Local News: helping our communities think more like neighbors and less like political adversaries
In April 2023, I had the immense pleasure of being Gather’s guest curator. I spent the month connecting more deeply with the Gather community via our vast Gather Slack channel. I was also able to take focused time to research a growing interest and design a lightning chat around local news and polarization.
A few years ago, there was a buzz in the journalism world when the study Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization was published. The consensus from the researchers was that local news was uniquely positioned to help communities address the growing issue of polarization. Her research became the foundation for April’s Lighting Chat: Local News: helping our communities think more like neighbors and less like political adversaries. This post will be a highlight of the broader research, a peek into a few case studies, and finally, specific advice from our panelists- all of whom were introduced to me by other Gather members!
My incredible guests were:
- Johanna Dunaway — Texas A&M co-authors and researcher of How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization and soon to be at Syracuse University’s Department of Political Science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
- Martín Carcasson — CSU the founder and director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation (CPD)
- Allison Shirk — Director of Digital Content and Engagement Strategy, WEHCO Media, Inc. in Chattanooga, TN, formerly the digital and engagement editor for the Chattanooga Free Press
Polarization: Why Should We Care?
Ahead of the lighting chat, I spoke with the panelists, and something each of them wanted to convey was both what and why polarization is an issue that every journalism organization can address. And while it is one of those “wicked problems,” there are concrete, actionable ways to address the divides we see in so many of our communities.
“I am one of those people that do believe that polarization is our number One issue… because I believe when we’re hyper polarized we can’t function. We can’t talk to each other. Facts don’t work. Good arguments get punished and bad arguments get rewarded.” — Martín Carcasson
For the lighting chat, we gave Martín from the Center for Public Deliberation, the opportunity to define the enormity of the problem for us. He walked us through a lightning version of his presentation The Scoop: Tools for Bridging Political Divides.
First, he says we are polarized in two different ways:
- Ideological polarization — focuses on differences between policy positions
- Affective polarization — focuses on emotional dislike and distrust of the “other”
Martín says that affective polarization concerns him the most and is increasing at alarming rates. Pew Research polled Biden and Trump supporters and asked, “If the other side wins, would it cause lasting harm to the country?” 90% of Biden supporters and 89% of Trump supporters said yes.
Martin’s research dovetails with a study from 2021 that The New York Times made accessible in A Close-Up Picture of Partisan Segregation, Among 180 Million Voters. It shows, with detailed maps, the local residential segregation of every registered voter. They found a striking pattern across the country: democrats and republicans live apart from one another — down to the neighborhood. This new data has researchers questioning how closely lifestyle preferences have become aligned with politics and how even neighbors may influence one another.
Martín wanted us to understand why some of this isn’t our fault. It’s in our nature. Below is Martín’s shortened lesson on the social psychology and brain science behind why humans are inherently primed for polarization.
- Our brains crave certainty and consistency: Once we make a decision, our brains are wired to protect that decision and defend it.
- We’re suckers for a good narrative: We are narrative creatures, in terms of story, and our favorite story is a simple good versus evil narrative.
- We’re groupish (a term coined by Jonathan Haidt): We are tribal creatures that prefer to gather with the like-minded. We’re not selfish. We’re not individualistic as a species, but we are very much designed to be in teams, making us very susceptible to polarization.
- We seek out and filter information that supports our perspective: Confirmation bias
- We don’t like tough choices: We inherently avoid value dilemmas, paradoxes, and tough choices.
You can read a more in-depth description of this work in Why Process Matters: Democracy and Human Nature.
Given these aspects of human nature, Martín says it’s easy to see how national partisan media and the siloed internet, for example, are feeding us simple us vs. them narratives. These stories help their bottom line and grab them more eyeballs, page views, and clicks. Our political system, being a two-party system with a red and blue teams, obviously triggers that same basic instinct to search for the simple story.
But Martín also says, “The good news is that humans are actually really good creative problem solvers under the right conditions.”
Why Think Locally
Johanna, of Texas A&M, weighed in on the effects of polarization on a local level. She said that those studying its effects have known for a while that it’s problematic but are now finally starting to get real evidence that those feelings of effective polarization are important at key critical moments in our individual and collective lives.
“When people are highly polarized within a town for instance, that can dictate the way they reason and make decisions about politics, including decisions about when to overthrow or toss out information or the relevance of democratic norms. We can start to believe that a violation of democratic principles is okay as long as my side wins.” — Johanna Dunaway
She gave an example: In a polarized town if a neighbor kid steals your yard sign and that kid’s family votes for the opposite party or candidate, you are more likely to think that kid should go to jail rather than a stern talking to for a minor infraction.
But she also presented a compelling argument for local news. In her 2018 book How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization when they studied communities that lost a local newspaper, they found that these communities were much more likely to vote in a straight ticket way, only choosing one party down the ballot. Unlike places that still had their local papers, this was not a trend.
She believes that one reason local news makes a big difference in polarization is that national media focus on these conflict narratives between the two major parties. In comparison, good local media tends to focus more on bread and butter or critical issues facing the immediate context of people’s lives. What will affect how well your kid is educated, how adequately you are informed about health and safety issues or knowing where to go in a health emergency? Johanna says those are the moments in which effective polarization tends to avoid coming into the conversation.
We need local media to emphasize these daily problems and the solutions to those daily issues. We need local media to remind people what they like about their neighbors and the good things about their communities. Without this kind of coverage, we are inundated with national disputes and conflicts that are sensational and evil versus good. And those are the things that spark these tendencies to be tribal, and our thinking and decision making.
