The Case for Change: How Business-as-Usual Political Reporting Threatens Democracy

Leah Dajches: If you read this headline, "Lost Children Rescued by Lone Old Woman Provided Food and Shelter," would you know I was talking about the witch in Hansel and Gretel? What about "Mysterious Stranger Aids with Demolition"? Does that sound like an accurate summary of the wolf's role in The Three Little Pigs? This type of reporting is representative of what we're too often seeing in today's news media. Such reporting defies the reality of our current political climate and can be misleading at best and dangerous at worst.

Matt Jorden: The reporting styles and strategies that served us well in the past, in a time when debate and political ads still had potential to sway voters, are falling short when it comes to conveying the depth and division in our country. By adhering to outdated conventions, media outlets are failing to call out moves toward fascism, violence, and even civil war. Columnist Will Bunch addressed the problem with business-as-usual political reporting and writing. We need to hear more from experts on authoritarian movements and fewer pollsters and political strategists. We need journalists who will talk a lot less about who's up or down and a lot more about the stakes. And he's here to talk with us today about this issue. A National Opinion columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bunch has won numerous journalism awards including a shared Pulitzer Prize. He's the author of several books, including Tear Down This Myth: The Right Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, The Backlash: Right Wing Radical, Paranoid Politics, and High Def Hucksters in the Age of Obama, and the e-book The Bern Identity: The Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream.

Leah Dajches: Hi, Will. Thanks for joining us today.

Will Bunch:: Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor.

Matt Jordan: So at the end of August, you had a piece that went viral. And in it, you said, "America is entering its most important pivotal year since 1860, and the US media is doing a terrible job explaining what is actually happening." Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by this?

Will Bunch: Yeah, so this was a piece that focused heavily on the 2024 presidential election, which already seems to be in full swing. And this has been kind of my specialty. I've been in journalism for 40 years, and the first presidential campaign I covered was way back in 1984. So, I've seen a lot of presidential campaign coverage over the years. And what's a little alarming is a lot of the norms of political journalism that existed in the 1980s, when I was a young reporter starting out, are still the same norms we have today. And not that the underlying concepts were flawed, but things have changed a lot in American politics since the 1980s and 1970s. And I don't think political journalism has really adjusted. We've seen a situation develop over the last couple decades in which one of our two political parties-- the Republican Party-- has really adopted a philosophy that is anti-democracy. And you just see numerous examples, whether it's trying to remove or impeach district attorneys and judges who are democratically elected, whether it's in extreme voting-access restrictions, a number of ways in which the party both wants to limit who can vote and rely on minority tactics to try and get its agenda accomplished. And it's not even much of an agenda it's really just preservation of traditional hierarchies in American society, such as white privilege, such as the patriarchy, which is why you see this focus on reproductive rights, for example. So that's the Republican Party. I mean, the Democratic Party, God bless them it's still in the Will Rogers, I don't belong to any organized party, I'm a Democrat mode. They certainly have their problems, but it is a party that tries to play by the old rules of democracy, that tries to accomplish its goal by actually crafting an agenda that's aimed at getting the most votes, which the Republicans have given up on. And that's the essential reality of our politics right now. And I'm just not seeing that reflected in the news coverage. There's still the same focus on trying to give equal weight to both sides. And so you'll see a situation in major mainstream news outlets-- I'll name a couple, The New York Times or The Washington Post, for example, where Donald Trump's 91 criminal indictments can end up often, on many days, getting the same weight as the impeachment effort against President Biden, which even the witnesses that the Republicans brought in to testify about, admitted that there was no evidence [LAUGHS] for the impeachment of President Biden-- or the Hunter Biden case. And look, if Hunter Biden committed some low- to mid-level crimes, which he seems to possibly have, then I think most Democrats agree that he should be prosecuted. But there's no evidence that Joe Biden was involved here. And to make it a scandal that, on many days, gets equal weight with Donald Trump's legal problems is wrong. So when I wrote that piece back in August, I was very frustrated at the coverage that was not reflecting that. And you see it. You've got this primary in the Republican Party right now. And they've had a couple debates now where seven or eight candidates participate, and Donald Trump is not one of the candidates who participates. And he doesn't really need to. And you get these seven or eight dwarfs up there, so to speak, who are really afraid to challenge or say anything negative about Trump. And it's a very unsatisfying experience. And I watch the TV pundits who come on after these events. And they're trying to make sense of it, and they can't make sense of it. And that's because the Republican Party is not a political party like some of us were taught way back when we were political-science majors in college. It's become a movement. It's a very authoritarian-oriented movement. It's a movement that has decided who its leader is. Its leader is Donald Trump. And so nothing can really shake his position as leader of that movement among the core. I mean, obviously, there are some Republicans who want to vote for somebody else than Trump. But with all these candidates running, they can't seem to get to 50%. So these are some of the realities that are happening out there that I just don't see reflected very well in the day-to-day news coverage either in newspapers or on TV or really anywhere.

