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John Biewen has spent more than 20 years in public radio and the last decade-plus making Scene on Radio, the twice-Peabody-nominated documentary podcast produced out of Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. Each season, he takes on a big, systemic issue with a co-host: white supremacy, patriarchy, democracy, capitalism, and the climate crisis are a few.
The latest season, “The News,” turns the show’s big-picture, systemic lens on the industry Biewen has spent his career in. With returning Co-Host and NYU Journalism Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika, the two explore the myth of the echo chamber, perceptions around bias, how news has been funded, who it was built for and what new models are needed to help good journalism survive.
Much of the season is grounded in North Carolina's Border Belt: the counties of Bladen, Columbus, Robeson and Scotland. Les High is featured sharing some of his family’s 80 year-long history running The News Reporter (including a 1953 Pulitzer shared with the Tabor City Tribune for their “successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan”); selling the paper to editor Justin Smith to keep the paper family-owned; and launching the Border Belt Independent to bring more accountability reporting to the region. Longtime local news researcher and former news executive and professor Penny Muse Abernathy takes Biewen around her hometown of Scotland County, where she retired. We hear how locals get their news, including a farmer who uses the Newsbreak app on his tractor, and get a window into what happens when newspapers like the Bladen Journal are bought up, re-sold and gutted.
While Professor Kumanyika was not available for an interview, we did get to catch up with Biewen to talk about what he learned reporting on the industry from the inside, why the Border Belt made sense as a home base and what he hopes newsrooms and local journalists take away from it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What did you learn about the news and information needs in these resource-strapped, capacity-limited counties, where there’s little to no options for local news?
John Biewen: Oh man, I learned so much. I went into the project with the kind of vague understanding that I think is pretty typical in the country — I've seen some articles referring to troubles in the local media business model, I know we've lost a lot of publications. But the depths of it… I don't think the severity of the collapse and the significance of it has really been fully transmitted or absorbed by most people.
The interview with Angelica Das, Director of the Democracy Fund, was an important element of that, to say: it's not just this surface-level loss of journalism in small towns. There's really powerful evidence that it has a great deal of effect on the civic health of these communities, on the level of civic engagement, and the way people behave in the voting booth, or don't go into the voting booth in the first place.
The other thing I learned is how many smart people are out there who are deeply aware of it and are actively working on addressing it — like NC Local, like the various national organizations and funders — people who are three steps ahead of me in recognizing the problem and trying to figure out how to address it. That part has been encouraging and inspiring. But yeah, you realize how much of a hill there is to climb.
I'm curious what specifically attracted you to the Border Belt region, versus farther east, farther west, and so forth.
John Biewen: Well, I wasn't necessarily thinking North Carolina. There was this general sense of, okay, we should ground this in one or more places with "regular people" — looking over the shoulders of people as they consume media, or as they think about media. So how do you decide where to go? One of the variables was to think in terms of interesting responses or publications that have emerged to address the problem. I was looking at things like City Bureau in Chicago — maybe we go to Chicago, then some rural place — and the Border Belt Independent came to my attention. There are initiatives like that all over the country that you could use as an anchor or a reason to go somewhere. But I think that was the initial thing that got me looking at that region — the Border Belt Independent, which of course covers the same four counties we ended up covering. That's a pretty good clue that was the initial pull.
But then you find out, okay, most of these counties are news deserts. This is a chronically economically struggling region. It's very diverse. It's a place that has gone from blue to red quite recently, at least in presidential elections. Penny Abernathy lives there, for God's sake. That was enough reason to go to this place. And the fact that it was a couple of hours' drive for me, that we weren't going to have to take a whole bunch of flights all over the place — it was like, okay, I think we can do something useful by just focusing on this one place, along with the various talking heads, experts and historians we were going to be talking to.
You said there's powerful evidence that the lack of local journalism affects the civic health of a region, especially as you were exploring the Border Belt and saw counties shift from one political persuasion to another. What is the relationship between this crisis and civic health? Is there a solution or a pathway for news media to address this dearth of civic health?
John Biewen: Well, I mean, in episodes 7 and 8, we explore some of that — episode 7 is our attempt to understand the relationship among these things kind of causally. To what extent did a set of trends in the media space contribute to a political swing in a place like that, along with, obviously, other forces at work? We are persuaded that it's a piece of the story. Sarah Nagem, the Border Belt Independent's editor, says that the fact that people have been told for decades, don't trust the mainstream media, has had an impact, in kind of amping up polarization, and in convincing some people that they could ignore what the news media is saying about their favorite president, for example. That has affected election results in a place like that. And I think that's representative of something that's happened across the country. Not by any means the only thing going on, but one piece of the puzzle.
