kept it going—because we’re AP, we weren’t just covering the U.S. but also the world. Everywhere, in places like Taiwan and Thailand, people were doing something positive. All we had to do was find that one individual making their community better. I thought that was something that would have been worth continuing.

Apcar

I've seen something similar locally. We have a new editor, and he’s brought in more positive, community-focused content. There’s a section called "Inspired," which highlights pro bono work being done in the community. There's also a column about community life and other features that are much softer, positive, and illuminating. These are the kinds of stories that aren't often covered, but now they are. It's a shift towards focusing on the good things happening in the community.

While the paper still maintains its traditional broadsheet format with a less-than-ideal website, they’ve secured advertising support from major companies in Louisiana, like Shell and Blue Cross Blue Shield, who sponsor this section. It runs on Sundays, but it’s expanding to the end of the week as well. 

The editor previously implemented a similar approach in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and it seems to have been successful, which is likely why he brought it to South Louisiana. I assume this trend is happening in other places too because it’s clear that you can’t just keep pounding away with the old model of negative stories without also showing the constructive things happening in the community.

Danielle Brown

 I think this is a legacy of harm the media has created. There's certainly a lot of negativity in the news, but there is also joy, like the initiatives you mentioned in Detroit. 

We just finished reviewing all their 2013 newspaper coverage, and the most successful stories on social media were about youth doing extraordinary things. Whether it's someone earning $72 million in scholarships, saving a lady on the bus, or helping her across the street—these stories are successful and do exist in the news. The problem, I think, is that our newsworthiness factors tend to be conflict-oriented, so we focus on that. It's a chicken-and-egg situation. If we shift the focus, as public opinion polling shows, people believe everything is falling apart, reflecting civic cynicism and a lack of belief in the country's direction. If we're reporting on unhappy things, it may reflect how the public feels about citizenship and how politicians are failing to address these concerns. It goes both ways.

Lena Morrealle Scott

I think there's some weaving that we can do here. Speaking as someone who's written a lot of civic engagement curriculum, it's about elevating the voices of ordinary folks who are doing extraordinary things in community with others. That, in fact, inspires people—whether they're journalism students or an eighth grader—to be more civically engaged, but they (the exemplars and people they study) have to look like them. 

So, it's incumbent upon us, both as teachers and reporters, to elevate the stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I completely agree with that.

Part of what I struggle with when I try to teach about democracy is understanding what democracy really is. Is it just about the old rich white guys, or is it about us? Or is it about people who look different from us, creating democracy together?

And that's part of my confusion. I'd like to better understand your questions and answers and what you learned about democracy. I think many people, including myself, are confused by the election results, especially with all the pre-polling saying this was the most important election—one of the most important things being saving democracy. Clearly, a lot of us don’t understand if that was really a priority. How did we end up with this result? What can you tell us about how people think about democracy, especially when principles of democracy are in conflict with one another? Because some people think about democracy as the old story of the three branches of government, but others think of democracy in terms of surviving the traffic stop.

Lena Morreale Scott and Paul Brown, University of Maryland

Rosenstiel

 Well, I think some people, presumably, might think of democracy as saving the country from the "woke left" or saving the country from Brown people coming through the border. I mean, you don’t really know what that word means to them.

 Schmemann

On the question of what you’re watching and good news, first of all, if you’re watching the late-night shows, you’re not watching reporters. You’re learning the news they read somewhere else. At some point, someone has to go out and report it, which is what we’re talking about—who's actually going to report, and what are they going to report?

On the question of good news versus bad news, I was at a conference with a psychiatrist who conducted a study on this. He found that people usually take in about an equal amount of good and bad news every day, but they remember the bad news because that's how we're wired. We learn to avoid rattlesnakes, but we don’t learn to avoid the butterfly. So, we remember the rattlesnake. But it’s your sense, for example, that you’re getting far too much bad news because that’s the news that impacts you and sticks in your memory—it’s just how we're wired to perceive it.

The danger, and to some extent the function of journalism, is to warn you about what lies ahead. There's also the other part, which is to entertain and make you feel better. If you look at it, certainly in our case, there are plenty of features and stories designed to entertain, but those may not stick in your memory as much.