Matt Jordan: So what are some of the things that you think journalists do-- and as a habit or as part of a sociological field-- that lead them to be vulnerable to the hacking of the media ecosystem that it seems like we've seen.

Will Bunch: Well, I can speak briefly from my own experience because, as I mentioned earlier, I started working in newspapers full-time in 1981. And I feel that the values that I had as a journalist at that time were very much in line with the values of almost all of my peers in which I prided myself, more than anything else, on being a balanced reporter. In fact, it was interesting because, really, most of the first three or four years after I graduated from college in my own political thoughts were, I guess, left or center-left-- not as liberal as they are now, to be honest, or not as progressive as they are now. But that was my own thoughts. But I ended up working for three or four years at the Birmingham News in Birmingham, Alabama, in a very conservative state at a time that it was the Reagan revolution. You had a lot of Moral Majority, Christian-fundamentalist, right-wing people running for office. And I remember very well at that time, I just took enormous pride in how balanced I thought my coverage of those people were. And there's one moment in particular where this guy who, in today's world, he probably wouldn't be considered that extreme. But at the time, he was considered an extreme right-wing candidate who had served a term in Congress and was running for the Senate. And I had covered his campaign, and he and he went up to me at the end, and he said, "You know, I didn't think I could get a fair deal from you," because I was from the Northeast originally. And he said, "But you were really fair to me." And for years, I bragged about that. And now, 40 years later, I look back on it, and I feel like, why wasn't I tougher [LAUGHS] on this right-wing extremist because I see these people posing a threat to democracy. And today, and I don't want to oversimplify it, but I think if there's any shift that would make a difference, it would be for journalists to not see balance or objectivity-- and when I say objectivity, I mean in the worst senses of the word-- not to see those as the best, the core, the fundamental values of journalism, but to see the fundamental value of journalism as fighting for democracy because you can't have journalism without a working democracy. And we need to do a better job of conveying that than we have been, especially now, because the next year or two is going to test democracy more than anything, I think, we could have imagined in our lifetime.

Matt Jordan: So do you think the question of balance, like saying, "Oh, I need three quotes from this side and three quotes from this side," has structured the way that political reporting is done?

