Ideas - PT 1: How Journalism is Fighting Against Polarization

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

The crisis in journalism has been blamed for the social and political polarization visible the world over. But newer forms of journalism may point a way out of the quagmire that the media itself has dug everyone into. IDEAS contributor Anik See explores how we got here and where we may be heading in a two-part series.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm just curious, can you explain to me why there is a carbon tax in the agreement? Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. We're the journalists. I have the freedom to ask questions if I want to, and I've just answered. I've been answering your questions. Journalism used to be a profession built on trust and authority.

The news doesn't tell the truth. Doesn't tell the truth. Doesn't tell the truth. They have no sources. They just make them up. It's fake, phony, fake. And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. Journalism is supposed to be the fourth estate of a functioning democracy. But the rise of the internet and social media over the past two decades

has meant that journalists have taken a back seat to pretty much everyone else. And as a result, civil discourse has suffered a gut punch. Across Canada, this has been a day of protest, counter-protest, and even some confrontations over sex ed and LGBTQ rights.

The result, we've heard countless times, is that we're more polarized than ever. But there may be a way through the polarization that can be found in new forms of journalism. that can be found in new forms of journalism. Within the first couple of days, having this questionnaire on the website, we had over 12,000 people registering for this project. And what was it like seeing, you know, after a couple of days, seeing that 12,000 people had reacted? Our feeling was people have been waiting for this almost. They have really been waiting for the opportunity to meet the other side.

Contributor Anique C. examines the seismic shocks to the media landscape in both North America and Europe, and the potential opening for new paths forward. It's the first of two documentaries she's prepared for our series, The New World Disorder, Part 2. And she begins by asking, how exactly did we get here? It's a good question. How did we get here? But where exactly is here?

I'll start by saying that Canadians generally agree that polarization is a problem. People tend to feel like this country is polarizing. They're seeing it in their own lives. They're experiencing their communities. They're seeing it on the news. And they're starting to get anxious about it. In 2023, investigative reporter Justin Ling charted the rise in social polarization and found that Canadians were increasingly picking one side over the other and getting angrier in the process. To the point where now partisans don't see anything in common with partisans of a different stripe.

They're seeing the ways in which this country is facing some really big problems. Yet our political system, our democracy, our media seems really incapable of mediating those conflicts in any reasonable way. Yeah, definitely. Well, conflict is, you know, such a pervasive thing. It's in all aspects of our experience. Conflict has become a daily occurrence now. And just about everything seems at an impasse.

But one man has made it his life's work to try to fix conflict by understanding it. My name is Peter Coleman. I am a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. Peter Coleman has studied conflict for nearly 30 years. In the early 2000s, he and a multidisciplinary team of political scientists, mathematicians, and physicists started labs in New York and Munich, researching the kind of polarization that we're experiencing more and more often these days. We have to understand how those things come together to create these patterns that suck us in and lead us to our own demise, despite our own good faith intentions to get out, right?

And these spaces allowed us to bring people in who had differences over moral issues that were important to them, and then study the conditions under which the conversations over those differences went well or went poorly. Peter and his colleagues called their project the Difficult Conversations Lab. the Difficult Conversations Lab. They sent out surveys on various issues and then matched the respondents with someone who had an opposing opinion. It was climate change at the time. It was abortion, hate speech versus free speech, those kinds of issues that can polarize.

Found people and then really just brought them in and had them have these conversations. And then we just wanted to kind of watch and see what happens when these conversations take place. What were the different kinds of conversations that unfolded and how would we understand those differences to get a better picture of what happens during the conflict, right? Not just before and after, but like what was distinguishing the dynamics between us emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally over time. One initial observation was no surprise. Conversations went poorly whenever someone

wasn't really listening to the other side and didn't want to hear what the other person had to say. But what's intriguing is that they found the pattern of getting stuck was tied directly to one thing above everything else. And it wasn't conflicting world views. It was how the conversation actually began. You know, the early kind of stages of these conversations really matter because what you see is if there's a lot of negativity and, you know, contempt or frustration in the first couple of minutes of the conversation, that tends to be the trajectory that they stay on.

