Margaret Talev discusses the mission and vision for the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship, how distrust in election results and politicians is at an all-time high and the challenges artificial intelligence poses.
Margaret Talev can vividly recall the specific moment she knew journalism had failed to properly inform and educate a large portion of the American voting electorate.
It was Jan. 6, 2021. More than 1,000 citizens were protesting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Talev was working as managing editor at Axios, overseeing the outlet’s political coverage. During the events, one of her reporters became trapped in the chambers of the House of Representatives, while another was trapped in the Senate’s chambers.
A decorated and accomplished national political journalist, Talev prided herself on helping people understand the news, both in the short-term and big picture. Talev covered American politics and the White House for 30 years, including working the campaign trail for presidential elections in 2008, 2012 and 2016 as a White House correspondent for Bloomberg News and McClatchy Newspapers.
Talev watched the events unfold and was left wondering how thousands of her fellow citizens could stage a protest based on misinformation.
Unsure of her future in journalism, Talev wanted to focus her career efforts on the relationship between the news that was being produced and consumed by voters and how that was impacting their views on democracy and governance.
Margaret Talev
She was immediately interested in serving as the Kramer Director of the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship (IDJC), a joint effort of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Based in Washington, the institute promotes nonpartisan, evidence-based research and dialogue in the public interest, striving to create new knowledge, foster a more informed and engaged citizenry and better equip students for success.
“I cared about focusing on the governance and the information piece of this, which is, how is democracy working for people? What do people believe democracy is? And why are a segment of Americans so upset with the process that they’re willing to resort to violence or willing to believe conspiracy theories? That became the central question that I was interested in reporting on, and the chance to build an institute that would really be dedicated to looking at the connection between news and government, between journalism and politics, between how people perceive the way their country is working and the news they’re ingesting,” Talev says of the IDJC, which will formally open its headquarters in Washington later this spring.
On this “’Cuse Conversation,” Talev discusses the mission and vision for the IDJC, how distrust in election results and politicians is at an all-time high, the role citizens can play to address issues facing our democracy and the challenges artificial intelligence poses.
Check out episode 158 of the “’Cuse Conversations” podcast featuring Talev. A transcript [PDF] is also available.
We hired our research director, Johanna Dunaway, an incredible professor and political scientist who came to us from Texas A&M whose expertise is on polarization, and our senior researcher, Joshua Darr, who came to us with a political communication background from Louisiana State University.
We brought in great academic researchers who are already doing this work in their communities to highlight and learn from their work. We met with students in journalism and politics classes to understand their interest levels in democracy issues, what they’d want to see done from a program being built from the ground up and which guest lecturers they’d want to see brought in. We engaged with the advocacy and educational groups and journalists and politicians in Washington, trying to find out where there were needs that weren’t being met in the democracy space.
We launched the institute’s first class, “Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship,” a media literacy and civic engagement course. By the time our students complete this semester-long course, they’re extremely knowledgeable in trust trends across the last century in America, news consumption and who is watching what channels and reading what publications, and how those patterns impact how people look at policy. The data to why we’re such a divided country.
There are a few factors. One is the declining trust trends overall in the United States. Gallup has been measuring this since the 1970s, and almost every institution in the United States has experienced a decline in trust. That includes journalism.
Trust has also declined precipitously in terms of elected officials, Congress and the American presidency. But what does that mean? People are much more likely to trust their own member of Congress unless it’s from the opposing party. The same tends to be true for journalism. There are party differences. Republicans are much more likely to say they distrust the media than Democrats are. Independents are somewhere in the middle but a little bit closer to Democrats. Why is that? Well, part of it is because distrusting the media has become a core part of the messaging of Republican politics over the last several decades. But why do Republicans who say they distrust the media, distrust the media? Often, it’s because the media they consume are telling them to distrust the media, but the other media, not their media. People trust their own sources of news and information. It’s the other sources of news and information that they don’t trust.
The changing economy has really strained and shrunk the middle class and caused a bigger gap between the wealthiest Americans and the working-class segment of the American population. A big cross section is the decline of local news and news deserts, places where we’ve seen local news organizations either close or greatly decline in scope. Where that’s happened, we’ve seen an increase in polarization, and that’s what our two researchers, Johanna Dunaway and Joshua Darr, have been so focused on: the connection between polarization and access to news. As local news has declined, we’ve seen people become much more tribalized and much more divided. People who are tribalized are easier to misinform and easier to turn against one another.
One of the IDJC’s real hopes is, that there is a ton of philanthropic investment right now in rebuilding local news. One of the real goals of doing that is to decrease polarization and disinformation by helping people find not just a common set of facts to coalesce around, but a town square aspect too. If all you consume is national news that is about politics and the divisions in politics, you’re going to feel more divided. If you are consuming news that is about where you live, what’s going on in the schools and local businesses and volunteer opportunities, those are chances to bond with people over something that’s more day-to-day important, like coexistence.
Note: This conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.