Will Bunch: Yeah, I do to a great extent. And we've seen over time-- we've seen the manipulation of that process. And I think the canary in the coal mine for a lot of people was the issue of climate change because on that issue, it's an issue that screams out for something other than traditional objectivity because it's centered on science and on facts. And the whole thing about having two sides, well, you do have two sides on climate change. You have the scientists who do the research, and what is it, 97% or 99% of the world's climatologists agree that manmade greenhouse-gas pollution is raising the planetary temperature. So that's the one side. And the other side is the oil industry and this network of, for the most part, kind of pseudo think tanks that they've created to promulgate their view. And for years, they were able to get their views out there by gaming this system, but by knowing that journalists were very afraid of just totally taking the side of the science and dealing with the oil industry's response and in the proper context. And instead, it was done on one hand, on the other hand basis. But we've seen that, again, I think that was a testing ground because we've seen that, certainly, more in politics, especially at a time when, as they became more of an anti-democratic movement, so much of what the Republican Party is doing these days is, on one level or another, not based in fact. I mean, they are, in fact, on the side of the oil industry's against climate change. But the number of people who won't say that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election-- and by that, I mean right on up to the people who are running for president. I mean, if you've seen the debates, even people running for president are afraid to answer questions about whether Trump or Biden legitimately won, even though numerous recounts showed that Biden won by 7 million votes and won the Electoral College. I mean, that's just the most blatant example. But there's a lot of untruths, and-- oh, the other one I was going to mention was the Biden impeachment that we talked about earlier because you see a lot of coverage in the media about Republicans planning to have hearings on the Biden impeachment and even news analysis or looks at, well, what's the Republican strategy here? And so many of these pieces, I think, don't play up or put in proper context the most important fact, which is that there's no evidence for the impeachment of Joe Biden. I've seen news analysis that just look at the politics of this without emphasizing the fact that this is a fact-free operation. So I think those are some of the examples that we've seen of just how that system still exists and how it's failing readers. And, in a way, it's failing democracy, basically.

Leah Dajches: So I'm hoping we could talk a little bit more about objectivity. We had a podcast episode last season, and I want to share a somewhat recent quote from Christiane Amanpour. She was asked to discuss her experiences covering the humanitarian crisis. And she said, "In situations of gross violations of human rights, you cannot be neutral because then you are an accomplice." She goes on to say, "We have to be truthful, not neutral, and it applies to everything, whether you're covering Donald Trump, whether you're covering the climate crisis. Whatever you're covering, you absolutely have to be truthful, which does not mean unobjective. Objective means, cover all sides. It does not mean, come to the same judgment about all sides. And so thinking about your work and the conversations we've had so far, is this issue a larger question about objectivity? Essentially, I'm wondering, how does objectivity come into play when we think about evolving journalistic norms?

Will Bunch: Yeah, I mean, objectivity-- the word objectivity-- is central to all of this. And I think a lot of the problem for journalism is, you basically have two different definitions of objectivity. There's too many people out there who have injected this idea of balance and objectivity, that to be objective means that you don't put your finger on the scale, that you give equal weight to both sides. And I think a lot of us, and I think Christiane Amanpour, who I think is fantastic, and other people who've talked about this who say, "Well, there's a different definition of objectivity," and it's the kind of journalism where there's a couple values, like you said. One is just exhaustively trying to figure out the truth of a situation. Again, I keep going back to climate change because I think it's the most obvious example. But there's been so much research now about climate change that there is a scientific truth to some degree. And maybe future studies will alter that a little bit. But there's just a powerful consensus on the main issues around climate change, and that's truth. Or looking at some dispute over the ongoing dispute over the 2020 election, going over all the recounts. And the AP and other news organizations did that. They didn't just say, "Oh, we don't think there's any proof of fraud." They spent months crunching every possible recount and number to just definitively show there's no fraud. And that's truth. And the other thing about what I think is real, desirable, objective reporting is, you do have to talk to everybody. I mean, again, to use the climate example, you shouldn't do a major story about climate change and not talk to ExxonMobil or not-- you should definitely find out what they have to say. As a journalist, you have to use your talent and ability to put what they say in the proper context that if they give their explanation of why they think burning fossil fuels is not causing climate change, you can say that. But you should bracket it with the scientific evidence that shows that's not true. My friend Jay Rosen at NYU, who's really done so much work for decades on some of these issues around objectivity and about how political journalism works, he's talked about this idea called a truth sandwich, in which if it's necessary to cover a lie that's uttered by somebody, you basically surround it with the truth on both sides so that the casual reader doesn't read the lie first. It's like if you wrote a story that said, "ExxonMobil claims that fossil fuels don't cause climate change." And then four paragraphs later, you explain why that's totally ridiculous, well, a lot of readers might not get to the fourth paragraph. So the idea is to be really vigilant about how you frame because we just live in a world where there's just so much disinformation out there-- that there are entire political movements built around disinformation. And it's created enormous challenges for journalists-- how to cover these movements-- because they're significant, and they're important. But you don't want to have a Streisand effect, as they call it. By covering their lies that are so central to their movement, you don't want to propagate the lies.

