The Kicker

Ruth Margalit is an Israeli journalist living in Tel Aviv. By day, she covers the crisis there for the New Yorker. By night, her young family shelters in their building’s stairwell. On this week’s Kicker, how American framing of this week’s violence conflicts with the rest of the world’s; how Israeli military censors lost control of the narrative; and why Netanyahu’s downfall could be related to h...

Recently, Maria Bustillos had the opportunity to discuss “post truth,” press manipulation, and right-wing media lies with Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and Claire Wardle, the cofounder and director of First Draft, a nonprofit focused on addressing mis- and disinformation. Both scholars spend a lot of time in the muck with...

“Nomadland,” a film inspired by and featuring non-actor sources from journalist Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, just swept the Academy Awards. Both book and film explore the life of America’s “new nomads,” who live without traditional housing since losing their savings in the Great Recession. On this week’s Kicker, Bruder joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to dis...

A discussion on algorithmic design, data discrimination, social media manipulation, and how racism is baked in. The conversation is led by Nehal El-Hadi, a science and environmental journalist whose work explores the connections between body, place, and technology, with guests Chris Gilliard, a writer and professor whose scholarship centers on digital privacy, surveillance, and the nexus of race,...

Special Report: In 2018, David Goren, a radio producer and audio archivist, created the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map to collect the sounds of dozens of pirated broadcasts from across the borough. Pirate stations earn their name by hitching a ride on already licensed radio frequencies that typically cost commercial stations millions of dollars to acquire and set up. Nowhere in the country are th...

In 2019, in an effort to combat climate silence, CJR and The Nation, in partnership with The Guardian, founded Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaborative aimed at strengthening coverage of the climate emergency. Two years later, Covering Climate Now partners publish coverage of the climate crisis to 2 billion readers. On this week’s Kicker, Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of C...

In the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict, Mel Reeves, the editor of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, and a 30-year member of the community where George Floyd was murdered, tells Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, how he watched police and city authorities depict his home as inherently violent for the national press.

Reporters were in Minneapolis covering the trial of Derek Chauvin when news broke about the police shooting of Daunte Wright. On this week’s Kicker, Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress,” joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his work in Minneapolis over the past week, the ways reporters...

Joaquin Oliver was murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. His parents, Manuel and Patricia Oliver, recognize a pattern, both in how the US media covers mass shootings by rote, and in how Americans are able to look away once the news cycle ends. On this week’s Kicker, the Olivers, who founded Change The Ref, a nonprofit that works to raise awareness about mass shootings thro...

In August 2019, days after 32 people died in the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings, our host Kyle Pope spoke with John Temple. Temple was the editor of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News when the Columbine massacre changed America’s perception of safety forever. Temple told us about the photos he decided not to run that day in 1999, and the one he did, which confirmed a child’s death before police spoke...

In the wake of the shootings in Atlanta this week, the media has focused on the killer’s story and struggled to explain why the attacks were racist. The process has dehumanized the victims. On this week’s Kicker, Diana Lu, who writes about Asian American culture and coverage, and Kent Ono, a scholar of Media and Asian American Studies at the University of Utah, where he studies racial representati...

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, most media coverage has focused on the ongoing physical health disaster and the need to convince readers and elected officials to take action. But the coverage is also a chronic source of trauma. Now that there is some good news interspersed with the tragedy, we struggle to find a balance. Dr. Alison Holman is a health psychologist and professor at the...

Refusing to learn female reporters’ names, to speak on the record, to refrain from embarrassing comments. The Andrew Cuomo that political reporters know is entirely different from the pandemic persona during the worst moments of the coronavirus crisis. On this week’s Kicker, Josefa Velásquez, the Albany reporter for THE CITY, who has covered Cuomo for a decade, and Michael Powell, a New York Times...

Last year, Michael Tubbs was the focus of an HBO documentary, "Stockton On My Mind," that followed his experience trying to reinvent Stockton, California as the city’s first African-American mayor. Within a few months, however, with his campaign for re-election coming up, Tubbs was subjected to a targeted disinformation campaign, by a fake news website called the 209 Times. Named for the...

Burmese journalist Swe Win has survived an assasination attempt and detention by his own government. Now he leads his Yangon-based news outlet Myanmar Now from exile, and his newsroom is in hiding. On this week’s Kicker, reporter and essayist E. Tammy Kim, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speak with Swe Win about journalism under threat in Myanmar, and why he so desperately wants to ret...

On this week’s Kicker, Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018), joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss how the events of January 6th are already being misrepresented in press coverage and how reporters should be framing the ongoing threat.

GameStop, Reddit, and who hacked the system by Columbia Journalism Review

Shirish Dáte had a front row seat to the chaos of Trump’s presidency and famously asked Trump whether he regretted having lied so many times to the American people. Dáte was also in attendance at the first, radically different press briefing on inauguration day. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Dáte, HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent, discuss what needs...

In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, journalists struggled to cover the devastation in a way that resonated, much as they do with the Covid-19 pandemic today. In “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter who Revealed it to the World,” Lesley Blume tells the story of how New Yorker journalist John Hersey cracked the code. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR,...

When Trump gave the go-ahead for his mob to storm the Capitol last week, it manifested more as a media event than an organized political coup. As Trump loses power, his followers doubtless will fight harder for relevance and air time. On this week’s Kicker, Davey Alba, a New York Times technology reporter covering online disinformation and its global harms, and Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fell...

Five lost lives by Columbia Journalism Review

Lisa Edmiston, a middle school principal in Queens who is sick for the second time this year, talks to CJR Editor Kyle Pope about urgent inequities within the city’s public schools. The media has devoted its energy to the debate over whether to keep schools open. But that obscures an even bigger story that Edmiston says isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

The media’s diversity efforts have been underway for decades, but very little has changed, and diversity rhetoric often becomes dehumanizing. As new union negotiations press the issue, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Maya Binyam, a senior editor of Triple Canopy, an editor of the New Inquiry, and a lecturer in the New School’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program...

New vaccines, same story by Columbia Journalism Review

The media did better work covering Trump than in 2016, but did that reporting have any impact on the real world? On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, sits down with CJR’s public editors—Ariana Pekary for CNN, Maria Bustillos for MSNBC, Gabriel Snyder for the New York Times, and Hamilton Nolan for the Washington Post—to discuss what it would take to rebuild the influence o...