Session 3

The Election’s Findings and Implications for Future Research

Danielle Brown and Johanna Dunaway

Co-Moderators

Considering Transparency

Danielle Brown

We could just pick up where we left off. That question was related to transparency. One of the solutions people have started talking about to create more trust in journalism has been thinking about creating more transparency about the journalistic process, what journalism does in general, and who journalists are. 

Johanna Dunaway, Syracuse University

Danielle Brown, Michigan State University

Maybe we could see what people's thoughts are or questions about the efficiency of more transparency.

Johnson

 I think it depends on what we mean by the word transparency. There's the ethical value of transparency and the act of transparency. One of the things it affords is the opportunity to not be the “Wizard of Oz.” Being able to see what's happening behind the curtain is important. People, as much as I hate this adage, like to know how the sausage is made. They want to know there's accountability in what they're doing. Transparency doesn’t mean we have to say, and then I did this, and then I did that. We're not playing the Walter Lippmann model of objectivity here. But some of those things include simple solutions — like including a box in the backend of the website that defines words, with the definition displayed right next to the text. The New York Times started doing this after consulting with Trusting News. Now, in their bios, they explain what their ethics statement is. More newsrooms around the country are doing the same. The AP has done a phenomenal job explaining how its election monitor works — what actually goes into calling an election. The idea of transparency, to me, ties back to the belief that journalists are educators. 

If we are transparent, we’re explaining the process and practice. By doing so, we invite people to the table to see what’s happening. That doesn’t mean they need to participate, but it gives them a method to trust the credibility of the journalism because they can see the process. It’s like credentialing journalists, similar to credentialing doctors, without requiring a board exam to do it. I have very controversial opinions about ensuring journalists are credentialed, but that’s a separate issue.

Danielle Brown

 So I know Benjamin Toff  is doing some work around those New York Times bios, but they're out, and his initial findings, he recorded at the International Journalism Press of Politics recently, and it was like, in those bios, not their ethics statements, because they didn't analyze those, but in those bios, people are basically just giving glorified CVs. And, you know, there's just a few people who are really giving more insight about who they are, other than, like, I have an elite education. A few people are married, and you know that, but they're not doing a whole lot in terms of transparency.

Toff that there's not a lot of work about how much that actually does. I'm curious if there's things in the newsroom that people care about.

On Diversity and Objectivity

Fields

Well, one thing I try to tell people, and this is going to sound heretical, is that journalism is not objective. The way I do my job is objective. What I think is a good story, what I gravitate to when my editors aren't looking, is totally subjective. Based on my life, I was homeless as a kid. What do you think I'm going to care about when you ain't looking? Where do you think I'm going to gravitate to in my coverages?

Gary Fields, Associated Press

If I'm doing criminal justice, I'm probably going to see criminal justice differently. That's subjective. I better make sure that I'm doing my job right when I 

go out to do those kinds of stories. To me, that's where the diversity part comes in, because there aren’t that many people that worked at The Wall Street Journal like I did, who could say they slept in a train station with their teenage mom before she met my stepdad, who then saved my life.

That was what diversity did, and I didn't need the diversity of this. I need the diversity of the mind in my newsrooms. I need the diversity of your life experiences.

One of my problems has always been that too many people come from the same place when they're sitting in these editorial meetings. So, when you turn around and look at somebody and say, ‘What do you think of that? I think it's a great story.’ The two of you actually grew up together. You need diversity of life experiences, for starters. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is this whole idea of, ‘We're objective.’ Everybody calls bullshit on that because they know we're not objective.

Dunaway

I guess it's interesting that you raised this example because I was thinking of humanizing when the bios came up. Like, if I were to read a little bit more about you on a website or something from the AP, as a news consumer, I would actually really like to know more. It's almost like there's a bit of a humanizing effect that could have the potential for building trust.

I think, OK, I'm probably a more sophisticated news consumer than most people since I study the news, of course. But I still think it's not so much that people necessarily expect bias-free or perspective-free journalism. Maybe it might help them just to know what that perspective is, or where some of those perspectives come from. It sort of made me realize why that kind of transparency might be helpful to me. It's not quite transparent in the way I was first thinking about it. 