Matt Jordan: So you gave the example of the AP doing all the work into unveiling the myth of January 6, that the election was rigged and whatnot. What do you think motivates a news organization, after they have basically created a foundation for truth, to ignore their own truth and keep-- I guess, laundering the talking points, normalizing the mythology by repeating it? What are the motivations? Are these editorial decisions to want to appear fair? What do you think is behind that?

Will Bunch: Well, the news tends to be a stampede. It's not like Silicon Valley where you have a new product, and you work on it for three years. In journalism, you report a story, and then something happens related to that story the next day. And you've got to keep going. And I think under deadline pressures, competitive pressures, probably because of downsizing-- you have a lot of reporters who are doing more stories per day or per week, at least, than they might have been in the past-- and I think my experience has been the more that you face those pressures, the easier it is to fall back on, well, I don't want to hear about this. I'll make sure that ExxonMobil side or Donald Trump's side or whatever-- I'll make sure it gets a lot of play so I don't hear about it from them. And people fall back on that, whereas in the six-month investigation of voter fraud, you have a different mindset. It's like, we want this to have impact and we want this-- whereas on a lot of daily stories, people can get lazy or sloppy. I hate to say it, but it's just human nature. And I think it's harder work to be vigilant about misinformation because you're going to get pushback. And people-- it's like, uh, I don't want to deal with the pushback. And, I mean, all the thousands of poor people right now who are trying to make sense of this situation in the Middle East know that they're going to get intense pushback for whatever they write. And it makes it hard. I mean, you're trying to deal with the atrocities that were committed by Hamas that started this. And yet, you're also somehow, if you're being fair and objective, you have to look at the human rights concerns about the response from Israel. And I know for a fact that journalists, as they write these stories, are thinking about-- the angry response they're going to get from people is on their minds as they write these stories. And sometimes, I think that can cause people to pull their punches or pull back because they don't want to get that kind of angry response, which, in the long run, is unfortunate because people aren't getting all the facts or the fair, balanced look at the Middle East. So that's currently in the news example of, I think, the problem.

Matt Jordan: Let me pose that question in a different way because you're categorized in The Philadelphia Inquirer as an editorialist, right? You have a column there. Is this a tendency in news orgs to anybody who has a perspective that would be pro-truth I guess you could say, is going to be put over in the corner with the editorialist, with the opinion people? It seems like a strange irony that if you don't have an opinion on truth, somehow you're seen as more balanced. But if you do have an opinion on truth, you're seen as merely being opinion.

Will Bunch: Yeah, and it doesn't have to be that way. I'm at The Philadelphia Inquirer now. The reason-- there's a complicated history here in Philadelphia where over a period of years, The Philadelphia Daily News, which is where I originally worked, merged with The Inquirer. And it's interesting because they need to be honest-- and I don't know if they'd be thrilled if I was talking about this in public-- if you go way back, when I started there in the '90s and into the 2000s, the two papers definitely had very different ideas about objectivity. The Daily News was a tabloid, and we were the people paper, and our longtime editor Zack Stalberg, who's now retired-- but he believed that a paper should take a stand on some issues and be out there. And The Inquirer was the total opposite. The Inquirer was, I think, the ultimate in being terrified as being seen as taking a position on issues. And also, when you have that mindset, I think you're also more susceptible to push back from different organizations. I know The Inquirer did a few critical stories in the '90s or early 2000s about the Catholic archdiocese in Philadelphia. And I know they got incredible pushback on that. And, honestly, I think they retrenched a little bit because of that pushback-- my point being that different news organizations have different values when it comes to how much you can advocate or to take a side in a news story that it doesn't have to be one size fits all. I do think a lot of the bigger, better-known news organizations like The Times or The Post have this almost medieval, how many angels can fit on the head of a pin quasi-religious views on objectivity that it's like written on a stone tablet somewhere that you have to do things a certain way. And I don't agree with that. I think good journalists can use their judgment on when you can push taking aside-- like that Christiane Amanpour quote that you read, when you see an atrocity, to go back to your desk, and try and write a cold-blooded, neutral piece. It's hard to imagine even if it's a news story.

