Lessons for Journalists from Amanda Ripley’s Book, High Conflict
Conflict is part of democracy. But there’s a stark difference between the characteristics of healthy conflict and what’s called high conflict.
High conflict is when a conflict becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming. Often it devolves into an “us vs. them” situation: Democrats vs. Republicans, White vs. Black, urban vs. rural, etc. Many Americans are currently embroiled in high conflict.
Journalist and author Amanda Ripley wrote a practical and tactical book called High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out that I had dog-eared and profusely underlined on my desk throughout 2022.
While Ripley’s writing is not directed exclusively at the media, many lessons can help shift the practice of journalism to support a healthier democracy. This article will explore how Ripley’s ideas offer ways in which journalists can shift their traditional processes to reduce high conflict while supporting the kind of healthy conflict that can lead to community empowerment.
Media as a conflict entrepreneur
A key concept Ripley explains is that of a “conflict entrepreneur,” a person who exploits high conflict. Yet the media itself can act as a conflict entrepreneur. The business models of many commercial newsrooms and the attention economy depend on sharing information that puts people into highly charged emotional states: anger, shock, disgust, fear, righteousness, or contempt. In addition, the expansion of news from in-house platforms (e.g., their own websites, broadcast signals, printed materials) to proprietary social media platforms like Meta (Facebook), Twitter, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc., further encourages the production and sharing of content that drives emotion — and often division.
The attention economy has also shrunk many consumers’ attention spans for longer, more complex, and nuanced information. This encourages the production of more “bite-sized” journalism that’s often oversimplified at the expense of the reality of any given story of people, institutions, or forces that are in tension or conflict. Simplicity, Ripley found, is related to people becoming more certain in their beliefs, more intractable. Those emotional states become fuel for black and white thinking, dehumanization, and potential violence.
Many for-profit and nonprofit newsrooms exploit conflict for generating dramatic stories, attracting public attention and generating money (whether through advertising dollars, subscriptions, or memberships), which in turn helps the newsroom stay in business.
One way for media outlets to dilute the kind of journalism that exacerbates conflict is to practice more public-powered journalism, solutions journalism, and ensure a well-rounded information diet that includes coverage of what brings people together: arts, culture, and opportunities for civic engagement.
Binaries and standard mythology
The two-sided or “bothsidesism” framing to so many news stories creates binaries. Rarely are there two clear-cut sides in any relationship, and this approach reinforces overly simplistic and inaccurate depictions of reality. In the so-called interest of fairness, the “both sides” approach winds up creating false equivalence, providing two positions as though they have equal merit when they do not (e.g., climate change deniers and science). This leaves open exploitation opportunities for bad actors who seek to discredit accepted doctrine or to bring disinformation further into the public sphere. In turn, this reinforces a “good vs. evil” framing that runs deep in the human psyche and is the foundation of many fairy tales, stories, and mainstream entertainment media in Western culture.
Another way that journalists flatten people or issues into stereotypes is the technique of “telling:” using certain shorthand language for a person or group (e.g., “at-risk youth,” “underserved community”). These quick descriptions are useful in that they’re concise, but ultimately using them is at the expense of painting a fuller and more accurate picture.
Humiliation
Journalists are taught to hold people, particularly the powerful, to account. Yet “accountability reporting” is based on the following theory of change: exposing and humiliating a person, institution, organization, or business for wrongdoing will lead to public outrage, along with shame felt by the subject in question, which in turn will spur humiliated parties to take action and change. The hope is the ensuing change will create accountability and contribute toward some arc of justice.
While this sequence can and does play out as described above, Ripley explains in her book that humiliation is the nuclear bomb of high conflict. It should be the last resort to solving for any given tension. But for many newsrooms, their only real instrument in accountability reporting is humiliation.
Humiliation is a limited tool for accountability. People rarely react rationally or forthrightly when being humiliated. Targeting any single person, business, organization with accountability through humiliation addresses symptoms rather than the disease. The biggest issues that communities face are multifaceted, complex, and systemic, and most news outlets and journalists aren’t set up to think and report on a system level. This singling-out approach encourages the belief in bad apples (again reinforcing the “good vs. evil” frame), rather than examining the history, system design, and incentive structures that produce bad outcomes.
Paths toward “good conflict” in journalism practices and products
Speaking of systems and incentive structures, I don’t imagine that newsrooms will be able to shift toward good conflict practices without targeted, long-term interventions.
Auditing stories
Perhaps the simplest way for newsrooms to start to understand where and to what degree high conflict practices are showing up in their reporting is to do an audit. I could imagine a checklist for each story that asks the following questions:
- Are only two sides presented in this story?
- Are we using humiliation to attempt to right a wrong?
- Are we using shorthand descriptions of people that encourage stereotypes (“telling”)?
- Are we oversimplifying a complex issue and repeating a predictable narrative?
- What contribution is this story adding to public understanding of the topic?
Shamil Idress runs Search for Common Ground, an NGO that works in over 30 conflict zones worldwide. Wherever he goes, he says, people want the same three things: security, dignity, and hope. What if journalists asked themselves how each story contributes to those three universal needs?
How reporters listen
Most reporters listen to collect information, not to necessarily understand the motivations of their sources. Digging deeper to get at what Ripley calls “the understory” and what motivates people to make decisions is a huge, missed opportunity.
Reporters would do well to deploy a listening method Ripley describes in her book as “looping” or “tactical listening.”
Tactical listening is a listening style where journalists solely focus on their sources’ response to a question to understand what’s most important to them.
There are four steps of tactical listening:
1. Listen: Listen to the other person to hear what’s most important to them
2. Paraphrase: Articulate the essence of what you understood
3. Check-in: With curiosity, ask if you got it right
4. Tell me more: Dig deeper and invite the other person to explore what’s underneath the talking points
If a reporter does not ultimately understand what’s motivating their source and then goes on to produce information for the public record, then it’s likely that information will be at best, incomplete, and at worst, inaccurate. And the inaccuracies often oversimplify a narrative, which is one of the core characteristic states of high conflict.
By using tactical listening, reporters are far more likely to hit upon the understory of any given conflict and generate more accurate, nuanced accounts.
Questions to break through conflict
Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict provides the following list of questions that reporters can ask to produce more complex, nuanced stories and reduce unproductive conflict:
1. What is oversimplified about this conflict?
2. What do you want to understand about the other side?
3. What do you want the other side to understand about you?
4. What would it feel like if you woke up and this problem was solved?
5. What’s the question nobody is asking?
6. What do you want to know about this controversy that you don’t already know?
7. Where do you feel torn?
8. Tell me more.
Including these questions in interviews concerning any story with deep tension would not only change what’s being reported, but also create an opportunity within the people being interviewed to reflect more deeply, and potentially shift their mindsets and behaviors. A conversation that seeks to understand, rather than extract basic information, has the potential to create a real relationship. It can be transformational.
The magic ratio
Many newsrooms are coming to see that they have underserved, misreported on, and harmed communities that don’t hold traditional positions of power (e.g., communities of color, low socioeconomic status, undocumented, refugee, very young or very old, people with radical or fringe beliefs). Every newsroom is approaching this reckoning differently. Some are asking, “How do we get more diverse audiences?” to which I always ask, “What are you offering them of value that they have said they need?”
To answer that question, newsrooms need to establish authentic and thoughtful relationships with communities and individuals that they otherwise have not been in relationship with.
Ripley talks about a magic ratio in her book, which is “when the number of everyday positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, creating a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy.” A great ratio to aim for is five positive interactions for every one negative.
If you concede that on some level the communities that newsrooms have underserved have conflict with that newsroom — or at least are not on good terms — then how might the services and staff of a newsroom better show up for those communities?
This could look so many ways: newsrooms tabling at a community fair and offering something of value, developing deeper relationships with community leaders, mentoring, and showing up for youth, collaborating with faith groups and local support organizations, and in general reporting on topics that highlight the full richness and beauty present in any given place or group. This would go a long way toward setting new dynamics in which newsrooms don’t just show up in a community when something terrible has happened.
Another practice that can help support a better magic ratio is reporting more solutions journalism: rigorously reporting on the people and methods that are showing promise to correct for problems that communities face. And newsrooms can focus on more follow-up reporting to share how an issue was resolved.
Yet being in healthy relationships with communities is not the priority newsrooms have traditionally set. They see their jobs as reporting facts, letting the public decide what to do and hold the powerful to account.
In order to make the suggested shifts in process and priorities, newsrooms would need to decide on what they believe their role to be, who they need to serve, and what outcomes they are looking to drive (e.g., “To what end?”).
Perhaps the most fundamental challenge in making shifts toward good conflict reporting practices is in the commercial business model that many newsrooms are built upon. For news outlets that rely on advertising reach for their main revenue stream, their incentive structures reward content and headlines that are dramatic, get people’s attention, stir emotion, and stoke conflict. The 24-hour broadcast cable news takes this approach to the extreme and perpetrates the type of content that creates high conflict states.
What could be possible when applying lessons from High Conflict to journalism?
Despite the many challenges that would need surmounting, I feel inspired by the potential futures that shifting toward nuance, community relationships-strengthening, and adjusting business models can create. Below are a few examples I’ve dreamed about since reading Ripley’s book and dwelling in the possibilities.
Every newsroom has a dispute resolution center
What if newsrooms were able to create a neutral third-party space in which the people in conflict at the center of their stories had a process by which they could seek remedy and repair? Not only would this make a newsroom a more trusted and critical piece of civic infrastructure, but also would yield excellent follow-up reporting opportunities that showed how high conflict can become healthy again. In a related question, What would change if every reporter were trained in conflict mediation?
The “how I changed my mind” beat
What if every newsroom had a beat devoted to people who used to think X, but now thought Y, and showed people how it’s possible to change? Such stories would give people permission to start to lessen their grip on entrenched beliefs, and it would become acceptable to not hold a strong opinion. Stories with this arc can help people become more comfortable with nuance and more complicated narratives. There’s a growing field of study around this concept of “intellectual humility” that shows tremendous benefits.
Newsroom fines for exacerbating conflict
This is admittedly far more stick than carrot: What would a world look like with an independent judicial process that could fine a newsroom for stoking or exacerbating conflict? In this current context of limiting press freedoms for other reasons, this is likely a terrible idea that should not and could not exist. But it’s a thought experiment worth pondering. Many industries have independent bodies to regulate their effect on society or the environment. What would it look like for newsrooms to have some accountability like that, too?
Pulitzer-level prizes for stories that help resolve conflict
Rather than (or in addition to) the “stick” approach above, there could also be a “carrot” approach in which newsrooms and journalists are lauded and publicly recognized for their work in helping conflict to progress from being high conflict to healthy conflict, or even resolution. This might motivate some outside journalism to consider a job in the field.
Changing elections coverage: decency ratings for politicians
Rather than newsrooms using the horse race, competitive lens for elections, what if newsrooms prioritized a “citizens agenda” approach? This would allow the public to ask questions and suggest qualities they would like to see in candidates. Could newsrooms create a decency rating (alongside other dimensions) based on some publicly agreed-upon criteria, and give politicians a score and add those alongside their voter guides? Could this help newsrooms tip the balance of who runs and wins for office?
Radical collaborations between newsrooms at various ends of the spectrum
Could newsrooms that lean more progressive or conservative collaborate on coverage to highlight the areas in which they agree, or in which conversation is needed? It would be very exciting to see a pair like Mother Jones and The Bulwark tackling an issue from places of collective possibility. Radical collaborations, when well-facilitated, could help staff at seemingly opposing newsrooms to soften their stances, be more willing to hear one another’s ideas, and collaborate.
Reporter mission statements . . . and mission questions
Some newsrooms, like KPCC, are creating reporter mission statements so that curious news consumers can better understand goals for their work. I’d love to also see their mission questions: What curiosity is motivating their work and what life experiences have contributed to pursuing answers and solutions?
If you or your newsroom would be interested in experimenting with these concepts, reach out we’d love to collaborate!
This post originally appeared on the Kettering Foundation’s Blog. In 2022, journalist Amanda Ripley spoke to Kettering Foundation staff about her book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Kettering Foundation collaborator Jennifer Brandel was commissioned to pull out lessons from Ripley’s book.
Additional Recommended Resources:
- Amanda Ripley’s seminal essay Complicating The Narratives for The Solutions Journalism Network
- How To! Slate podcast 2-part episode “How To Talk Politics With Your Dad (Without Yelling)” This demonstration project allows listeners to witness people navigating through conflict. It’s a collaboration with Amanda Ripley, author Mónica Guzmán and Jennifer Brandel, using Brandel’s family as the subject. Listen to Part 1 and Part 2.
- A terrific companion book to High Conflict is Mónica Guzmán’s book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations In Dangerously Divided Times.