If in those early encounters, there's a little bit more i don't know humor rapport generosity of spirit something like that if there's more of a positivity in the dynamic then even if the conflict gets tense and you know they really you know bang heads about some point that they're discussing, even if that happens, you see a more constructive conversation unfold. The most important insight that came from that was that the conversations that went well enough were what we call high complexity, which means that people felt a lot of different kinds of feelings over the process of the conversation, sometimes felt okay, sometimes got triggered or frustrated, but were able to kind of move back and forth emotionally. Their thinking, their understanding of the issue was more nuanced. It

wasn't overly simplistic right away. You know, you're wrong, I'm right. This is, you know, this is the truth. That's a lie. but they were able to sort of integrate more nuanced information, and they treated each other the way they behaved, it was a more of a balance in asking questions about the other side, as well as taking, you know, stronger advocacy positions about their take on the issue. They were able to stay in a more open and kind of learning orientation as opposed to move to certainty and contempt. People start to feel similar feelings at similar times in the conversation. And the opposite is true in the more destructive conversations. It's not that they feel opposed, they just are out of sync.

they feel opposed. They just are out of sync. The Difficult Conversations Lab then took what they'd learned in the first study and started tweaking the experiment. So the second study we did, which was in Munich, we basically took information about an issue. We would take pro-life and pro-choice if that was the issue in which they differed. And we would then present them with information beforehand. And the information could either be what we would call simple or low complexity. You know, here's the pro-life side and here's the pro-choice side. So in some ways as a simple dichotomy, right? Either or. Or we would take the same information, you know, abortion is a complicated, emotional, personal, religious, medical, you know, there's

so many dimensions to it. We would frame it by saying, this is a complex set of sub-issues, right? Different dimensions of which are important in different ways to people. different dimensions of which are important in different ways to people. And we would present the same information, but as a more kind of complicated constellation of things. And what we found was that just changing how the information was presented, not only affected people's cognitive understanding, but it also opened them up emotionally. It also opened them up behaviorally to be more curious and to ask more questions. And those conversations ended up in, you know, much more nuanced, politically sophisticated solutions. Again, people willing to continue the conversation afterwards. So the effects of these small interventions were highly significant,

which again, you know, is one thing to read, it's another thing to see in the data. So here's the thing. When it comes to how the media, especially commercial media, typically presents a story on an issue, complexity and nuance cuts against the grain of how journalists are taught to cover the news, which has conventionally been to focus on two opposing sides of a story. It's a concept that in the United States, for example, was enshrined as policy in the late 1940s. The policy was called the Fairness Doctrine and required broadcasters to feature contrasting viewpoints in order to prevent the broadcasters from editorializing or taking a political stance themselves. So they try to be fair and balanced, you know, and have two sides.

And again, that's better than one side, but it depends on how that is presented, right? And what we learn is that when you present two sides to an issue that has ten sides, right, or ten different aspects, if you present just two sides, then people listen carefully to the side that they're most comfortable with. So trying to be fair and balanced by presenting binary opposites ends up encouraging people to retreat into their already established comfort zones. 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. And this dynamic of entrenched opinion in turn feeds what's now the media's habit of pitting one provocative voice against another. And the news then becomes entertainment, or as some have called it, confruntainment. He cooperated with them.

No, he didn't. That's how he ended up. He cooperated with them. Are you kidding? Yelling at doesn't make it true. Yeah, he did. Jesse said all the time. Jesse said, no, no, no.