Leah Dajches: Just a reminder, this is News Over Noise I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: We're talking with Will Bunch, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, about how business-as-usual political reporting can endanger democracy. So you've been talking a lot about how journalists have to think about the potential pushback or the response that they'll receive if their piece or the way their journalistic norms are perceived as not objective. And so I'm curious as to what the aftermath or what the reception to the piece you wrote that went viral in August on both sides-- how did people respond to it?

Will Bunch: Well, that's interesting. It was mostly very positive because I think a lot of people out there-- and when I say "people," regular folks, but also journalists as well-- have a lot of concerns about the fate of democracy and how this next election is playing out and some of the anti-democratic things that we're seeing coming from the right. And a lot of people were very positive about my piece. It was certainly amplified by some other journalists like Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. And Jake Tapper showed a quote from it on the screen on CNN, which was weird. And so I got a lot of positive feedback. I got some negative feedback. Paul Farhi from The Washington Post. He's a guy who covers media and is somebody who I really respect a lot and was like, "Why do people always blame the media for these problems?" And I understand that point. That's a point of view basically saying you're blaming the messenger, know that, yes, the political situation in the United States is terrible right now. And the media isn't causing that. It's just reflecting that. That would be the Paul Farhi point of view, and that a lot of what we know about some of the problems in America right now is because of journalism. And that's true, and I don't deny it. I've never denied that, that we know a lot of important things that we wouldn't know otherwise because of journalism. I'm not going to deny that. And a couple of other experienced mainstream journalists did criticize my piece for similar reasons, that it's not the media that's causing the problem. It's maybe, you don't like what the media is writing about, basically. So that was the pushback I got from media people. Of course, anything I write gets pushed back from the random, right-wing folks that are out there on X, formerly known as Twitter, or some of these other social-media sites. So if I wrote about the weather, I would get pushback from those folks at this point. So it wasn't really anything that different that jumped out at me than I normally get, so.

Matt Jordan: Do you ever worry about this, that one of the criticisms or the ideas that's out there is that by covering people who are bad-faith actors-- people who lie as part of strategy, people who know that if you just get a frame out there, and keep it animated, that people will adopt that-- do you worry about journalists covering bad-faith actors in a way that launders or normalizes that behavior or those ideas?

Will Bunch: Yeah, that's a fascinating question. In fact, it's funny. I do this newsletter every week. And one of the features is, I ask readers a question for them to send answers to me. And I asked about that, specifically, because there have been a couple of events with Donald Trump. This there was the CNN town hall, and then there was-- I forget what the [INAUDIBLE].

Matt Jordan: "60 Minutes."