I'll just say one thing I recall on this directly from research—this was a while ago, and I can't even tell you where it was from—but there was one study I found really interesting. It showed that people who understand how the media business works, including its economic model, were much savvier news consumers.

They had more understanding of where and when to be critical. For example, they might recognize that an outlet’s market is mostly Republican, so maybe the news leans that way. They were more critical in their thinking about it, but they also weren’t throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They felt they had a handle on where the bias might be coming from because they understood the nuts and bolts of the business. I think one problem with the expansion of the media environment being so different now is that people aren’t really aware of many of the underlying models, and that might be part of the issue.

Danielle Brown

In my research, I regularly find that a lack of connection with or the limited approachability of journalists can serve as a source of mistrust for community members. I’m wondering — how much of your (referencing Gary Fields) story, having studied many journalists and how they create trust with individuals, are you willing to disclose in an individual story versus in a bio?

How much would you naturally put out there, given all the challenges journalists face today, or that journalists from different identities might face as they report? How much of that story would you be willing to be transparent about?”

Fields

Do it on a one-to-one basis. Well, especially when someone tries to castigate me, saying, “You have no idea what this is like,” I can say, au contraire, I actually do. That lets us skip the learning curve and get straight to the heart of what they’re seeing and experiencing.

One of the stories I did during this election cycle was about people who don’t vote. My lead was a homeless man having a conversation with a college-educated next-gen advocate trying to convince him to vote. The advocate emphasized the importance of voting, but the 72-year-old man responded, “I live out here — doesn’t that tell you how I feel about everyone else?” He explained how he’d been homeless through multiple administrations. I was able to do that story because I knew where homeless folks line up in Detroit and wasn’t afraid to go into neighborhoods where other journalists might feel uncomfortable.

Being a journalist means embracing discomfort. I hit bus stops, food pantry lines, and churches where people gather, like the two-mile line every Sunday in Silver Spring, Maryland. Talking to people in these spaces shapes how I approach my work. For instance, I was once assigned to cover the Ku Klux Klan for my paper in Shreveport,  Louisiana. You’d think there’d be barriers, but I covered them fairly. They were fighting for a parade permit that the whole area opposed, and the ACLU was backing them. That even led to the state Grand Dragon becoming my pen pal.

Johnson

 I think Johanna (Dunaway), the word you use, is what makes transparency important: it has the capacity to humanize people. What Ben (Toff)  is doing is amazing because it goes against the common belief. The Times is doing what it does best—objectivity—but they don’t want, need, or desire to humanize their reporters in that way, at least from the ones I’ve talked to.  But transparency in a bio is different. Take Shasta Scout in Northern Oklahoma, a paper serving counties with significant native and indigenous peoples. Their bios talk about the specific native groups the reporters come from and how they want to connect with people. Transparency becomes a value focused on the interpersonal.

Being transparent means I go to a coffee shop and have a conversation with you. I might ask questions that could make you uncomfortable, but you can walk away, say no, or choose to stop the interview at any point. Even if I use what you say, an editor may cut out certain parts, and I’d be transparent about that process with you. Transparency allows us to be the kind of people we’d want others to be toward us. Seth Lewis (University of Oregon) and Jacob Nelson (University of Utah) did about why people trust their doctors but not journalists. Walter Lippmann said objectivity was a scientific method. This was adopted post-1918, after the Spanish flu, because people trusted doctors, believing in the scientific method.

I want my doctor to walk me through my test results and explain the timeline. Similarly, when I'm talking to a sommelier, I don’t just want them to say something is "full-bodied." I want them to explain what that means to them, so I understand.

There’s nothing wrong with sitting down with someone, acknowledging that I may not look like I belong in the room with them, but we can talk through what this means because we understand it. This is why people say academics are annoying—they think we sit in an ivory tower and don’t explain things, hiding behind paywalls.

The Process of Journalism

Schmemann

A bit of conversation like this often leads us to lump all forms of journalism together, but transparency really depends on the context.

