Messinger is the founder of Digital Citizen, a media engagement nonprofit that connects Americans to their leaders, each other, and the world.
Our deeply divided nation agrees on one thing, at least: Your facts and my facts are irrevocably different.
This is the news problem from hell: a profound division in how the media portray what is true. The problem isn’t new – it’s baked into the U.S. Constitution – but today it’s worse. Online platforms pretending to carry news array their wares before me; “us” or “them” are the only choices. Toxic cable channels boost ratings by selling me biased reporting and fabricated facts.
I know deep down I am an idiot to bite, but I bite.
Then there’s the hyperpartisanship. I live in an all-encompassing info-bubble that always shows me how I am right and those others are wrong. And put a cherry on top of this poisonous sundae: A lethal dose of extremist lies from the far right fringe is creeping into accepted political discourse. Add it up and the role of news reporting in this democracy is under threat.
I’ve been looking for signs of hope lately, searching for ways to forge a path out of this media hellscape. There are some hopeful developments: People are beginning to recognize how serious the threat is to our democratic republic. Numerous civic groups that belong to the Bridge Alliance (which owns The Fulcrum) are making headway in helping people dismantle animosity between neighbors, in de-demonizing “the other.” Our nonprofit, Internews Interactive (InterAct) is part of this movement.
Understandably, these organizations often keep an arm’s length from news media, that disagreeable place where the sausage of public opinion is made. But if the problems with news reporting aren’t solved, every effort to find consensus faces a nearly unwinnable battle.
Regaining trust
InterAct is focused on how media may provide solutions. First, can news media earn back the public trust they squandered by jumping onto partisan bandwagons when that was the avenue towards greater profits?
One of the best known U.S. news channels, CNN, is about to answer this question. CNN drifted into liberal editorializing territory during the Trump years, looking increasingly like the left-leaning MSNBC and mirroring the right-leaning Fox News. That strategy added viewers who were horrified by Trump. According to The New York Times:
But leaders of CNN’s new corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, have suggested that they want the network’s programming to have more straight news reporting and fewer opinionated takes from hosts.
Some fear the network is simply flipping to the conservative side, but according to The Washington Post, Chris Licht, the new chairman of CNN “has told CNN staff that he hopes to see more Republican politicians making guest appearances. ... But the network has pushed back on suggestions that Licht was specifically trying to curry favor with Republicans, saying he just wants to make CNN ‘a place for fair and respectful dialogue, analysis and debate.’ ... Licht said he wants to help regain the trust that many people have lost in media, by ‘fearlessly speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo, questioning ‘group-think’ and educating viewers.’”
This is encouraging for people who despaired as CNN became just another partisan, sensation-mongering machine. Let’s hope the changes hold no matter what comes next.
Building connections
Other ways the news industry is attempting to tackle this hellish problem are less sensational but may be more significant. One approach focuses on building strong ties between reporters and their communities. The premier practitioner of this approach is Trusting News. It’s website explains:
“At Trusting News, we identify things news audiences don’t understand about how journalism works and use engagement and transparency strategies to rebuild trust. We look for opportunities to demonstrate credibility [to audiences] by explaining news processes, coverage goals and journalism ethics.”
We are working with Trusting News on a project that is also trying something new: turning the news problem on its head. What if reporters become ambassadors who explain their home community to others, and interpret other points of view for their own audiences? We call this News Ambassadors because the idea is to help in understanding without sacrificing factual reporting.
Reporters from Columbia University in New York and the University of Missouri held community meetings in two very different localities: the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, N.Y., which is more than 50 percent Black and where more than 70 percent of voters went for Joe Biden; and Moberly, Mo., which is over 50 percent white, and gave 70 percent of its support to Donald Trump in the last election. Next, the reporters will create radio stories that explain to the other community how “we” have dealt with a difficult national issue – such as abortion or guns.
Journalist Amanda Ripley is leading another approach to reconnecting reporters to their audiences. It's called “Complicating the Narratives,” and she wrote a book on the topic. As she recently explained at the Solutions Journalism Network blog:
“The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. ... Usually, reporters do the opposite. We cut the quotes that don’t fit our narrative. ... The problem is that, in a time of high conflict, coherence is bad journalism, bordering on malpractice.”
The article continues:
“One of the most well-studied biases in the human portfolio is confirmation bias — our nasty habit of believing news that confirms our pre-existing narratives and dismissing everything else. ... [C]onfirmation bias is the Kryptonite of traditional journalism.
“So one way to gently counter confirmation bias is to create a little cognitive ease. ... If you’re doing a story about the scientific evidence for the safety of vaccines .. . use sources that surprise [news consumers] — ideally ones from their tribe.
Cognitive ease also comes from a feeling of hope. Uncomfortable information that could generate fear ... is more palatable to people if it comes with a side of specific actions that people can take. ... [F]ear without a sense of agency backfires — leading people to respond with denial, avoidance and disgust.”
Presenting news this way should help the public gain insight — but this raises the question: Are people ready to jump off their own partisan bandwagons? There are, after all, news consumers as well as news producers, and an equally urgent need for the public to see that theirs is not the only correct viewpoint. News consumers must somehow get beyond today’s simplistic approach to right and wrong, and they must learn to discern truth from lies.
Just as literacy has been essential to being a good citizen, today’s citizens must learn a new kind of literacy. They must become media literate. To fact-check claims that now are routinely accepted as truth, to access tools that discern faked media from the real thing. They must be able to smell when something seems fishy; to be skeptical if stories fit too neatly into their own biases. They must recognize they have biases in the first place. Changing the news consumer is, perhaps, more difficult than changing the news.
But there are positive developments on this front too. Illinois is the first state to institute mandatory media literacy courses for all high school students. As Yonty Friesem of Columbia College Chicago told NPR:
“The idea is to teach about asking questions of how is it constructed, this message? Who is behind it? What's going on here? And how does it affect me and society? And what's my role in how I'm using media? So it can be in a science experiment, but it can be also in art. It can be talking about civics in social science class.”
Taken together, a more literate public, reporters who see themselves as part of their communities, and news outlets that look for unbiased ways to report could make a difference. As the old reporter’s phrase goes, “Time will tell.” It can’t happen soon enough.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.