Will Bunch: Yeah, right. I guess that was it. It was his "60 Minutes" interview. And the question is-- and he's told documented lies in both of those appearances, like all of his other appearances, and-- oh, I know. It was a "Meet the Press," actually. He was on the initial "Meet the Press" with Kristen Welker, their new host. And a lot of people said, why do you give him a forum? And my take on the Kristen Welker interview was, look, Donald Trump is overwhelmingly the front runner. And unless something radically changes that we don't expect, he's going to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. This is not going to happen, but if somebody called me up and said, "Hey, I'm giving you a chance to do a 30-minute interview with Donald Trump, yeah, I would jump at that opportunity, to be honest. And it's frustrating because I do want to see him interviewed. I want to see him being asked the toughest possible questions. And what drives me crazy is, I can't say this for a fact, but I know quite often, there's these behind-the-scenes negotiations, and there's ground rules. And there's self-policing that goes on with these interviews because there's a sense of, oh my God, if I ask this question in the first five minutes, he's going to walk off the stage, and then we'll have 25 minutes of dead time. And so people pull these punches. But the other thing, and the thing that I think drove a lot of people crazy about his appearance on "Meet the Press" with Kristen Welker was, how much fact-checking are you going to do? And the "Meet the Press," there was some fact-checking. He would talk for 10 minutes, and they would come on and do 25 seconds of a fact check, saying, actually, this wasn't true or whatever. And you guys know the old saying that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. This is exactly what they're talking about because people maybe watched five minutes where you're told 10 lies, and then and then they switched to a football game or something. And they didn't even see the fact check. But on the other hand, if you had done the kind of fact-checking that Trump probably deserves, which would have something on the bottom of the screen the whole time that every time he spoke a lie, just say, "This is a lie," in real time, that probably would be the right way to do that. But he never would have agreed to the interview.So it's a very difficult situation. And I don't think those people who say that you just shouldn't interview Trump because he's going to lie, I don't know. Maybe I'm kind of old school in that regard, but I don't agree with that. I think he's too important, and he's too powerful not to interview. But he's posed a problem for the media and how to figure out how to do it the right way. And I'm not really sure anybody's done it yet, so it's a real conundrum.

Matt Jordan: When we're thinking about pro-democracy, reporting, and there have been a lot of calls for that-- different news organizations have called for that, a lot of people who do meta news, criticism, called for that-- what would be ways of doing pro-democracy reporting, or what would be ways of framing these things that make people less susceptible and the public to authoritarian types, like the cult of personality? Is that part of it? As you were talking a second ago about the idea of having access to the front runner, that's a fertile ground for an authoritarian mindset because it's the front runner who matters, not the governance, not the policy. Is that part of the mindset? Would taking the focus off the person--

Will Bunch: Yes, yeah.

Matt Jordan: --make people less susceptible?