That tendency to try to keep an audience is also part of the business model that I think is problematic. Then informing the public takes a back seat to keeping their attention and getting their attention. And that is part of what's driving political polarization today. And that polarization has its roots, at least in Canada, with the distribution, or in fact, the lack of distribution of media ownership. One company owned pretty much all the media in this part of the world. It was called CanWest. They owned the three major papers, the major TV station. They own most of the weeklies. This part of the world was studied by scholars around the world

for having some of the most concentrated ownership of media anywhere in the world. David Beers is the founding editor of the Ta'i, an independent online news magazine in British Columbia. He cut his teeth in journalism the traditional way, by working for big-name newspapers and magazines in the U.S. his teeth in journalism the traditional way, by working for big-name newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Canada in the 1980s. Back then, media organizations like that dominated the landscape and operated as gatekeepers. The gatekeepers controlled some very large media institutions, and the regional newspapers and the regional radio stations were very powerful,

but their focus was a mass audience. They saw themselves as a large tent, and they wanted to sort of be reasonable all the time. Interesting, but reasonable. There wasn't a lot of room for extremism, for example. There wasn't a lot of room for just white-hot anger in those spaces. And you could command huge audiences. The largest audience I ever had was when I was an editor for the Sunday magazine for the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, and a million people on the weekend would read that Sunday paper in the late 80s. Well, when I started writing about journalism and critiquing the press,

it was something close to monopoly industry, where you had three major networks and it was very difficult to challenge them. One public network, PBS. Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at New York University. He began studying journalism in the mid-1980s. And then at the local level, you had newspapers that had outlasted all the other competitors during the previous century and kind of ruled as singular powers. singular powers. And the basic tools for getting news stories out to the public, whether that was broadcast or print or magazines, didn't really advance or change at all for decades. Back then, the idea of journalism as the fourth estate of keeping the government and institutional power in check reigned supreme. In the late 1980s, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished, but two-sides journalism remained the norm. Journalists were taught to present what was thought to be a balanced, neutral viewpoint. And journalism's mission was largely unchanged, to empower the public so that

citizens could make informed decisions. When you work at a newspaper in the old days, pre-internet, you can tell yourself that you're facilitating that conversation, that you're doing all that's necessary to facilitate that conversation and empower citizens. Because the medium itself, you know, printing on paper, on dead trees, is pretty one-way, as broadcast can be if you don't open the lines to listener response, right? So it was a one-way conversation. And when the internet happened, it changed everything. By the mid-1990s, when the internet started to change how audiences consumed the news, media organizations were caught flat-footed and were slow to respond. Repurposing content made for another platform was the story for a while.

And then it took a few years for people in journalism to realize that this wasn't just another way to get your news out, to get your content out there, but there was something different about the online world. Now the internet allowed a much more interactive relationship with your audience. You literally could watch them read your offerings. You could see not only which stories they preferred, you could see how deeply they would go into the story, how quickly they would become bored with the story. You could see how often they would share the story.

And they were using it to carry on the democratic conversation that they wanted to have. Especially with the emergence of blogging in and around the year 2000, where anybody could have their own little printing press, which was called a webpage or a blog post, everything written on the internet could in theory be read by anyone else on the internet. So it took a few more years for blogging to emerge as something that would have to be dealt with to this day, which is the freedom day, which is the freedom that users of the internet have to publish the way that in the past only the media could publish. And I think a lot of journalism was before the web becoming a kind of a club, a professional club. If you didn't work at one of the three news networks, if you couldn't get a job at the local newspaper, if you weren't on TV and you didn't have access to the big media, you kind of didn't exist

in the communications public square. But now that's very much changed. The powers of the press are in a way available to everybody now. And if you have something to say, there's at least a decent chance that other people will hear it. There was, I think, a couple of years when journalists really felt fascinated by all of these new voices out there in the internet. Maria Exner is a German journalist who worked for eight years as an online editor-in-chief for Die Zeit, one of Germany's largest media organizations. But they already also felt threatened because this was the beginning of the end of their gatekeeping power. Before that, really, journalists and

editorial teams were the ones who curated what got, you know, talked about in any given country. And that moment when it became possible for virtually anyone to publish a story, that's when the presumed authority of journalists began its decline. And then came the tidal wave of social media. And they started to target their audiences and deliver the data that they had on their audiences to advertising partners and pulled people's attentions into these platforms and away from other media sources. So I think just the sheer time that people might, you know, before that have spent reading newspapers or watching TV

