The Kicker

Burmese journalist Swe Win has survived an assasination attempt and detention by his own government. Now he leads his Yangon-based news outlet Myanmar Now from exile, and his newsroom is in hiding. On this week’s Kicker, reporter and essayist E. Tammy Kim, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speak with Swe Win about journalism under threat in Myanmar, and why he so desperately wants to return despite the threat.

On this week’s Kicker, Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018), joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss how the events of January 6th are already being misrepresented in press coverage and how reporters should be framing the ongoing threat.

GameStop, Reddit, and who hacked the system by Columbia Journalism Review

Shirish Dáte had a front row seat to the chaos of Trump’s presidency and famously asked Trump whether he regretted having lied so many times to the American people. Dáte was also in attendance at the first, radically different press briefing on inauguration day. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Dáte, HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent, discuss what needs to change in the way the press corps covers a presidency, and why the destruction of the Republican party is a major political story of our time.

In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, journalists struggled to cover the devastation in a way that resonated, much as they do with the Covid-19 pandemic today. In “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter who Revealed it to the World,” Lesley Blume tells the story of how New Yorker journalist John Hersey cracked the code. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Blume discuss the problem with coverage that focuses too much on numbers, science, and policy, at a time when Covid deaths in the US continue to surge.

When Trump gave the go-ahead for his mob to storm the Capitol last week, it manifested more as a media event than an organized political coup. As Trump loses power, his followers doubtless will fight harder for relevance and air time. On this week’s Kicker, Davey Alba, a New York Times technology reporter covering online disinformation and its global harms, and Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and an adjunct professor at Portland State University, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss what journalists should look for online as Trump leaves office.

Five lost lives by Columbia Journalism Review

Lisa Edmiston, a middle school principal in Queens who is sick for the second time this year, talks to CJR Editor Kyle Pope about urgent inequities within the city’s public schools. The media has devoted its energy to the debate over whether to keep schools open. But that obscures an even bigger story that Edmiston says isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

The media’s diversity efforts have been underway for decades, but very little has changed, and diversity rhetoric often becomes dehumanizing. As new union negotiations press the issue, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Maya Binyam, a senior editor of Triple Canopy, an editor of the New Inquiry, and a lecturer in the New School’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program, and Betsy Morais, managing editor of CJR.

New vaccines, same story by Columbia Journalism Review

The media did better work covering Trump than in 2016, but did that reporting have any impact on the real world? On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, sits down with CJR’s public editors—Ariana Pekary for CNN, Maria Bustillos for MSNBC, Gabriel Snyder for the New York Times, and Hamilton Nolan for the Washington Post—to discuss what it would take to rebuild the influence of good journalism.

Trump told us, ahead of time, he would claim victory in the election regardless of how America voted. On this week's Kicker, Masha Gessen, a New Yorker columnist and author of "Surviving Autocracy," talks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the continuing dangers of autocracy in the US.

In 2016, Donald Trump told rally attendees that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters. Since then, disqualifying pieces of investigative journalism have glanced off without impact on him or his base. On this week’s Kicker, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, assess how the media has navigated through all of this, less than a week before election day.

Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon have written the CJR newsletter, “The Media Today,” since its inception in the wake of the 2016 election. On this week’s Kicker, they speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what journalism should become when the torrent of Trump news is gone.

Most sexual assault coverage in America is told from the attacker’s perspective. Survivors’ physical appearance is described in detail, and the actual assault is sexualized. But in E Jean Carroll’s masterly series for The Atlantic, “I Moved on Her Very Heavily,” Trump’s survivors remain firmly in charge of their own stories, focusing their conversation on his crimes and his impact on their lives. On this week’s Kicker, journalist and author E Jean Carroll speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how our coverage of sexual assault makes it easier for voters to slough off and why she knew coming forward to tell how Trump raped her in the mid-nineties would rouse his base.