The Kicker

Trump told us, ahead of time, he would claim victory in the election regardless of how America voted. On this week's Kicker, Masha Gessen, a New Yorker columnist and author of "Surviving Autocracy," talks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the continuing dangers of autocracy in the US.

In 2016, Donald Trump told rally attendees that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters. Since then, disqualifying pieces of investigative journalism have glanced off without impact on him or his base. On this week’s Kicker, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, assess how the media has navigated through all of this, less than a w...

Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon have written the CJR newsletter, “The Media Today,” since its inception in the wake of the 2016 election. On this week’s Kicker, they speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what journalism should become when the torrent of Trump news is gone.

Most sexual assault coverage in America is told from the attacker’s perspective. Survivors’ physical appearance is described in detail, and the actual assault is sexualized. But in E Jean Carroll’s masterly series for The Atlantic, “I Moved on Her Very Heavily,” Trump’s survivors remain firmly in charge of their own stories, focusing their conversation on his crimes and his impact on their lives....

The president has COVID-19, but the White House has failed to provide reliable information about his condition. To fill the gap, journalists have turned to doctors. On this week’s Kicker, Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, an emergency medicine specialist and professor at NewYork-Presbyterian / Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, track how our framing can...

As a result of an aggressive disinformation campaign, about half of Republicans believe voter fraud is a major problem. Now that Trump has tested positive for COVID-19, what will the impact be on his party’s push to question the validity of the election? On this week’s Kicker, Yochai Benkler a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at H...

How did Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg view the press? And how far did the mythology we built around the “Great Dissenter” stray from reality? On this week’s Kicker, Betsy West, co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary ”RBG,” joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR to discuss what it was like to work with Ginsburg, the hagiography around her, and her legacy of optimis...

The forcible sterilizations of female detainees at an immigration detention center in Georgia comprise a new level of cruelty. But ICE health care systems are known to replicate those of American prisons, where reproduction injustice is an enduring problem. On this week’s Kicker, Tina Vasquez, a senior reporter at Prism who has covered the Georgia case, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR,...

Editor Sheila Rayam and reporter Georgie Silvarole both grew up in Rochester, New York. So did the city’s former Police Chief La'Ron Singletary and Mayor Lovely Warren. When Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle published a letter from its editorial board calling for Singletary’s resignation following a cover up of Daniel Prude’s murder, it channeled the community’s shock and pain. On this wee...

As long-time middle school principal and COVID survivor Lisa Edmiston prepares to reopen her middle school in Astoria, she has worked to manage the fear shared by her staff and students. She has also made arrangements for herself at a local funeral home. On this week’s Kicker, Edmiston, and Michael Elsen-Rooney, an education reporter for the Daily News, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher o...

On this week’s Kicker, Professor Richard R. John, a historian and author of “Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse,” speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the intersection between the Postal Service and politics. For decades, the Postal Service -- the internet of its age -- was entwined in electoral politics. That ended, but now Donald Trump has res...

Radio rallies in church parking lots, candidates in their basements, and voters stuck in hibernation. When all that’s left to cover are the talking points, how should local and national political reporters adapt? This week, the national press missed the heartland’s biggest story, a series of storms that devastated the center of the country. On this week’s Kicker, Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of...

Stephen Sackur and Interviewing Trump by Columbia Journalism Review

The uprising to abolish the police asks our country, and the press, to envision a new world. But the news business is not built to accommodate ideas that would transform society. On this week’s Kicker, three longtime writers and speakers on anti-Black racism and policing—Mychal Denzel Smith, Josie Duffy Rice, and Alex Vitale—discuss media coverage of recent protests, trace our use of the word crim...

When Nicholson Baker first fell in love with YouTube, it was for its “outpouring of human miscellany” and “first person journalism.” But when CJR asked him to write about YouTube as a purveyor of political information, he stumbled upon a different world—one that, in spite of recent algorithmic adjustments, makes radicalization a frictionless experience. On this week’s Kicker, Baker and Kyle Pope,...

On this week’s Kicker, journalist Jack Herrera and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the gaps in newsroom’s coverage of the defunding debate, and the blind spots journalists still have as a result of the lack of newsroom diversity.

Ed Yong on COVID-19 and American fatalism by Columbia Journalism Review

People with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Studies show they make up close to half of all police shooting victims. Young black men with mental illness are the most vulnerable group of all, so why won’t the press tell their stories? On this week’s Kicker, Meg Kissinger, an investigative reporter and professor of reporting on the mental health system at t...

As journalists cover the intersection of racist police riots, our president’s instability, and the coronavirus pandemic, we struggle to break the old mold of objective reporting. Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for the New York Times, recently wrote about the terrifying detachment of white police violence, the inequalities the pandemic has underlined, and how Patti LaBelle’s 1985 cover of “If You...

Police murders of Black Americans, and the resulting protests, are once more at the forefront of the news cycle. The focus constitutes an important opportunity, but journalists who don’t have a nuanced understanding of our country’s systemic, state-sponsored violence against Black people, wrongly report the latest police crimes as a symptom of the Trump regime. On this week’s Kicker, Danielle Belt...

When Adam Piore set out to profile MSNBC, he discovered a community of viewers who feel that, just by watching cable news, they are participating in our democracy. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Piore and Betsy Morais, our managing editor, to ask why cable networks abandoned their “just the news” stance to emphasize opinion and commentary, and how they w...

As COVID-19 death rates in some native communities soar, and federal care package payments to Indigenous tribes lag behind those to state and municipal governments, why does the US trail so far behind other colonizing countries in its news coverage of its first peoples? On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Hopkins, special projects editor of the Anchorage Daily News and recent recipient of the Pulitzer Pri...

Investigative journalist Giancarlo Fiorella was watching when the Associated Press reported a plot to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. What Fiorella could not believe was that, after the planned coup was revealed, Jordan Goudreau, a former green beret and sometime security guard to President Trump, decided to go through with it anyway. Equating himself to Alexander the Great,...

As tens of thousands of Americans die of COVID-19, fear and uncertainty devolve into paranoid tribalism. At our most extreme, one side believes science is sacrosanct, and the other claims the pandemic is a plot to destabilize the president. Political commentator Charlie Sykes was once at the center of the American conservative movement. Now he opposes Donald Trump and the right-wing media that ena...

The intersection of conflict, climate, and disease has never been more apparent, and neither has public need for “journalistic rigor and urgency.”On this week’s Kicker, E. Tammy Kim, a freelance reporter and essayist, and Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for The Nation, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what COVID-19 and the climate crisis reveal about the probl...