Serge Schmemann, The New York Times,  

Mike Mccurry, Former White House Press Secretary,

Len Apcar, LSU

I write unsigned editorials where you don’t know who wrote them. Many people contribute to them, but also, in our newsroom, we now include reporter biographies. That's fine, but it conceals the fact that the story isn’t just the work of one reporter — it’s gone through editors and many other people. It’s an institutional product and knowing that a reporter with certain biases wrote the first draft doesn't necessarily equate to transparency. It could even obscure the truth behind the story. 

I’m from a different generation, one that trained me to keep myself out of the story, which we called objectivity. I don’t like the term, but for me, being fair meant withdrawing from the story as much as possible. Adding a biography where I mention personal preferences or political affiliation would undermine that effort to be fair and neutral. In other types of journalism — like magazines or commentary — you do need to know who the person is, but in basic reporting, I’m not sure transparency is always the answer.

We tried to make our editorial endorsement meetings public during the last election. In my view, it was a farce. We all prepared questions for the candidates, anticipating their answers and follow-up questions. Instead of a real, open exchange, it became a poorly-produced TV reality show. 

So, do you really want to know how we form an editorial? I can tell you, but it might disappoint you. We discuss it briefly, and then the editor says, "Here’s the viewpoint we’re taking," and that’s it. Sometimes, a publisher overrules it.

Dunaway

I just want to clarify something—it’s probably my fault for not explaining this clearly earlier. When we first raised the issue of transparency, I wasn’t thinking about bios. I was thinking more along the lines of ensuring readers understand the process behind how a story or opinion is formed. While some may find this boring, for others, it’s critical in helping them grasp how a group arrived at a particular conclusion and why it’s written a certain way.

The layered nature of writing a news story is something I really wish people understood better. When people worry about bias coming from the individual reporter’s perspective, I think it’s unnecessary. The reason for that is the layered approach — it’s going to go through multiple processes and involve several people. That’s why I wish more people understood how the process works. And, of course, not every outlet operates the same way or has the same views, but that’s a given.

Schmemann

 I completely agree with that formulation, and I've always thought that news consumption should be taught in schools other than journalism.

Rosenstiel

You kind of anticipated exactly where my thoughts were going when this comes up a lot in class, right? Objectivity. I’ve written endlessly about it, but when I talk about it now in class, I say part of the problem with this term is that it really has multiple meanings. The dictionary definition of objectivity is about consciousness, and we all know that’s not possible.

Then there’s objectivity of process, how you go out and do a story, how you verify what you did, and I trust the way you did the work. And then there’s the objectivity of presentation, a stylistic thing the profession adopted 100 years ago or longer, like never using the first-person pronoun and the omniscient narrator voice. Hopefully, we’ve dispensed with that objectivity of presentation. 

But we still get very confused very quickly in conversations, even among journalists, about whether we’re talking about objectivity of process or objectivity of consciousness. I'm on a crusade to get rid of the word and describe open-minded inquiry, or something that pulls us toward backwards process.

Fields

Hey, look, when I talk about it, I'm coming at it from the standpoint that I'm just one part of the process. I happen to be the one who gets the hate mail and death threats, because my editors don't, and they often want to interject things that get me those threats.

 So, when I talk about objectivity and subjectivity, as a reporter, I tend to lose that argument because I’m further down the food chain. My editors may insist on including things in the story that I don’t think are necessary. Objectively, I don’t believe those things should be in the story, but subjectively, I see their importance based on my personal experiences. Ultimately, objectivity and subjectivity come down to whose ass is on the line when the story goes out—because it won’t be the editor’s.

Gary, do you want to ask about the current transparency requirements? It depends on the subject. For example, the race calls have been hugely transparent, and I’d argue they’ve been very successful, with little pushback. The AP has been calling races since 1848, and you don’t get much pushback or anger. But if the result had been different, I can’t say if the push for transparency would have worked or mattered. Still, we did a tremendous amount of work to ensure transparency in the race calls. The process is extreme—they go to great lengths to ensure accuracy, because if there's one thing you don’t want to have to correct, it’s a race call. It's spectacular to watch — it’s a mix of mathematics, calculus, and a bit of voodoo.

It has helped to some degree, but I can't say completely, because, as I mentioned, we probably needed a different result for people to fully understand the transparency behind race calls. In terms of other stories, we don’t get much opportunity for full transparency. 

