4
Media and Narrative
The fourth session of the workshop explored the relationship between the media and information ecosystem and the domains of measurement, research, science, and policy. Panelists discussed narratives, actions, and collective effort to achieve a thriving, healthy, and equitable society. The session’s discussions also touched on various barriers and challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, racial disparities, health inequities, how to enhance youth civic engagement, and how to include youth perspective (highlights provided below).
MEDIA AND NARRATIVE: DISCUSSION
Rinku Sen, the executive director of the Narrative Initiative, started the second day of the workshop by introducing the panelists and providing an overview of the day. Sen opened the discussion with a question about the preferred creative practices and tools used by the panelists in their everyday work. For example, Sen noted that she uses a whiteboard.
Adam Carr, the deputy editor for community engagement at the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, began by describing the community in which he lives; “I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’m in a 100-year-old house in a 100-year-old neighborhood, a beautiful, brutal, complex city. I found when I Google image-searched ‘Milwaukee,’ I get the Christmas card version of the city.” From Carr’s experience, he said, these Google images did not capture or have the fidelity of the lived experience of Milwaukee. Now Carr carries a heavy camera everywhere and
shares these pictures on social media and with his community. “I present them to people who live here,” Carr said. “They feel much more truthful to the reality that they understand” because oftentimes “we restrict, we limit, we dehumanize our environments . . . and then we internalize those as who we are, and I think that does a great disservice to the incredible reality to the city I live in.”
“It is really important, as a practice, to listen,” said Joshua Clark, a political participation analyst and the lead researcher for the Civic Engagement Narrative Change Project at the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Clark is part of a team that carries out qualitative research, focus groups, listening sessions, and one-on-one interviews with members of communities that are chronically underrepresented and disenfranchised. He said that it is just as important to hear the pauses and silences as to hear the things that are said.
Phil Napoli, the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy and a faculty affiliate with the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy
at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, said his practice is not necessarily a favorite but one that has been commonly ingrained into his work. It involves researching the infrastructure that produces the journalistic narrative that people engage with. In that line of work, he said, his preferred practice is comparing narratives. “I’m very fascinated by the differences we can see in the narratives that are produced around the same event or the same phenomenon,” he said. Recently, he added, this process has revealed increasingly great disparities and differences across the different types of news and information sources that people rely on, which in turn can generate a sort of frustration and sometimes anger.
Courtney Stewart, the vice president of strategic communications at the Missouri Foundation for Health, shared her preferred practice. “I find myself sitting down and getting ready to create content that I know is not new,” she said, and “one of my favorite things is to see what else is out there, to tap into my network.”
Sen asked panelists to share one definition, concept, or idea that feels central to their work and that would be important for workshop participants to take away with them. Sen began by sharing the definitions used at Narrative Initiative: “Narrative is built both through action and through communication and storytelling.” Stories often have elements, characters, a setting, and a plot. The definition of narrative includes themes and ideas communicated through stories. Consumers should consider how these stories are crafted and presented and their intent. “The point of the story comes through all the perspectives that we bring to it,” Sen said.
Clark spoke about the concept of narrative itself and its relationship to facts and data as an important takeaway. Often the term “narrative” is used as a way of calling a particular account into question or dismissing it, e.g., “that’s just the narrative.” If facts or data are deployed, then that information is considered not a “narrative” but rather “true” or “reality.” However, to interpret something as a narrative is not so much a matter of evaluating whether it is true or false. Instead, he continued, it is about noticing how the facts and data are integrated into a story selectively. “A narrative admits and enlists certain data points, certain facts, filters them in, and fits them to a particular plot structure while filtering other facts out,” Clark said.
Napoli described the idea of engagement in the media ecosystem, which has evolved with the media since the days of measuring viewership for ratings. Contemporary measures of how people engage with information and news assess exposure, such as how much time was spent on a website, how many comments were submitted, or how often an item was liked or shared on a given platform. Engagement metrics become vital feedback and have huge influence over the kind of news stories that are produced, the frames that are used. Napoli spoke about
how engagement correlates strongly with actions and factors that “cause anger, sow division, and facilitate polarization.”