As for how to address it… I think all of the things people are doing, that we try to bring to light in the conversation with Les High, where he's talking about this new era where news organizations trying to survive are collaborating with one another rather than fiercely competing — across mediums, across nonprofit and for-profit. The involvement of foundations and philanthropy is trying to shore up newsrooms. The extent to which states are increasingly looking to get involved, I think, is really important — beyond the sort of utopian notions we explore in episode 8.
These solutions probably need to be big, structural, and they need to involve money, and they probably need to involve the federal government. I'm very open to other ideas, but that's what feels like the shortest distance between two points.
As an engagement journalist, I'm curious about your conversations, research and reporting about how we define what counts as journalism, especially as we see a rise in people turning to influencers for information.
John Biewen: You know, I don't know that that's something I necessarily tried to systematically think about or explore. When we hear about Victor Pickard's idea for public media centers, and we talk about the fact that people who are not previously trained as journalists — that of course is always somewhat squishy anyway, right? I don't have a journalism degree. Most of the journalists I know don't. It's something you learn. I've often thought of it as almost a kind of apprenticeship.
There are absolutely real standards and best practices that one hopefully learns, and I feel like I learned those in public radio newsrooms, with the colleagues and editors surrounding me. So there is a real process to becoming a trained journalist who knows what they're doing and knows how to follow the conventions of the business. But that said — yeah, absolutely, if somebody in a community starts a website or a newsletter and decides to cover city council meetings or the school board and share information with their community, and does that in a thoughtful and responsible way, that's absolutely a useful service. That's journalism. And I'm all for it.
I think that's the flip side of some of the problems that come with the internet age and the social media age — the almost limitless accessibility for people who want to simply write or report and put it out into the world and try to find an audience for it. That's actually a wonderful thing, in my opinion. There's no certification on a piece of paper that anybody needs in order to do journalism. Your credibility is earned. It's not something you show up with an ID badge for. But that doesn't mean it's not a real thing.
The series looks at myths around the echo chamber, political bias and the concept of neutrality. What did you find around how these things impact both perceptions of the news and what information reaches people?
John Biewen: I didn't expect to spend as much time talking about the bias question as we did. But the more we looked at things, the more clear it became that this is probably the single largest issue that comes to mind when people think about their irritation with the news media. I was at a barbecue with neighbors on the 4th of July, and I mentioned I was wrapping up a season on the news media, and this person said, "oh, you mean how biased it is?" So it comes immediately to mind for a lot of people.
But then the more we looked, and you look at the history — the economic structuring of the news media, the fact that news media as big business was driven by advertising — that was related to the adoption of objectivity or neutrality. And so, to me, the fact that you have very openly biased news media in all directions on the one hand, and then people deciding they won't pay attention to what I think of as actually the most truthful, most accurate, most professionally done and rigorous news media because someone is telling them it's biased so they can ignore it — it just permeates everything.
What we try to say is that there are some real misunderstandings, some of them frankly the result of propaganda and gaslighting, but there are some deeply held misunderstandings about what bias means and what it looks like — including among professional journalists, who have adopted this idea that being unbiased means never being perceived as taking a side. So you avoid saying something that could result in someone saying you're taking a side, and as a result you don't even say what's plainly true, when the evidence is overwhelming for a conclusion, because you're bending over backward not to appear to be taking a side, when the facts are on the side of a given conclusion.
Our audience with the Hub is editors, reporters, publishers, local news funders and civic practitioners across North Carolina. What do you want them to take from this season?
John Biewen: Well, journalism is really important. That seems like a very easy thing to say, a simple idea, but I came away with a renewed appreciation for how absolutely essential good journalism is, and how tragic and unfortunate it is that we're in the state we're in with American journalism today — in all the facets we describe: the crisis of trust, the crisis in the economics of the business, to name just two huge ones. The declining number of working journalists; that's a really big deal. So that's one thing, and I hope people feel that, in case there's any doubt about the importance of our work as journalists.
If I had one big takeaway, it would probably be that we should try to move away from the conversation about what can news organizations do to do our jobs better — not that it's not a useful conversation — to a conversation about what can society as a whole, including the public sector, do to ensure that we actually have a free, accessible, functioning, democratic news media in this country. What's that gonna take?
Have ideas? Join the conversation on LinkedIn and Facebook. Listen to the “The News” and previous seasons of Scene on Radio (including one on The Wilmington Coup). John also says there may be an event in the works for later this year. We’ll keep you posted on that! |