AP polls, we write it, and certain graphs get inserted that I might not have included in a story because I didn't think they resonated with the public. Then, of course, I get death threats. The issue is that I can’t go back and explain to people that those graphs weren’t ones I would’ve used. I can’t say, ‘Before you start looking for my house, maybe you should know that these weren’t my choices.’ And honestly, I don’t think I’d want to constantly explain how I disagree with my editor on stories every time someone gets angry, because I’d never stop talking.

I don’t think we do much transparency when it comes to that. In terms of my own personal bio, there’s stuff in there that people can read, and honestly, you can Google me and figure out who I am. It’s pretty easy. My name shows up right after Gary Fields, the economist, who I sometimes wish I could take credit for because he’s pretty smart. But no, I don’t think we do much transparency, and we definitely didn’t do it at The Wall Street Journal. 

Danielle Brown

 That's also the extra step of transparency, right? Like linking to the methodology of an interview or showing how many people click on the links in a story. But people don't click on links, so how much good is transparency really doing? I think it's something we need to measure — whether the efforts we're making are actually creating solutions.

There's also a power struggle we have to acknowledge; you're the one getting the death threats. How many times do you get death threats? Too many. So how do we think about the consequences of transparency? When are people willing to risk it? We know the most trusted people risk it all the time, but journalism is not set up to protect them. These are important questions we need to consider when thinking about where we go next with trust and transparency.

If I can ask one more question, I want to go back to our original chart and ask your thoughts on where we go next with racial thinking, racial resentment, and identity-based politics. 

Placing Trust

Danielle Brown

In this chart, we see three groups—the ambivalent, both classically liberal and MAGA—who all have high trust in the military. I know there’s no specific question about international relations and war in Gaza in the survey, but it’s interesting that military trust is included. It makes me want to ask: when did you first engage with international affairs? How did you first stumble upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? How much does that impact your news or political attitudes now, and did it before? I’m not sure how many, especially my students, were paying attention to international issues before October of last year. So, I’d like to hear any context you can provide about the questions on diversity, immigration, and inclusion in the survey, and what you think we should focus on going forward based on what we know.

Connelly

I don't think when we ask about confidence in the military, people are thinking about what’s happening overseas, like Ukraine or Gaza. They're thinking about their dad, who served, or something close to them. 

If you asked that question in the '60s, you'd probably get a completely different answer. Back then, you wouldn’t see as much confidence. But in recent years, there hasn't been that kind of shift. Now, if we started sending people overseas again, we might get a different answer, but overall, there hasn't been much change in military confidence. 

Benz

We've been asking the military question from the General Social Survey since the '70s, and it has remained steady. The military has consistently been the highest-trusted institution. The scientific community, which was once stable, began becoming polarized before COVID and then experienced a massive acceleration of that polarization. The military and scientific community are essentially the only institutions that have maintained a steady level of trust, while trust in all other institutions has dropped dramatically.

Jenny Benz, Marjorie Connely

NORC at the University of Chicago

Connelly

 Some of these questions show that it doesn't matter what your party affiliation is—Congress as a whole isn't particularly liked, but your view of the executive branch often depends on who's in the White House. The Supreme Court has dropped in recent years, and it might diverge as you mentioned. If you look at the people who align with the Supreme Court, they're mostly positive, but for other groups, not so much.

Fields

Are you planning to deploy another poll after the inauguration, especially as people start taking over, like at the Pentagon? If people start seeing a few generals suddenly leaving due to politicization, I'd be curious to see how that affects the trust level.

Connelly

There are questions asked about trust in different aspects and institutions. I know Gallup does this every year, no matter what's going on, in August, so you can see changes over time. Given what's happening in the Pentagon over the next few months, there could be a drop or something similar. I’m not saying you won’t do it, but for the AP, it depends. It’s not like we plan things ahead of time, but other organizations like Pew and Gallup have certain questions they ask every year, no matter what. The General Social Survey does the same.

Rosenstiel

I think one thing that we did with this massive survey is because it was, you know, not something that was in the field with 30 questions for, you know, a month in a point in time. We were trying to get to deeper level things. Usually, these sorts of attitudes about media are run across demographics and party ID and attitudes about confidence and political trust or social trust, the same thing, run across ideology, party ID.  Because we looked across these different domains, we were able to establish, wow, there are patterns here of belief around diversity or around the importance of religion that correlate to trust in government or trust in confidence in the future. And we were able to break these down, not through typology, not around ideology, but around these other things, so it opens up potentially new ways of looking at these issues. 

It doesn’t, as you said, surveys don’t tell us why people feel this way because it’s not causality, but it does suggest there’s a correlation here between liberals being really cynical about the future and conservatives being really cynical about the future, even though they disagree about these other things. Or people who are not sure what they think, and they’re across all parties. So, we hope there are avenues to go deeper, things that are exposed by this, that we don’t know, that we want to know more.

Benz

 I think fundamentally, it shows that people are trying to balance multiple values, which are often in conflict, and they have to weigh some values more than others. You can look at that disillusioned group, for example, and see that it's cross-partisan. People aren't necessarily making electoral decisions based on partisanship. They are generally supportive and favorable of diversity and immigrants, yet if you look at these types of people in voter studies, they still voted overwhelmingly for Trump. 

Maybe their priority was their financial outlook and future pessimism. What they were valuing was someone who promised to blow up the system and make things better for them. So, when you look at how all of these things interplay with each other, it becomes a more realistic picture of how everyday people make trade-offs between many things they value at different levels and times. 

American Dream and Democracy

Apcar

 I'm intrigued by the question of whether people feel the American Dream is out of reach for them, and how it feeds into insecurity about democracy. It strikes me that there's a deeper area to probe, suggesting that the American Dream and democracy are correlated. For some people, they've lost faith in democracy and feel that neither they nor their children or heirs can achieve what they consider the American community. We don't have much on that in this study, right? This could be an area for further exploration, or have others already looked into it?

Benz

Well, Jordan (Hinkle) and Claire (Krummenacher), both of NORC, took a lot of time to code. We asked people what they meant by the American dream, and the response was overwhelming. 

Apcar

Arlee Russell Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” in which she studied, among other things, the American dream and the resentment toward migrants in the South. She embedded herself in the border of Texas and Louisiana off and on for a few years, during the Tea Party movement. As a daughter of a foreign service officer, she was comfortable learning about different cultures. She observed communities that viewed the American dream as a home, maybe on a dirt road, with family on either side, working hard to create a place where everyone could gather on Sundays. 

These people were deeply resentful of immigrants they saw as "line-cutters," grabbing a piece of the American dream early in their time in the U.S. Migrants, with resources, were seen as taking away their dreams, leaving them feeling like strangers in their own land. There was also a strong resentment also toward the people of both coasts and the elites, and a sensitivity toward references to ‘flyover country.’ She wrote a book about this dynamic, published in the mid 2015-16s, before Trump’s rise. This book resonates in Louisiana where it was used as part of the freshman honors curriculum at LSU, tying into the broader conversation about democracy and the American dream. The loss of the American Dream is seen as a reflection of a broken country, undermining representative democracy. 

Danielle Brown

 The American dream, connected with cost of living, is the primary concern for most voters. The American dream is increasingly seen as unachievable, and these issues are well connected. At the same time, with population decline in the United States, many cities are trying to think about sustainability through immigration, recognizing the need to bring people in. When thinking about where we’re going next, migration and immigration questions will likely help us understand the divisions and resentment that continue to divide us, particularly between the North and South.

In my studies in Black communities in the Midwest, one of the most controversial issues we disagree on the most is race-related policies, particularly those related to immigration. This is a big issue to consider moving forward.

People in ‘The Middle’

Dunaway

This aligns directly with what I was going to say. While I agree that one of the most interesting aspects of the study is how it allows us to arrange respondents beyond just a partisan lens, we can still agree that one group ends up on the left and another on the right. 

What's truly valuable, though, is the three groups in the middle, which we previously knew little about. Scholars, journalists, and politicians often refer to this group with terms like the floating middle, floating voters, switchers, deciders, or double-haters, lumping them into one category. 