Will Bunch: Yeah, and I've written a little bit about this because there's this myth out there that Trump is running a policy-free campaign. It's like, oh, well, we can't really focus on policy in our coverage because he's not really talking about policy. And it's true that in his rallies, he rambles a lot, and they'll go off on tangents about bizarre topics. But if you look more deeply, there's actually a lot of policy stuff going on around what President Trump taking the oath of office on January 2025 would do. The most prominent of these is an effort that The Heritage Foundation has been working on called the 2025 Project, which is very detailed, very sweeping blueprint on how to-- in their language-- dismantle the administrative state, or as some on the right would say, take on the deep state. To me, looking at this, you're talking about ending governance as we know it, to basically gut all of the bureaucracies that all of the agencies in the federal government that we've come on to rely on for expertise. One that I focused on in the column because it's so important is the EPA because we just lived through the long, hot summer of climate change. And we saw so much powerful evidence from wildfires or floods or the smoke over this region that people weren't able to see or had breathing problems. And there are very specific plans for how they would roll back climate-change legislation-- undo various orders that might promote electric cars or might promote reduced use of fossil fuels and also just gutting the staff at the EPA, taking away their powers. And I've seen a couple stories about this, but very, very little focus. Somebody did a list the other day of some of the things that Trump has called for in terms of things he would do if he becomes president in January 2025, such as sending troops into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, such as creating tent cities for homeless people. Stephen Miller, his immigration guru, gave Axios a very detailed plan about how Trump would use the Navy to interdict drug smugglers. And there is just a lot out there about what Trump would do if he becomes the 47th president of the United States. And how much do you see this in the media? I see very little of this. That's not the only part of pro-democracy reporting, but I think that's the most important part is just what are the stakes? What are the stakes of putting a Republican government in charge of the country in 2025? And the stakes are enormous. And I think the average voter doesn't know that. And the way our politics works right now, most people's minds are made up. You're not going to change the minds of too many. There are obviously some-- the magical undecided voters. They do exist. There's not a ton of them, but they're out there. And they're important. But you're really talking-- in a country where, historically, millions of people do not vote every presidential cycle, what you're really talking about here, I think, is getting these people who are on the fringe, who maybe vote sometimes, but not every election, or some of the people who don't vote at all, but could be reached, could be persuaded to register to vote, I think those are the people that you need to reach with pro-democracy journalism saying, "You think that voting doesn't matter? Well, what if I told you some of these things would happen if Donald Trump gets elected president? Would that motivate you?" And I think some people, it would. I think the ultimate goal of pro-democracy journalism is our democracy needs to function a lot better. We need to make it easier for people to vote. And I think that is also something that would or could or should be a focus of pro-democracy journalism, which is barriers to voting or how easy does your local county or state government make it to vote or have your vote counted? And I think there's been more of that type journalism in the last four or five years than prior when there was hardly any of it. But people were just stunned by some of the things that happened in that 2000 election with Bush and Gore because nobody had been talking about it for decades. And so now, we talk about it a lot more, which is good, but I think more could be done. But I think the ultimate goal here is to have a system where everybody feels they understand the stakes, everybody wants to participate because I think when you look out there, I think the majority of Americans want the right things. I think the majority of Americans want a democracy. They definitely do not want a dictatorship under any circumstance, no matter which party it is or whatever. But the majority of people don't always vote-- the people who are more motivated. If the people who were more energized by the idea of having a strong man, some kind of "red Caesar," to use a phrase that's been circulating in the right wing think tanks, who will smite all the liberal journalists and all the liberal academics and Hollywood and all of those people, if that core minority are the people who are the most motivated to vote, they're going to win. So I think those are some of the things we're talking about when we talk about pro-democracy journalism.

Matt Jordan: I'm going to make this the last question for us, but I'm wondering if you think that the conflict-framing-- which is often a way that people talk about political reporting, that it's so-and-so guts so-and-so in a policy debate or whatnot, this kind of notion that there's this football game going on-- I wonder if there's another way of doing it that might de-emphasize the fight element and make it more about the notion of collaboration and deliberation, that if that framing of these things by pro-democracy reporters that focused on are all of our capacity-- this is me being an optimist. I also think we also don't want to be stabbing our neighbors and having civil war like the red Caesar people seem to think we should be doing-- that if one of the things isn't also getting away or stepping back from this constant conflict-framing to focus on collaboration and the things where government actually does get things done.

Will Bunch: Or just how government or how your choice of who's going to be your president or who's going to be your senator or congress person, how those choices affect your everyday life because I think the conflict-framing, to be honest, it's sports right, and so many of us-- I know myself, especially, in October with baseball and football and everything underway at the same time, I'm probably watching 60% sports now and 30% politics. But I say that because I honestly think that bleeds in to how we cover politics. Do people want to know who the winners and losers are? And you see that explicitly in a lot of political coverage, not just who won the debate-- although there's that-- but who won the day? Who won this? It's just constant. And yet, when Donald Trump gets elected president, as he was once before in 2016, and when he appoints three ultra-conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and then you're right to have an abortion is taken away from you, a lot of people out there are like, gosh, I didn't know that was going to happen because that's what happens when you don't tell people what the stakes are. There's a perfect example of how thousands, if not millions, of people-- probably millions of people's lives-- were affected because if Hillary Clinton had won that election, she would have appointed completely different people for the Supreme Court, and Roe versus Wade would not have been overturned. And now you have women in Texas and some of these other states being forced to bring pregnancies to full term where the baby is unhealthy or dying or whatever. And these are just real-world consequences of who people voted for. And they're not the things that we talk about. And I think I think for journalists, I think if you keep that in mind, that this is what we're doing it for so that people can make informed votes and know the outcome and know the stakes, then I think we can certainly do a better job. But as you know, it's easy to fall back on old routines and old tropes and the conflict. And it's a great question because the mainframe of so much of our political coverage is conflict. And certain things are, of course, set up that way, like what's going on this week in terms of who's going to be the Speaker of the House. Again, who the next Speaker is-- just to give one example-- the next speaker could be supportive of funding to support Ukraine, or they could be against it. And to me, that's a bigger consequence than the personality of the people that are running. But not too much of the coverage mentions that particular stake. So we know how to do better, and we have the tools. We're just not always doing it.