Carr spoke about his experiences in the newsroom co-producing local narratives. It is important to build trust in the communities that one is reporting about, he said. “Sometimes the audience will be fed up with how much trauma, drama, crime, and conflict-defined narratives of communities of color” are reported, and often there are missing narratives and a demand for good news and good stories. Carr gave the example of the “diamond in the rough” narrative about someone who overcame their neighborhood and community to graduate. This narrative indicts the community in the process of telling this story, implying that all else around them are “rough.” Carr noted that telling complex (i.e., not simplistic) stories is slow work and requires trust.
Stewart identified convening and inviting others in conversation as an important approach, instead of simply acting alone. “So that we’re not duplicating efforts, we’re sharing resources, coordinating and getting unified . . . helps us drive change in a really significant way.”
The panel moved on to discussing how journalism and media coverage has changed over the last 5 years and how such changes have affected actual civic engagement. Napoli offered some reflections about local journalism, starting with what he identified as the greatest change, which is that there is less of it. Napoli said that because of closures of local news sources and the loss of journalism jobs, content is changing. There is less local news content about the local community and more content from elsewhere, making local papers less original. Napoli also described some consequences of the decline of local news. “We see all sorts of indicators of civic engagement drop,” he said. “When local news goes away, civic knowledge diminishes.” Stewart added that journalism is a change-making tool. Referring to the lack of local reporting, Stewart noted that “residents in Missouri could not see themselves in those stories, and therefore it was not resonating with them.” Through a valuable partnership with Kaiser, Missouri was able to establish its own journalistic infrastructure, the Kaiser Midwest Bureau (Missouri Foundation for Health, 2022). Now, Missouri journalists are able to tell the stories that were not being told. Carr said he is also experiencing a decline in local news in Milwaukee. Journalists with major papers are not embedded in schoolboard meetings, city (council) meetings, county meetings, or state government, which are the reality of community members. These local stories may not be as exciting as national stories, and the fact that they are not getting told is a challenge.
Clark spoke about national journalism. Over the past 5 years, he said, the general media coverage has largely focused on national partisan politics and how the country is deeply divided and polarized. The national news is consumed by the national partisan divide, and it may not be the
case that average Americans demand this coverage. “We also know that polarization is less about distance on policy issues and disagreement . . . and more about people’s dislike or distrust for the other side,” Clark said, adding that when “partisan voters are exposed to news about polarization or to the idea that we’re polarized, that tends to increase their animus toward those who vote the other way, those who are on the other side” (Levendusky and Malhotra, 2016). Also, he said, there is an impression of politics as being a realm of people who are fixated, “political junkies,” which can be off-putting and diminish civic engagement overall. Clark concluded by saying, “I don’t want to place all of this on journalists and the media, but I do think that there’s a lot of reason to reflect on how the idea of the public as hyper-political and partisanized gets perpetuated by media accounts, especially when we know that on a lot of significant policy issues, there is actually more agreement than might be portrayed.”
Panelists discussed ways to equip young people to discern through the torrents of lies and misinformation what is being reported. Carr provided an analogy: “The idea that you can consume so many calories that your body is obese and malnourished at the same time” also applies to the information that Americans consume. Carr continued by suggesting that “less consumption, slowing down, finding those nutrients that are locally sourced and organic, and then also exercising those muscles of dialogue” is important when consuming news when faced with a flood of misinformation.
Stewart said that society does not value the perspective of children. A lot of money is provided for research and polling efforts, but rarely are youth voices included, and their thoughts concerning topics like the Census, firearm suicide, or Medicaid expansion. Carr described attending a conference on youth attitudes and opinions. During the event, youth were lectured by well-meaning adults, and a result, they were left asking, “So what?” Carr added that in order to engage with youth, adults need to understand that it cannot be a one-way conversation or a lecture. Clark spoke about his research at the Othering and Belonging Institute where the focus is on listening to young voices of voting age (18–30 years) and exploring their views on civic engagement. In deciding whether to vote, the determining factor among youth is often that they do not feel that they follow political issues, candidates, and topics closely enough to participate, Clark said; they lack confidence in their preparedness or ability to weed through too much information. “This is the result of the denigration of these young people’s knowledge . . . their perspectives . . . their views, and their ability to exercise their voices,” he said (Clark and Araiza, 2021). It is important to ground youth in their ability to distinguish right from wrong, and in their commitment to show up for their community and speak out on behalf of that community.