or listening to radio. But now they spend much of this time on these social platforms. And we know what happened next. Viewership of traditional media tanked. Why go to the New York Times webpage when you could just read the news on Facebook, which was where you were anyway? And why pay for a subscription to a newspaper when there was so much free media out there? That made it necessary for journalists to begin asking some really important questions of themselves, like how do we do the news with these other actors in the picture? And what do we want to get out of social media? And how are we going to finance our newsrooms when there is so much competition? A lot of journalists kind of thought of advertising revenues as something that they owned or should own or should be theirs. And now they don't control the revenue stream internet and so they can send your message to the

people most open to it in a very effective way then that has led to a major business crisis in the news industry la times announcing massive layoffs today cutting the jobs of at least 115 employees. It's the largest workforce reduction in the paper's 142-year history. BCE, the parent company of Bell Media, which owns CTV News, announced massive layoffs, 4,800 jobs. CTV's Heather Wright reports. They are the largest layoffs in nearly 30 years. Bell announcing today it is slashing about 9% of its workforce. BCE called the cuts difficult but necessary. I think journalism has, since the digital revolution started, been too slow in responding and is kind of in the position to always be the one to have to catch up with what technology is laying before them.

In what now seems like a never-ending scramble to survive, traditional news media has to report the news with a lot less money and simultaneously compete with social media. And then within these social platforms, they would find more and more emotionalized content. Within these social platforms, they would find more and more emotionalized content. So now we're right back to the place Peter Coleman was talking about, where informing the audience has taken a backseat to keeping the audience's attention. Well-researched, impartial information by journalists has gotten less and less important within these ecosystems. And in order to still find your audience with journalistic content, you need to make it a little more spicy than probably traditionally necessary. And it's here that a conundrum arises.

Traditional media still needs to do the work of informing the public, but it has to package its content in a way that finds audiences on social media platforms. That conundrum has also led to a crisis in content, with commentary and opinion pieces assuming more and more prominence than reportage and features. It's simple to describe, but hard to escape. You need clicks to get advertising dollars, but to get the clicks, you need content that veers towards the extreme. And with the necessity to distribute journalism through social media platforms, we make our well-intended product part of an information ecosystem that produces polarizing outcomes. After another week of surging crime and anarchy across America,

President Trump tearing into Democrat-run cities and vowing to stop leftist mobs. These cities, it's like living in hell. So here we are in the age of the internet. It was supposed to connect us all. It was going to be this font of reason. But instead, on your radio and your TV and your social media feed, you have a very fractured landscape right now. This polarization that has separated us into these fierce tribes who don't want to entertain each other's ideas, don't want to hash things out. And there are people who are

anti-democratic who are using that model to further divide and undercut fact-based, good-faith journalism. You're listening to Ideas and to the first of two documentaries about the media and polarization by contributor Anik C. They're part of our series, The New World Disorder, Part 2. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldhar. Mala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make.

I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find That word news comes from the French nouvelle. It's called that because the information being conveyed is supposed to be new. But now that we're always online, chances are that when we read, watch or listen to the news, we already know what's going on.

And many of us simply scroll through headlines instead of reading an entire article. Long-form journalism has largely been replaced by tweets and social media posts or has disappeared behind paywalls. And that's also had unintended consequences. People, you know, hardly find independently and journalistically researched content if they don't pay for it in a subscription form. And so traditional well-researched journalism becomes more and more something for the richer parts of societies. And television? Fewer and fewer younger adults watch it, and they get their news from social media.

I teach journalism at a university in the Netherlands, and each year my students, and these are media students, are less and less aware of established news organizations like Al Jazeera or the BBC, let alone the names of eminent journalists and awards like the Pulitzer Prize. More than half of all U.S. adults get their news at least sometimes from social media.

