The Kicker

In the five days since Russia declared war on Ukraine, invading troops have drawn ever closer and their attacks have grown more deadly. Domestic and foreign reporters on the ground are struggling to determine how much danger is too much, and where they can most effectively cover the conflict. On this week’s Kicker, NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley and Igor Kossov, a journalist at The Kiev Independent, spea...

While Sarah Palin may have lost her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, the legal climate for journalists nevertheless seems to be getting worse. Stuart Karle is a media lawyer who has served as chief operating officer of Reuters News and as general counsel of The Wall Street Journal. On this week’s Kicker, he and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the Palin case and why pr...

The Biden administration on Friday warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen within days, and again advised Americans to leave Ukraine “now.” The advice is strangely at odds with what day-to-day life feels like in the country. How do Putin and Biden’s age—and Cold War experience—shape the current crisis? Eleanor Beardsley, Paris correspondent for NPR, recently traveled to Ukraine. On...

As last summer’s efforts to aid evacuations from Afghanistan grew desperate, media debated who was to blame for the crisis. In his landmark piece “The Betrayal” for the Atlantic, George Packer reframes how to think about te fall of Kabul. On this week’s Kicker, Packer joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the impact of Biden’s experience with Vietnam, and how the media should ap...

Typical disaster journalism follows a transactional track. Survivors give the press their stories to package and sell. In turn, the media validates the horror and solicits aid. But when Tonga faced a volcanic eruption and tsunami earlier this month, the island nation neither wanted nor needed Western coverage. In fact, our intrusion presented more of a threat than the crisis itself. On this week’s...

Despite Ukraine’s efforts to downplay the threat, hybrid warfare between Russia and the west has already begun. Christo Grozev is the lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, focusing on security threats, extraterritorial clandestine operations, and the weaponization of information. On this week’s Kicker, he and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss how the press should cover a conflict...

Education reporters cover one of the most emotional facets of the Covid-19 pandemic. The political obsession with keeping public schools open during the latest Covid-19 surge does not match the desires of parents. In fact a recent poll shows that the less income a child’s household has, the more caution the parents express about in-person schooling. On this week’s Kicker, Tracy Swartz, who covers...

The Ghislaine Maxwell trial has highlighted the court system’s bullying of sexual assault victims—those who take the stand, those who come to bear witness, and even those who sit on the jury. On this week’s Kicker, Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter with the Miami Herald whose work led to Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s arrests, and Lucia Osborne-Crowley, a lawyer and a reporter for Law360 wh...

Journalists on Twitter are faced with an impossible task, a choice between building their following or avoiding harassment. More often than not, they face those risks without the support of their editors and newsrooms. On this week’s Kicker, Jacob L. Nelson, an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and Kyle Pope, editor...

As Ian Urbina’s investigative work uncovered human rights abuses and climate destruction across the world’s oceans, he realized he needed to diversify his audience—beyond even the reach of legacy outlets like the New York Times. On this week’s Kicker, Urbina and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss this week’s story on Libya’s migrant prisons, and the journalism model Urbina built to ch...

On this week’s Kicker, Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist, and Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about media accountability and where press discussion of the Steele dossier fell short.

Most reporters in the developing world can’t afford to attend high stakes climate conferences like the COP26 held in Glasgow this month. Neither can most climate activists. What is lost? Jon Allsop, author of CJR’s newsletter “The Media Today,” spent the past week at COP26. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with two conference attendees, Disha Shetty, a public health journalist from India, and M...

As journalists struggle to cover the latest revelations in the Facebook story, they also endeavor to write stories that land with the general public. How much context is sacrificed for the sensation of something new? On this week’s Kicker, Renee DiResta, who is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and an ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic, and Mathew Ingram,...

The network of websites that pose as local news outlets but aren’t has grown exponentially in the run up to next year’s midterm elections. Who funds the sites, and how can we track them? And why are they called “pink slime”?On this week’s Kicker, Priyanjana Bengani, a senior research fellow at Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and...

This week, the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression convened. The 6-3 “super-majority” is poised to roll back decades of law. On our latest episode of the Kicker, Jay Willis, the editor in chief of Balls and Strikes, a site that launched last month promising “progressive, bullshit-free commentary” about the legal system, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They disc...

Medhi Hasan has built a global reputation on devastating interviews. Now on MSNBC and Peacock, is he a corrective to the equivocal tendencies of the American press? Jon Allsop profiled Hasan for our latest issue. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to detail how Hasan’s approach can be seen as “an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms."

Adam Piore spoke to 50 current and former staffers at the Wall Street Journal on how the paper’s editors limit subject matter and political coverage in an effort to hold on to their traditional audience. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Piore discuss his findings, the Journal’s obsession with the New York Times, and what it all means for the journalists who work t...

In his five-plus decades of photographing performative wealth and celebrity at events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, Larry Fink perfected the art of taking “candid pictures of very non-candid people.” On this week’s Kicker, Fink joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss coverage of last week’s Met Gala, how journalism can learn from his ability to capture the spa...

For CJR, Jon Allsop followed the weekend’s deluge of September 11 anniversary coverage—where it excelled, and when it lacked self-awareness. On today’s Kicker, he joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what the media got right and what it didn’t.

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousnes...

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deport...

Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. Some 50,000 well-paid jobs were gone. There was a concurrent rise in anger as the workers and their children struggled to survive with minimum-wage jobs or in the gig economy. Youngstown represents the...

There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They are Empire Slayers — why else would “Star Wars” and its fight against the Galactic Empire have such a hold on the popular imagination? In this episode, two scholars explain how, from the nation’s birth,...

Whiteness in America isn’t just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with being part of that supposed norm. And becoming white – not in terms of pigment but of social status – is a choice that nearly every immigrant or refugee group in America has had to embrace or reject....

The issue of police violence and racism is a familiar one. It’s been present in the United States since the Republic's beginnings. And the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and others cannot be understood if we do not know and comprehend that history. In this episode, we discuss race, crime, criminal justice, violence and the kind of cyclical dynamic that we have seen repeat...