This study provides a starting point for differentiating among individuals in that large middle group. We know the 10% on either end are the most vocal, the most likely to vote, and the most partisan or ideological. However, we haven't known much about how to differentiate between those voters in the middle. While specific economic circumstances may have influenced this time, the different classifications offer good places to start, such as exploring views on the American Dream, immigration, race, ethnicity, and how these compete with economic interests. There's a lot. 

Fields

One thing that I find interesting as I listen is this: The disillusioned group seems to be more open-minded when it comes to diversity. Many of them are likely young people living in their parents' basements because they can't afford a home, and those who go to college often have significant debt. One candidate actually had policies addressing all three of these issues, but that person got defeated. I’m struggling to understand how we got here. If I look at the data without context, it’s confusing. For example, one person proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time homebuyers, policies aimed at helping with student debt, and an openness to diversity and immigrants. But how did they vote?

Jennifer Benz

The candidate promised to help retire student debt, promote diversity, and support immigrants, but how did that group vote? Those promises were grounded in faith that our current systems and institutions could deliver on them. However, the disillusioned group has less faith in these institutions right now. Trump, on the other hand, promised to achieve similar goals but without providing many details. He framed his approach as one that would bypass the system, claiming that people would have more money as a result. I think that's a key difference.

Patrick Johnson

When I see this data and think about what the middle groups are trying to say, I always ask the question: Whose democracy are we talking about? Who's allowed in, and who’s not? 

Danielle Brown, Michigan State University

Patrick Johnson, Marquette University

Who has access to the American Dream, and who doesn’t? When we ask polling questions like, "Do you believe in the American Dream?" It's clear that some people don’t think everyone should have access to it, or to the same extent.

I have a colleague, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, whose family is now mostly green card holders. He calls it the "ladder scenario." They are grateful for the accelerated citizenship process under Reagan, so they feel indebted to the Republican Party. But they believe people in Section 8 housing don’t deserve the same access to the American Dream. They see the ideal American family—mom, dad, 2.5 children—as the standard, and any disruption to that is seen as undermining the American Dream.

This issue is complicated because I've encountered people who don’t think I deserve the same access to the American Dream simply because I plan to marry a man. There’s more nuance here than we often acknowledge. For example, Trump ran ads asking, "Do you want men in women’s locker rooms?" which plays on these fears and divisions about the American Dream. I can totally see that. I’m from Wisconsin where Kyle Rittenhouse came to participate in the 2020 riots in Kenosha. If you ask my community, they’d say people like me are disrupting the ability to have the American Dream. They’d argue the American Dream isn’t attainable anymore because people like me exist. So, I think there’s more nuance to this idea now, especially with this data. For example, when someone who's disillusioned says they’re more willing to engage with diversity, what do they mean? Is it diversity of thought? Of race? Of sexuality? Of immigration? We don’t often break it down that way, and maybe we don’t know how to do that.

Schmemman

These debates are obviously intense, critical, and often painful. But what’s really new, as we discussed earlier, is the level of hatred and violence. I was working yesterday on a piece about Catholic Charities, one of the organizations supporting immigrants. They’ve been receiving threats, bombs, and all kinds of violence. Suddenly, after January 6, all of this has escalated into an incredible level of hatred. I feel it in myself, too, especially when someone votes differently than I did. That’s the part I don’t understand.

 I get the social debates, many of which are difficult. We’re entering new territory—some want to slow things down, others want to rush ahead. That’s happened before, but even in the ‘60s, when I was a student, it wasn’t this bad. The raw hatred we’re seeing now is something different. So, if you move forward with this, I’d ask: Are you prepared to kill the other? In what situation would you feel you have the right to be violent?

Fields

Yeah, that’s it - is violence acceptable in some situations? 

Rosenstiel

It's an unknowable question, but when you think about the anger in the 60s—revolutionaries, Black Power, Black Panthers, and calls for revolution—what would that have been like with social media? Back then, everything was filtered through a fairly oligarchical and homogeneous media system. We didn’t hear directly from those people, unless a reporter somehow got there or maybe through alternative papers, mostly on the coasts. But we weren’t getting Twitter threads. I don’t know if, with today’s communication systems, it would have felt more intense, but I’m not sure.