Leah Dajches: Before we let you go, Will, I'm hoping I can ask just one more question.

Will Bunch: Sure.

Leah Dajches: Something we focus on here with the podcast and the News Literacy initiative is really focusing on empowering our listeners and average Americans to consume news media in ways that's beneficial for them. And so we focus a lot of our conversation today on what's happening on the other side. How could journalistic practices and norms change for the better? What advice do you have for our listeners out there who are maybe turning away from the news because it's overwhelming, or it's, we feel like we can't do anything about it? What advice would you have for them?

Will Bunch: Well, I would tell them not to give up because we can't have a functioning democracy if people aren't informed, and it's hard. This week, in particular, with this situation in the Middle East, has been particularly frustrating because the amount of misinformation-- if you're the kind of person who goes first to social media, which in this day and age is most of us, even journalists. They're probably going to Twitter before they're going to the home page of The New York Times. But if you spend too much time on social media, you're going to be bombarded with misinformation these days. There have been so many pictures of bombings and attacks, and then an hour later, you'll see the same post, and it's got a note under it saying, actually, this happened in 2014, or this happened in Kosovo, or things like that. So that makes it so much harder for people. But just search out those trusted sources, and maybe not the obvious ones. I don't think there's any perfect news organization or one that I haven't been annoyed at sometimes. But The Guardian, for example, because I think they're not perfect, but a lot of times, I get perspectives on American stories from them that it's not a perspective that I'm seeing in The Times or The Post. And just shop around for the organizations that you trust and try and stay informed. But when you see something on social media, and you don't know who the original source is, you just have to be super skeptical right now. And a lot of good journalists fall for these because it's an instinct. You see this horrific scene, and it seems like it's really important, and you want to get it out there. And sometimes, your judgment can be clouded. Even experienced journalists tweet things, and then half hour later, they go, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I should have checked." It turns out that that wasn't real. That was a deep fake or something like that. So even experienced journalists are getting fooled by so much misinformation that's out there. But you have to believe in the importance of being informed. But you have to be smart about it. So, it's tough. It's hard work being a good citizen these days. It definitely is. But the payoff is worth it. The payoff is a better society.

Matt Jordan: Thanks so much, Will, for talking with us.

Will Bunch: Thanks so much for inviting me. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Leah Dajches: That was a really, I think, interesting conversation, very insightful, thinking about current journalistic norms and continuing to grapple with the notion of objectivity. Some takeaways that I'm really thinking about are how we, as average news consumers, can engage with content in ways that help us be informed engaged citizens in our democracy. And so I have these three takeaways that Will said, one being, be skeptical, don't forget to shop around for different news sources, and always don't give up. So I know it's really easy to want to give up or turn away when the news is overwhelming, but don't give up. Hang in there. Matt, what were some of your takeaways from today?

Matt Jordan: Well those are good things to keep in mind. I think just knowing how difficult these questions are, what would pro-democracy reporting look like? There's no answer to this. But I think what we can see from this is it's a long, ongoing conversation that has to deal with things as they emerge. There are going to be things that reporters are going to have to deal with, and which means that we're all going to also have to talk about what being pro-democracy looks like for us. That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Will Bunch, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. To learn more, visit newsovernoise.org. I'm Matt Jordan.

Leah Dajches: And I'm Leah Dajches.

Matt Jordan: Until next time, stay well and well-informed. News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.

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