But 40% also say the thing that they dislike most about social media is that it's inaccurate, that it contains unverified claims, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and unreliable sources. So what we see now are politicians doing fewer and fewer interviews and more and more posting on social media. And all that points to one big uncomfortable question. Is the idea of journalism as the fourth estate doomed to fail in a polarized online era? Or can something better arise out of it? The media landscape has changed, radically. We're now at a moment when more and more readers,

listeners, and viewers are choosing the kind of content they want to consume by clicking on stories they prefer. Whereas earlier, seems like a bygone age now, media organizations functioned as the curator. But since informing the public remains the goal, maybe now is the moment for journalism to change too. It was clear to us that this would be the federal election when right-wing populists would re-enter the German parliament.

In 2017, and with the national election looming, Maria Exner and her online magazine team at Die Zeit realized the moment they were then working in, when the sudden popularity of the extreme right meant the old ways of doing things just weren't good enough anymore. ways of doing things just weren't good enough anymore. And with them, you know, becoming this new political player, it was clear that a new era of a much more emotionalized, more extreme, more radical public discourse would start. And we felt also compelled to try to come up with some kind of reaction to that. not even thinking we have a solution but just think about what would be an adequate reaction from the point of a quite influential editorial team and it was just after the brexit referendum went in favor of the Brexit, which we, as any other European journalist, didn't expect.

And it was after the election of Donald Trump to U.S. president, which also our colleagues in the newsrooms at The New York Times and other big U.S. media didn't see coming. media didn't see coming. And we were thinking like, what would it be in the German context that we don't see at the moment? And how could we do reporting in the run-up to this election differently? It was at this time that Maria had a proverbial aha moment while reading an article in The New Yorker about the issue that defined the times, social polarization. And there was just one sentence in the story that said literally nothing else would make people change their mind but a one-on-one conversation. Because if people consume news or consume any kind of media, the way our brain works will always make us filter away the things that don't support the views that we already have, and bits of evidence and facts that will support what we already think.

And the only way to really shake up the way that this works is a one-on-one conversation. So Maria and her team started a project called Germany Talks and set up an online questionnaire asking readers if they'd be interested in meeting someone with a differing viewpoint on a polarizing topic. Such as, for example, was the abandonment of the Deutschmark and the introduction of the Euro a good development or should Germany have abandoned nuclear energy? Or should gay marriage be part of our laws in Germany? At the time, the daily readership of Die Zeit's website was between 60 and 100,000 viewers. So they expected only a few hundred people to respond to the survey.

And then within the first couple of days, having this questionnaire on the website, we had over 12,000 people registering for this project. And what was it like seeing, you know, after a couple of days, seeing that 12,000 people had reacted? Our feeling was people have been waiting for this almost. They have really been waiting for the opportunity to meet the other side. But in their everyday lives, they don't find the opportunity to do it. Maybe because, you know, they don't go to church anymore with lots of different people. Maybe because they don't have the time to talk to just somebody in the line at the bakery in the morning. I think it's all of those little things that have changed in our

everyday lives that have kind of taken away the, you know, just easy opportunities to talk to somebody you don't know and who might have, you know, just a very different opinion on something. So after gathering the data, they match people up in a kind of blind date. And then they let the participants decide on where and when to meet and for how long. The matched pairs would then report back to the paper on how it went. It worked. Despite having opposite opinions, the participants also found connections with each other.

We learned that people, if you ask them straight to the head, have very strong opinions on these topics. But when they start to talk to one another about them, they find a whole lot of middle ground. And they find a lot of things they have in common generally in their lives, lots of things where their biographies have similarities. And on these kind of personal exchanges, they always had a much easier time to accept that this other person has a very different opinion on some political topic, on some very concrete policy question, but is not generally a bad person. Having had this conversation made people be a little bit less radical in their political leanings.

And that for us was a really, this was a great outcome. But Germany Talks wasn't intended to be a miracle cure. It was also not a method to convert a person from one worldview to another. 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 that we maybe pull people back from this tendency to really start to hate people who have different views. What Germany Talks did do was offer a way for journalists to approach their storytelling differently. 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.

