How journalism is fighting the polarization it's been complicit in creating
'Journalism is not a business so much as it's a public good,' says founder of news site The Tyee
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, German journalist Maria Exner noticed that her own country was becoming more polarized.
"It was clear that a new era of a much more emotionalized, more extreme, more radical public discourse would start," Exner told IDEAS contributor Anik See.
But instead of just reporting on the issue, Exner and her online team at the news organization Die Zeit decided to experiment, to get ahead of the rising conflict. Using their skills as journalists, they started a project called Germany Talks, which put people on opposing sides of an issue together in long conversations.
"This is not a project that makes people change their mind, or that everybody is now a more liberal person after having this conversation, but maybe we pull people back from this tendency to really start to hate people who have different views," said Exner.
Pressure is building up relentlessly for us to see the collapse of the old models of journalism.- David Beers, founder of The Tyee
Most of the participants reported that they understood other person's views better, and the project has since expanded beyond Die Zeit to local, continental and international versions of dialogue across divides. Not only that, it has made journalists aware of how they do their work.
"If you allow people to elaborate on why they think for example, gay marriage is not the right thing to do, then you mostly find very understandable reasons why they think that," said Exner.
"They might come from a very religious background or they have fears on what this will make generally with how families stick together or how the role of the family in society will evolve. And all of this is not conveyed or reported on if we are doing journalism that's just saying '20 per cent of the people in Germany are absolutely against gay marriage'."
Exner is now the director of Publix, an organization in the middle of Berlin's most diverse neighbourhood. Media organizations like those involved in fact-checking, data journalism and investigative journalism will work together in this publicly accessible space to make them more visible to the immediate population, and encourage debate and help strengthen democracy.
"To be an ethical player in this world of information today means that you not only have to put resources into great reporting, but you also have to put resources into these spaces of dialogue with the audience," said Exner.
"We really need to restart a conversation between the citizens that journalism claims their work is for, and the journalists and the editorial teams who do this work."
10 sides to an issue
There are often many sides to an issue, but journalists have traditionally been taught to present 'two sides' of a story. But research done by Peter Coleman at Columbia University's Difficult Conversations Lab shows conflicts are more easily resolved when a nuanced interpretation of a subject is introduced for discussion, instead of a binary one.
"When you present two sides to an issue that has 10 sides, if you present just two sides, then people listen carefully to the side that they're most comfortable with. They process that much more deeply and they really ignore or deny the other half of the equation," said Coleman.
"And so you're really setting people up for more polarization and more division because their attitudes and their beliefs and their information is being reinforced."
But when an issue is presented with more sides, the more nuanced a discussion will be, and the less polarized the responses.
Exner thinks journalists can take a lesson from this finding.
"I think we still don't give enough time and enough consideration asking people, not just what do you think, but why do you think that? Where does that come from? What does it have to do with your fears about the future of our society?" she said.
"And all of these things would make us less prone as journalists to tell a story about how extreme views are, kind of tearing us apart."
Making space to relate to each other
The media often gets the blame for its role in polarizing issues. But an increasing number of journalists and news organizations are creating new initiatives and approaches to counter its harmful effects.
One of them is journalist Eve Pearlman, co-founder of Spaceship Media, who develops training workshops to bridge divides. In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, she and her team joined forces with a media organization to bring together female Democratic voters in the San Francisco area with female Republican voters in Alabama and have them talk about things like healthcare, religion or electoral politics.
"The women were talking about healthcare, and by and large, the women in the Bay Area supported Obamacare, and by and large, the women in Alabama didn't."
While the conversation was happening, Pearlman and her colleagues would fact-check what was being said.
"When you looked at it, because Alabama had rejected federal money, rates were rising like crazy there, while in California, the landscape was really different. So when we did the reporting, they could understand why people had different views," Pearlman said.
When people slow down, Pearlman says they have a better opportunity to see where people are coming from.
"When they see how the facts might impact people differently, it changes their ability to think about the issues and changes their ability to relate to one another."
The project was successful and many of the participants are still in touch with each other to this day.
No democracy without journalism
Media critic and professor of journalism at New York University, Jay Rosen has also started the Citizen's Agenda way of electoral reporting — something that's critical in 2024, when over half of the world's population will go to the polls.
"It doesn't start with the candidates or the race or the likelihood of Smith winning as opposed to Jones. Instead, the Citizens' Agenda Movement begins when a newsroom asks the people: what do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes?" Rosen explained.
"And you use that list to drive important questions to ask of the candidates... [and also as] a guide to where you place your investigative resources... Because once you've been able to get the candidates to discuss everything the voters said they wanted the candidates to discuss, you have done your job as a newsroom operating in a genuine democracy."
It's an approach that BC-based online news magazine The Tyee has also used in the past.
Because doing nothing is dangerous, according to David Beers, founder of The Tyee.
"Pressure is building up relentlessly for us to see the collapse of the old models of journalism clearly, to see that journalism is not a business so much as it's a public good," Beers said.
He argues we have to reimagine how we're gonna pay for this kind of journalism, democratize it "without leaving it to the worst actors,"
"You can't have one without the other. You cannot have democracy without journalism."
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
*This two-part series was produced by Anik See.
