The Kicker

Most reporters in the developing world can’t afford to attend high stakes climate conferences like the COP26 held in Glasgow this month. Neither can most climate activists. What is lost?Jon Allsop, author of CJR’s newsletter “The Media Today,” spent the past week at COP26. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with two conference attendees, Disha Shetty, a public health journalist from India, and Mark Hertsgaard, co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation, to discuss how global north editors dismiss important reporting from the developing world.

As journalists struggle to cover the latest revelations in the Facebook story, they also endeavor to write stories that land with the general public. How much context is sacrificed for the sensation of something new?On this week’s Kicker, Renee DiResta, who is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and an ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic, and Mathew Ingram, our chief digital writer, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how to connect the dots when the story gets this big.

The network of websites that pose as local news outlets but aren’t has grown exponentially in the run up to next year’s midterm elections. Who funds the sites, and how can we track them? And why are they called “pink slime”?On this week’s Kicker, Priyanjana Bengani, a senior research fellow at Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss her study of these op-up sites, how to find and follow them, and what the phenomenon means in the face of ever-dwindling local news.

This week, the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression convened. The 6-3 “super-majority” is poised to roll back decades of law. On our latest episode of the Kicker, Jay Willis, the editor in chief of Balls and Strikes, a site that launched last month promising “progressive, bullshit-free commentary” about the legal system, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss vital rulings that missed the news cycle, and why conservative justices have been so critical of the media.

Medhi Hasan has built a global reputation on devastating interviews. Now on MSNBC and Peacock, is he a corrective to the equivocal tendencies of the American press?Jon Allsop profiled Hasan for our latest issue. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to detail how Hasan’s approach can be seen as “an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms."

Adam Piore spoke to 50 current and former staffers at the Wall Street Journal on how the paper’s editors limit subject matter and political coverage in an effort to hold on to their traditional audience.On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Piore discuss his findings, the Journal’s obsession with the New York Times, and what it all means for the journalists who work there.

In his five-plus decades of photographing performative wealth and celebrity at events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, Larry Fink perfected the art of taking “candid pictures of very non-candid people.” On this week’s Kicker, Fink joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss coverage of last week’s Met Gala, how journalism can learn from his ability to capture the space between posed photo ops, and why now, against the backdrop of a global pandemic and extreme economic inequality, the time for risk-free activism and the fetishization of wealth is over.

For CJR, Jon Allsop followed the weekend’s deluge of September 11 anniversary coverage—where it excelled, and when it lacked self-awareness. On today’s Kicker, he joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what the media got right and what it didn’t.

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousness of what scholars call the “gender binary.” Bringing an intersectional perspective, and looking at examples from women’s sports, they invite journalists to speak truth to the power that is exercised, often violently, through an insistence on “normative” ideas of gender and sexuality. Guests: Zach Stafford & Jack Halberstam

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deported wholesale to vulnerable nations. In this episode, a scholar sheds light on the invention of the “illegal alien,” its use and manipulation for the past 140 years (and counting) to exclude and exploit people of color and more recent notions of who and who is not deserving of legal admission into the United States. Guest: Mae Ngai