They might come from a very religious background, or they have fears on what this will make generally with how the role of the family in society will evolve. And all of this is not conveyed or reported on if we're doing journalism. It's just saying, oh, 20% of the people in Germany are absolutely against gay marriage. against gay marriage. 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 biography?

What does it have to do with your fears about the future of our society? And all of these things would make us less prone as journalists to tell a story about how extreme views are, you know, kind of tearing us apart. Germany Talks was so successful that they did it again in 2018 and each year up until 2023. Then journalists from other countries got interested. And very quickly we found ourselves in Zoom calls with 30, 40 colleagues from all over Europe, with people from Spain and Portugal and Scandinavian countries and Hungary and Poland. Since then, Germany Talks has become an ongoing project, and similar series around the world have been developed,

like My Country Talks and The World Talks, but also ones at the city level and in smaller communities. You could say it's a small NGO now within the newsroom of Zeit Online. Did that surprise you with the response, the international response? It showed us that many colleagues in other countries have the same feeling of responsibility about what's happening out there. Why are people getting so angry at each other? And I think most journalists feel that they have something to do with it, that their work, which is well-intended work mostly, but the way that the information ecosystem works today

and how it's distributed through social media has these polarizing effects on its audiences. And my feeling is they don't really know what to do about it because they think, well, I'm doing reporting. I'm trying to convey the truth to people. But in effect, people start to scream at each other. And I think My Country Talks is really not the solution, but it kind of showed that if you really try to experiment with things,

you might find one piece of a puzzle of a solution. At the same time that Germany Talks was getting underway, someone in the U.S. was experimenting to find her own solution to the puzzle of polarization. My name is Eve Perlman, and I'm a journalist. And I've been a journalist since the mid-90s. I founded an organization called Spaceship Media in 2016 on the heels of that presidential election. Eve Perlman started out the way many journalists do, in local news. And she practiced the traditional ideal of journalistic balance and neutrality while suppressing her own views.

But that ideal didn't really work. I always sort of felt like a fraud. I always felt like, but I do have views, but I'm not neutral. Every story I choose is because I think felt like, but I do have views, but I'm not neutral. Every story I choose is because I think it matters. And every person I interview is because I think it matters. And what I choose to quote from them comes from a whole set of ideas and values and views and knowledge. And so in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, Eve Perlman and a fellow journalist had their own moment of reckoning and started a company called Spaceship Media. It was a very weird and awful moment and really shocking. You know, I had been in the online space for a long time and I was watching it change. And from the occasional kind of cruel and dehumanizing actor to that being a dominant force. And it felt really strange and really ugly and really sad. And so Spaceship Media really was born of thinking about what we could do in an ideal world if we were uncontained by what we'd always done. And so we hatched this method,

what we came to call dialogue journalism, of doing what news has always done, which is like, oh my gosh, there's something happening. But instead of saying, okay, there's something happening and we're going to get the loudest voices and quote them, or we're going to show the goriest pictures or take the outlier examples, and we're going to slap a headline on it. But like, what could we do in those places of tension differently? And so we thought about convening conversations, bringing people together who really disagree, slowing things down, inviting them to listen, inviting them to step back. You know, all the things that we know are curative, that are helpful in interacting with other people. And we flipped the process. So we're starting with conversation versus the story in the reporter's head.

So we're starting with conversation versus the story in the reporter's head. For Eve, it was clear that the public was losing trust in journalists. Because most traditionally trained journalists were unintentionally doing the opposite of what they actually wanted to do. They weren't helping the communities in which they worked or reported. And sometimes they ended up making things worse. Right after the 2016 election, you would see these t-shirts like, trust me, I'm a journalist, like facts matter. And they always just made me want to cry because why would you? Like, that's a giant red flag, right? Like, I'm not going to trust you because you're kind of smarmy and with me, you know, that's to me is like, okay, no, I'm going to

trust you because you show up, right? Because you're real and because you're honest. So right after the election, we were like, we got to do something. And there was a lot of kind of reckoning on all sides, right? Like I was in the Bay Area and how could anyone vote for Trump? And in other parts of the country, there was very different feeling. In partnership with a news organization called Alabama Media Group, Eve decided to start a series of conversations between women on the West Coast who voted Democrat and women in Alabama who were Trump supporters.

Participants were asked four key questions. What do you think the other side thinks about you? What do you think about them? What do you want to know about them? And what do you want them to know about you? So there's four important framing questions that have kind of become magical. Because once you say, what do you think they think about you? It's a caricature, right? And the same thing is true. We carry these really negative stereotypes about other people. And so that's disarming because you're like, oh, that can't be true. All Trump supporters can't be X and all Bay Area women can't be Y. Like,

you kind of know that somewhere in your head. And so just that moment of slowing down is helpful. And then we dropped them into a Facebook group. And then we dropped them into a Facebook group. And we asked people to introduce themselves. Who are you? What brought you here? We shared back their answers about what they'd said about each other. You know, they think we're all hoops, skirt-wearing, Confederate flag-waving, pregnant, barefoot people.

And on the other side, it was like, they think we don't care about our families and only care about our careers and selfish. So we surface all that stuff. And then we begin a conversation that's not just about the issue at hand, but about all the other stuff. Once the conversation started happening, even the reporters would get involved by fact-checking what was being said and by providing context on the things being discussed.

Our model is to report into the conversation in response to the questions and issues that arise. So the women were talking about health care, and by and large, the women in the Bay Area supported Obamacare. By and large, the women in Alabama didn't. But when you looked at it, because Alabama had rejected federal money, rates were rising like crazy there.

California, the landscape was really different. So when we did the reporting, they could understand why people had different views. And you see that dynamic play out when people slow down, when they learn, when they 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 lasted one month. And after it was over, many of the participants started their own Facebook groups to continue the conversations they'd been having with their geographical and ideological counterparts. For Eve, the experience was a game changer. You know, the more you push against someone, the more they will lock down on a belief. The research is clear in that. So, you know, I think it's incumbent on all of us to keep those channels open. I can't control what someone else thinks or what someone else does, but I can control what I bring to that interaction. I can take the moment to notice my negative stereotypes, notice my dismissal of

their humanity, notice my reactivity, and to bring a different sort of thing to whatever engagement I have. You know, we have tremendous control in those ways to chart different paths in interaction. But the idea is to give people time to slow down, to think again about what they can manage, what they can control, how they can be strategic in their communications, remind people that, you know,

if you're trying to convince someone of something, having a relationship with them is a good place to start, and respecting their values and views is a good place to start, and being curious about what they know and why they do it is a good place to start. Part of the project's goal was also to put journalism and journalists under the microscope. How were they covering stories? And more to the point, could they do it better? And it's hard because journalists are many times struggling. Their entities are underfunded. There's jobs disappearing. There's a lot of pressure to get stories out and all the traditional stresses. You know, in many ways, I think it was a gift.

It's like, hey, we're going to take time to support you in talking. We're going to take time to listen to what this is like for you, what you think about this, what you struggle with. It was an experience of an offering for. And that's sort of key to what I would like to see more of in journalism, which is putting the actual people that you are doing journalism for at the center of your work. So every time I'm doing a story, who is this for? Why am I doing it? How does it help them? What is the information that is useful? What is the perspective that is valuable? It's very easy to think about your byline or your page views or your award. It's a very different kind of journalism to say, who is this for? And what does it do to advance their basic well-being

and also fundamentally their ability to participate in democracy, to be an informed citizen? So it's that shift of mindset, like we're doing this for you. Like I'm in service. That to me is a key piece of what we need a whole lot more of. of. In the 80s and 90s, journalists were sort of like self-appointed prosecutors. Their job was to finger wrongdoers and then turn the case over to government to solve, and then come around later and scold government for not solving it yet. And my sense of that was that it's a super important role for journalists to play. And there's a kind of humility to that. You know, I'm not a policymaker. I'm not an elected politician. I just find out things that are not going well and point them out. But if that's all we were providing our audiences,