Bring Your People Into Your Tribe
If you work in local news, given the state of the world, you have already alienated some people in your community. Allison Shirk from WEHCO Media, Inc. in Chattanooga, TN, whose coverage areas are southeast Tennessee, northwest Georgia, northeas Alabama. Allison said, “If you’re familiar with politics in any way, shape or form, we are Marjorie Taylor Green territory.” She explained how rancor and vitriol in their comment sections had been ramping up for years, but after the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection, Allison realized they needed to make a shift in their newsrooms and find a way to reach more conservative.
“We are going to start bleeding subscribers. We are making people mad, and we’re not sure why. But we felt like there were people who, if we could just reach them and understand how to connect with them we could figure it all out.”
— Allison Shirk
She also knew that there would be inevitable pushback from within her newsroom. Why should they pander to nut jobs? Allison’s response is in the numbers. She walked us through the presentation she also shared with her entire newsroom.
Buoyed by these numbers, and the increasing number of angry comments and phone calls, she gave her engagement team the impetus (and credit with her bosses) to reach out to those Republicans or more conservative readers and figure out what we are doing that’s just not resonating. They conducted a 6-month long survey, with one of the OG Gatherers, Joy Mayer, at Trusting News, and came away with some simple fixes to execute and, in my opinion, better journalism. Here is an excellent piece from Trusting News that details the local news survey process that Allison and her team conducted: Your audience can tell when you’re out of touch (and other insights from Reuters research on trust)
They asked:
What do you wish journalists knew about how people with your political views feel about the news?
What they heard:
We are not uneducated gun-toting hillbillies that live in mobile homes and have confederate flags. Many are business owners, middle class and Christians who are worried about the country’s direction.
And when they asked what they wanted from their news coverage, they heard:
I’d like journalists to report the NEWS without pejorative, personal opinions — without sneers, with proper titles for persons they are discussing, with both or all sides of a matter.
You sprinkle salt on a perfectly good steak.
Times Free Press’ Shifts in Coverage Based on their Survey
- Rewrite and add context to all AP stories
Original AP Story:
Republican support for the lawsuit and its call to throw out millions of votes in four battleground states was rooted in baseless claims of fraud, an extraordinary display of the party’s willingness to countermand the will of voters.
Times Free Press Rewrite:
No evidence has been found to support the president’s claims of widespread fraud, and several judges in multiple states have dismissed lawsuits by his legal team that alleged voting improprieties. Election security experts, including the government’s top election security official, also said there was no credible evidence of computer fraud in the 2020 election outcome; Trump later fired him for that statement. Attorney General William Barr also has said the Justice Department did not uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud.
- Strive to be the authoritative voice on local issues, not nation or international politics. People can get Trump’s opinion anywhere. Why would they come to us, or pay us for a subscription for that?
- Refocus the Opinion Section. For two months, they asked their opinion writers to only cover local issues, and they found people were way more engaged with the stories, and it drastically decreased comments and angry calls to the editor.
- Cover business differently. Rather than focusing on the CEO and owners of a company, they made sure they were covering the people affected by the owners and CEOs’ decisions.
- Start a Reader Advisory Board monthly coffee with the editor.
Misinformation
When discussing polarization, inevitably, the quality of information comes up. Journalists are often tasked with helping audiences distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information. But combating misinformation is often a thankless job made more difficult given what we know about human nature’s desire to seek out and filter information that supports our perspective. Johanna reiterated that in her research, she’s found that local news is again in a very advantageous position regarding mis and disinformation. She thinks on the local level, journalists are on a much more even playing field with the local leaders and party organizations. It’s easier to call out misinformation because it’s local and verifiable. On a national level, things are overblown and caricatured and removed from daily life.
10 Things Newsrooms Could Do Tomorrow To Help Depolarize Their Communities
If polarization is a topic you are interested in, PLEASE watch the full lightning chat . This post is just a small sampling of the discussion. The panelists and audience members also shared a wealth of links to more projects and research on the topic.
At the end of the panel, I asked our guests to share some actionable steps, that are short time and resource intensive, that local newsrooms can take to help heal their communities and restore trust in journalism. Here are some of their suggestions:
- There are more people in the middle than we think. Give your team time to go out and talk to those who are not right or far left.
- Put your reporter’s face next to their name. Help people connect to them as human beings and understand what they cover.
- Make a distinction between Republicans and Democrats in Congress versus republicans and democrats.
- Cover local issues in your opinion sections.
- Visually distinguish between opinion and news articles.
- Rewrite AP articles with context.
- What resources could you free up if you decided to cover national politics less?
- Have regular in-person listening events reporters and editors can meet and hear from audiences.
- Set up a Reader Advisory Board to have longer conversations about issues in the community and what your organization might do better.
- Reach out to Johanna and her team of researchers if you would like to experiment with a shift in coverage or want to survey your readers! They are free labor and want to help study your communities. But please reach out in advance so they can help design the experiment! Find her at www.johannadunaway.com
Erica Anderson, an engagement journalist and moderator at Spaceship Media and a fact checker for NPR’s StoryCorps.
She is the host and producer of The Wedge- podcast from Spaceship Media. In the first season of this six-part podcast they explore what happens when you love someone but can’t stand something they believe. It’s takes us on a journey of a mother and daughter who believe different “facts” about the Covid-19 vaccine and the pandemic.
In another life she produced commercials and films and helped start a successful crowdfunding startup that supports new and diverse voices in film and tv.
Erica was Gather’s April guest curator. She explored polarization through the lens of local journalism, public policy, and what can be learned from fields outside of journalism.
