The Kicker

Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with the smartest minds in media to discuss the roots of today's crisis in journalism, from democracy's decline to the rise of AI, and to explore the uncertain future of journalism in the digital age.  This series is brought to you by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the New School's Journalism...

This summer, Margaret Sullivan, the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, and her colleague Julie Gerstein published a series of essays in CJR exploring what a new generation of journalism ethics might look like, as the media industry evolves.  “It is conventional wisdom among journalists that while the world around us chan...

On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using riot control measures like tear gas to disperse journalists seeking to cover protests outside the Broadview ICE processing center, near Chicago.  The order was the result of a lawsuit filed earlier in the week by several Chicago news  organizations and reporters who had been injured or detained whil...

In 2017, Elle Reeve, then a correspondent for Vice News , became a household name when she reported from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—as neo-Nazis marched with burning torches and a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.  Reeve has developed an expertise on what you might call the fringe beat, covering shadowy internet groups and right-wing p...

Last week, as DC reporters were patting themselves on the back for not falling for internet falsehoods claiming that Donald Trump had secretly died, Garrett Graff wrote an essay on his blog, Doomsday Scenario , saying, “It’s time to have a serious conversation about Trump’s health.” Graff is an author and historian who’s spent more than two decades covering American politics—more recently he’s wri...

Earlier this month, Hind Hassan, a decorated documentary news reporter who has covered everything from conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine to the bizarre underworld of the global wellness industry, spoke at a graduation ceremony for students at Columbia Journalism School.  In her address , Hassan pointedly apologized for not doing more to make the job safer for the next generation—a reference...

For the past few weeks, MAGA media and conservative podcasters have been torn apart over President Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones , joins The Kicker to talk about right-wing media’s efforts to change the subject—and whether their audiences will go along with it.  Read more: *Anna Merlan on what happened the last time Trump’s team tried...

Recent weeks have not been very comfortable for the BBC. A documentary about Gaza it refused to broadcast was aired instead by a competitor, to critical acclaim. A livestream of the Glastonbury Festival turned into a political nightmare, after a performer led the crowd in a chant of “Death to the IDF”—leading the network to ditch plans for future “high risk” live shows. But Alan Rusbridger, who sp...

Last year, Branko Brkic, the founder of the Daily Maverick , a South African news outlet, left his day job to launch an advocacy campaign in defense of journalism. Called Project Kontinuum, the organization aims to sound the alarm about the global threats facing the institution of journalism—and to begin to mount a defense. In this conversation, Brkic speaks about the admittedly “bleak” picture th...

For nearly twenty years, Arwa Damon worked as a journalist covering conflict zones across the Middle East—much of it as a prominent correspondent for CNN.  But in 2015, amid the unending horrors of the Syrian civil war, Damon had enough. She left the network and founded Inara, a charity that helps provide treatment to children facing some of the most difficult medical conditions. Her new role has...

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning Iraqi journalist for The Guardian and the author of A Stranger in Your Own City (2023), a reported memoir of his life as an architect turned journalist during the American war in Iraq. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abdul-Ahad shares his journey to becoming a reporter, what he was surprised to learn about his own country, and how he approaches depicting th...

David Fahrenthold won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 reporting on how Donald Trump’s lifetime of charitable giving was largely a mirage. Nine years later, he’s still reporting on how Trumpworld’s claims about financial matters don’t always add up—this time, looking closely at the cost-cutting from DOGE for the New York Times .  But does this kind of facts-first reporting still land? With Trump do...

For more than thirty years, Phil Williams has been the steadying voice of investigative reporting at NewsChannel 5, in Nashville. His deep dives into toxic wastewater and lobbyist access to state politicians have earned him a slew of major journalism awards, including five Peabodys and five duPont-Columbia Awards. But in recent years, his most viral moments have been his unflappable encounters wit...

Last week, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the end of funding for NPR and PBS. It’s the latest attempt by conservatives to cut back on support for public media, and in particular target NPR, which they view as having a liberal bias. Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO, says that perception is deeply unfair—and notes that the vast majority of the funding for public media goes to local sta...

A few years ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent nations in the world, with gang killings taking the lives of dozens of people every week.  Nayib Bukele, elected president in 2019, changed all that—today, violence is way down. But his brute-force approach to the problem has involved mass arrests, secret deals, and forced disappearances into a harsh prison system—which is apparently the env...

Kai Ryssdal has been the host of Marketplace , a leading daily radio show and podcast about the economy, produced by American Public Media, since 2005.  He delivers the news—from the bitter latest on our 401(k)s to unexpected interviews about the modern-day resurgence of train robberies—with an affable, direct tone. And when he has something he wants listeners to know—as he did all this week, whil...

Prosecutors weren’t notified in advance, witnesses are in shock—and Watson’s family celebrates his freedom. On the day that Carlos Watson, the founder of the digital media company Ozy Media, was due to turn himself in to prison last week, to begin serving a nearly ten-year sentence for fraud and identity theft, he and his family received some unexpected good news: President Donald Trump was commut...

If you thought “DOGE” only stood for the “Department of Government Efficiency”—well, you’re not alone. The world of crypto is full of double meanings and inside jokes, making the recent arrival of these alternative currency markets—and their attendant “crypto bros”—into the seat of power in Washington all the more mystifying. Enter Molly White, a longtime crypto researcher (and skeptic) whose work...

Over the past several months, Donald Trump has mounted a series of legal attacks against the media, including a libel case against ABC, an FCC investigation into CBS, and a lawsuit accusing an Iowa pollster (and the newspaper that publishes her) of “election interference.” The sometimes far-fetched claims in these cases notwithstanding, the maneuvers are having an effect. The parent company of ABC...

In January, the Baltimore Banner released an investigation into the star kicker of the Baltimore Ravens, in which multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior during massages, dating back years. (The player denies the accusations.) It was an example of a rare kind of journalism these days: hard-hitting accountability reporting on sports. Over the past several years, numerous inves...

András Pethő is a Hungarian journalist and a cofounder of Direkt36 , an independent investigative news outlet. Over the past decade, he’s watched as the government of Viktor Orbán—the world leader whom Steve Bannon once praised as “Trump before Trump”—has systematically eroded the freedom of the press in his country, in ways that may feel familiar to Americans watching corporate news leaders succu...

Jon Allsop writes and edits The Media Today , CJR’s daily newsletter. There, he’s closely watched as the American press has struggled to respond to, and cover, the barrage of news that pours out of Donald Trump. As a frenetic new term begins, Jon joins The Kicker to share his thoughts on what the media gets wrong—and how the political press might begin to chart a new relationship with the presiden...

Natalia Antelava spent many years as a correspondent for the BBC, before starting her own media company, Coda Story , in 2016. She’s covered wars in the Middle East and the rise of authoritarianism across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. For the past year, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford, where she examined how journalism might survive in an era of AI and tech supremacy. Antelava joins The Kic...

In the finale, Carlos Watson takes the stand—and the jury reaches a verdict. “The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker , on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review . Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach 

How inflating traffic data went mainstream in digital media—and a key witness takes the stand. “The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker , on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review . Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach