America is tense and divided: Here is how media and innovators are addressing the problem

I have just returned from three weeks in the US. It is tense there, and people discussed the election's outcome in very dark terms across the political spectrum. Talking to friends, they expect violence if Trump is elected with one saying, without drama, that she expects civil war. Political scientists from John Hopkins University and the University of Wisconsin Madison found in 2021 that “20 percent of Republicans and 13 percent of Democrats said political violence was warranted these days, while 25 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats said threats to opposing party officials were defensible”. This is about the same level of support Catholics and Protestants had for violence during the height of “The Troubles”. My fellow Americans, we don’t want to go down this road. Once dehumanisation takes root, it is challenging to reverse.

Journalists have been concerned about restoring trust in their profession. I believe one way to do this is by carrying out projects where people restore trust in one another.

In an era of radical polarisation, tackling dehumanisation helps foster a mutual sense of good faith people have in each other. In 2023, the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) Battleground Civility Poll has been “tracking attitudes towards polarization since 2019”, and while respondents send mixed messages, 94% believe (with 72% believing so strongly) “Respect for each other is the first step in having a government that works.” And almost the same amount, 89% believe that civility is the language of respect. There is reason for hope.

Throughout my career, I have looked inside, adjacent to and outside of media for solutions to problems. Community and building relationships between media organisations and their audiences have been central to my work, and here are a few initiatives I think can support the restoration of a respectful, civil civic society.

StoryCorps: One Small Step

When I worked at Ideastream Public Media, we took part in a project that was a collaboration between StoryCorps’ One Small Step initiative and Ideastream Public Media to help foster conversations across political divisions.

The Public Spaces Incubator

As a young journalist, a major theme of my early work was using social media and community engagement strategies to engage audiences with public service media. However, digital social spaces also have an increasingly bad reputation. Almost half of Gen Z wish Tiktok had never been invented, and fully half wish the same of X. Instead of abandoning the concept of digital community, as I have written before, publishers and broadcasters have decided to reclaim them.

New Public is working with public service broadcasters including the CBC, Australia’s ABC and European PSBs ARD and RTBF on the Public Spaces Incubator. They want to re-establish direct relationships with their audiences but also experiment with and develop new digital conversational spaces. It’s exciting because they are designing prototypes for nuanced conversations and broader perspectives. For instance, one prototype Representing Perspectives … “explores including a broader spectrum of voices in conversations on different topics and inspires commenters to add their own perspectives”. Public Square View “brings new opportunities for participating in live virtual events and joining conversations to discuss them”.

Good.chat

Can an online chat with someone from the other side of the political divide help alleviate partisanship? Boldium, an innovation agency (for lack of a better description), has kicked off this project. Their team was worried about the same trends I outlined. “The number of Americans with very unfavourable opinions of the opposing party has more than doubled in the past 25 years. And about one-third of Americans believe the opposing party is threatening our nation’s well-being.” (Based on data from the Pew Research Center.)

Disclaimer: I have been so busy over the last month that I haven’t had time to test-drive this, but I’m curious. However, it will take all kinds of experiments to address the issues around polarisation, division and dehumanisation.

Weave: The Social Fabric Project

I first found out about the Weave project from Michael Skiler, the communications director for the project. I’ve known Michael since he founded the Public Insight Network at American Public media. I have long admired his work. Weave is based on the insights from Robert Putnam, who famously wrote Bowling Alone, an essay and then a book about the decline in American participation in civic, religious and political organisations. Weave draws from Putnam’s most recent book: The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. To summarise very quickly, the book tracks America’s long track from an “I” society during the Gilded Age of the 19th Century to a “We” society from the 1890s to the 1960s and then a regression back to an “I” society since then. As the Harvard Kennedy School summary says: “He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community.”

The project tries to address “the problem of broken social trust”. It was founded in 2018 by New York Times columnist David Brooks at the Aspen Institute. Brooks started the project on a listening tour “to understand how people in different communities were working to move from a culture of isolation and individualism to one of relationalism”. That produced their founding document The Relationist Manifesto.

It’s an ambitious project looking to support community-minded doers who are working to increase bridging capital where they live to solve problems. You get a sense of the who and what they support through a recently released initiative, TrustMap.

Just writing about these initiatives gives me a little more hope. Now onto to some links I’ve seen this past week.

Major media companies continue to strike AI deals with major tech companies. I highlight this one because Reuters has done a deal with Meta rather than OpenAI, which has had a string of deals with media companies in the US and Europe.

On the audience side of media businesses, there is a new imperative to build direct relationships with readers, listeners and viewers, one that is not mediated through third-party platforms. On the commercial side, this translates into reader revenue through subscriptions and memberships as well as cutting out middlemen. Bloomberg has done this, and DPG Media is yet another example.

Bluesky use is surging, and as a Bluesky and X user, I feel it and understand it. Musk’s decision-making for X is muddled by politics, which has led to poor financial performance. That drives short-term business decisions that aren’t in line with user experience, satisfaction or safety.