then we shouldn't be surprised that over time what we were breeding was a sense of despair and a sense of not being effective as citizens. For David Beers, founding editor of the Ta'i, there is something that journalists could provide more of, a sense of empowered citizenship. You know, a feeling that one can participate in social and political institutions in a communal, ongoing way. Voting once every several years is not that. old-fashioned news media that I worked for that we talked about, that news media hasn't done a great job of providing access to those social and political institutions for citizens. Consider the labor union movement. That's a democratic institution that functions between elections.

It's an institution where people can find common cause, solidarity even. They can participate. They can do stuff. But right now, that's kind of a sealed-off, opaque world that's not much talked about in the media. There are maybe two or three labor reporters left working in Canada today. David has been a journalist for more than 40 years.

And while there's a lot to be despondent about, fake news, destructive social media algorithms, newspapers collapsing, his belief in journalism as the fourth estate remains unshakable. You know, I chose journalism because I imagined it a way to empower citizens with good information and ideas so that collectively we could make good decisions democratically. You know, that sounds a little goody-two-shoes, but that is actually why I became a journalist, is I believe in democracy and I believe in the power of an informed citizenry to chart its own better path.

So against the backdrop of a transformed media landscape, disfigured by funding cuts and defunct revenue models, where does all that leave the relationship of journalism to democracy, especially since democracy appears to be on wobbly legs? For Maria Exner, the question is anything but rhetorical. I think the role of a journalist in democracy is to literally be the fourth estate. And if we are this fourth power in a society, then our role is not only to report on what's happening, what politicians are doing, to report on what's happening, what politicians are doing,

if there is abuse of power, if people actually have access to the rights that the law grants them. But we also have a responsibility to support the democratic institutions and to be part of a movement to secure that they survive the early 21st century and it's not enough just to say for example oh public institutions are under threat this and this institution of lawmaking is under threat. Or he is a right-wing extremist party that's gaining more and more power. I think we really have to be part of a movement supporting the survival of our democratic institutions. And we cannot be impartial towards that.

It isn't an accident that journalism is in crisis. It isn't just sort of a byproduct of some random technological change. There are actors who would rather not have journalists around. Extremely wealthy tycoons, some of whom own social media platforms, are openly disparaging of journalists. Consider them in the way. Any aspiring authoritarian wants to do away with the day's institutions and replace all of their functions with their own authority. And journalism is one of those, and that's why there's such an attack on journalists these days from some quarters. Journalism should be a bulwark against that. And without journalism, I just see free reign to the propagandist. The old model of journalism, as much as we were proud of ourselves, of pointing out the flaws of our politicians and our institutions, it did help foster,

it did help grease the skids for what aspiring authoritarians are trying to achieve today, which is a complete lack of faith in our institutions and the ability of citizens to disagree with each other in good faith and work out compromise. And you can't have journalism doing its job unless it daily models good faith, participation with the citizenry in helping to peer into the future and facilitate a conversation of how we get to a better place. I'm just wondering how you see the future of journalism. We're in a period of absolute disruption that's taken a lot of people by surprise. When we started the TAI, there was no Twitter. There was no Facebook.

There was no YouTube. There were no iPhones. There was no wireless. There was no TikTok, that's for sure. You know, halfway through, there was a global depression. Two-thirds of the way through, there was COVID. So disruption, we know. It's nerve-wracking. It's frustrating. But I think the future of journalism, I'm going to have to bank on the fact that people are being tempted right now to give up on democracy, but they won't. And you cannot conduct a democracy without good faith, fact-seeking, fact-based journalism.

You can't have one without the other. You cannot have democracy without journalism. On Ideas, you've been listening to the first of two episodes by contributor Anik C. It's part of our series, The New World Disorder, Part 2. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.