Apcar

I’ve been in the Deep South for nine years now, and guns are just a fact of life. Guns at home, in the truck, in the glove compartment—they’re everywhere. With more and more animosity toward people who disagree with you, my neighbors talk about being ready. They say they’re loaded, with ammunition, and have all the guns they need, including automatic rifles. 

Rosenstiel

 And I always wonder, who do they think they’re going to shoot?

Paul Brown

Yeah, actually, I have a question about the survey. 

Did you include any questions about interacting with people who are different from you? 

In terms of civic health, there’s this question of whether people are in environments where they interact with others from different backgrounds. With the decline of institutions, people often turn to social media to confirm their own biases. I think the personal experiences of engaging with people who are different might make a difference. Social media tends to exacerbate those differences. 

Maybe this is too deep for now, but it’s another question worth asking later: How are people relating to and experiencing others who are different from them? 

Rosenstiel

 We asked classic social questions, but we didn’t ask a lot of questions about the "big sort," where people don’t live near others who are different from them.

Fields

 You raise the point that I'm actually curious about. Back in the ‘60s, Ronald Reagan believed in gun rights until the Black Panthers got them and started walking around openly with them, and then we got gun control in California. 

I wonder sometimes, as I look back, how that would have gone and what kind of outcry or non-prior would there have been nationally if you had the same internet and ability to say they're trying to roll back Second Amendment rights on this group. Would everybody have rallied around the Second Amendment, or would they have gone like, ‘Well, that's actually OK, because the Second Amendment wasn't written for them anyway?" 

I'm just curious about those things, and about asking folks, do you think the Second Amendment applies to everybody? I'd love to ask people how they feel about me.

Connelly

 There was a question that took me a long time to get back to, sorry I had to look it up, about what people think regarding immigrants and the American dream. We asked a question about how important it is to the U.S. identity and the ability of people living here to get good jobs and achieve the American dream. About 80% said it's very important to the American image, and this was pretty much across the board. 

But then, if you ask about the ability for people to come from other places in the world to find economic opportunities, about half said it's very important. 80% of the classically liberal, who've been pro-immigration all along, said yes. 

But only 30% of the mostly MAGA group, and less than half of the disaffected, ambivalent, and disillusioned groups, said it was important to our image as a country. So, while everyone says they want to achieve the American dream, there's a clear divide when it comes to immigration.

Fields

So hatred, I guess that's what we should be trying to actually figure out. 

Danielle Brown

 So we are two minutes over time. On that note, I think we also have something we need to talk about—the intersectional identity issues connected with Kamala Harris that need to be included. The gendered issues in patriarchy have to be assessed in some way in the future. I think the intersection of those two—she's not just a woman, she's a Black woman, which is uniquely different—should be discussed in the future, in addition to how all of this plays out and makes people violent.

Like, when does it make you decide you're going to go get your pistol out? I know, you know. I think these are really quick questions, so I'll let someone else wrap this up. Thank you.

Len Apcar

Thank you, all. That concludes our day, and I appreciate all of you who came and participated. I'm really grateful for that, and I appreciate all your candor, energy, and thoughts. I think it was hugely valuable and constructive. I don't know where this leads, but again, this was a huge undertaking for LSU, and I want to encourage, and do everything I can to encourage those scholars, journalists, and reporters who are among us today to write about this, because I think the more some of these issues are aired, the better— sunshine, transparency -- and all things we talked about.

You've all been talkative and helpful. I want to thank our friends from NORC;  Jenny, Marjorie, Tom and Jordan. Thank you. And to Claire, also of NORC who's not here. They were all very helpful in a long, long odyssey to get this done. So, with that, thanks to the University of Chicago's D.C. facility, there is a free lunch, but only if you go forth and write about it.

Follow-Up Coverage

The Misinformation About Fake News

John Maxwell Hamilton, Real Clear Politics

Inside the Cynicism That Shaped the American Election

NORC 

Does Anyone Trust the Government?

Serge Schmemann, The New York Times

Americans Are Moody, and Pollsters Should Pay Attention

Jennifer Benz, Scientific American

WRKF-FM’s “Talk Louisiana” Interview with Len Apcar.