Napoli said that a common phrase heard among young people is, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” It is imperative to teach young news consumers to be active seekers of news and information, not passive recipients, he said. For example, walking down the driveway to pick up a printed newspaper is more active engagement with news than what a lot of people do today—scroll on their phones. Sen added that relationships and experiences are important factors to consider in advising youth and encouraging them to increase their civic engagement.
The next topic that the panelists discussed was the idea of crafting a collective responsibility while also addressing disparate impact. Stewart says it will be important to move away from the concept that equity concerns only rural versus urban areas, or Black people versus white people and to identify relevant stories in other populations. She added that community research data is very valuable. When creating COVID-19 communication, the Missouri Foundation for Health found that it is not just minority populations that are challenged with information access, understanding, and trusting what is being put out about the COVID vaccine but that white populations are too. Carr mentioned a growing network in his community, Rural Urban Flow (Rural Urban Flow, 2019), a group that builds connections between people living in rural and those living in urban spaces through dialogue, experience, exchange, and support. Sen discussed John Powell’s targeted universalism (Powell et al., 2019), a method to design efforts to make transformative or transactional changes. For example, if the universal goal is for everyone to be healthy, then resources are allocated to each community to reach this goal, which allows for the opportunity to create programs to eliminate health inequities.
The panelists provided examples of collaboration and resources aiming to connect members of the “exhausted majority.” The exhausted majority refers in part to centrists or moderates, but it also includes people who cannot be easily politically characterized or are chronically marginalized or disconnected from civic organizations and civic infrastructure. Clark provided the reference for research conducted by More in Common (Hawkins et al., 2018). Sen spoke about the Pillars Fund, a philanthropic organization that supports initiatives designed to change the narrative around Muslims in the United States and raise the voices of Muslim people through art and media (Pillars Fund, 2022). Napoli recommended Breaking the Social Media Prism by Chris Bail, which describes online tools to use to access news and information online. Carr said the group Rural Urban Flow collaborated with their Local Voices Network1 during the pandemic through Zoom and were able to carry out useful conversations from their different venues, such as farmlands and cities,
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1https://cortico.ai/platform (accessed April 3, 2022).
about the experiences of people of color in rural spaces. Such dialogues and experiences were possible, Carr said, because the people involved learned how to slow down and listen to each other.
Stewart spoke about how well philanthropy has engaged in the public narrative in ways that are strategic and mindful of the power differentials. For example, healthy, productive conversations need to engage representatives from both philanthropy and the community. The community should also view philanthropic organizations as a resource for change and not just a bank, and philanthropies need greater coordination and dialogue with others, flexibility, and openness to thinking outside the box.
Napoli spoke about the conditions that led to today’s constraining two-party system narrative. In the past, the Fairness Doctrine of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission required broadcasters to present opposing sides of controversial issues of public importance, and historical accounts suggest that this infiltrated print journalism. During the 2016 election, Napoli said, political coverage appeared to be dictated by perceptions of who would win. However, it is not a journalist’s job to decide what is newsworthy based on expectations or predictions of the outcome of an event. Today, the decimation of the traditional economic model of journalism provides an opportunity to come up with a more nuanced and sophisticated approach for creating narratives about the political landscape and allowing for the two-party system narrative to break down.
The workshop concluded with panelists reflecting on how to radically reimagine the definition of a healthy democracy and the path to it. Clark said people need to focus on the issue of social mistrust, alienation, and disconnection from civic institutions, associations, and organizations. Carr underscored the importance of internalizing and focusing on critical connection rather than critical mass. Stewart commented that “civic engagement and building infrastructure start with building relationships, and we’re not doing that organically.” Before people can come together and coordinate to achieve common goals, she said, they need healthy acknowledgment and healing.
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