News Ambassadors is working to narrow the partisan divide through a collaborative journalism project to help American communities that hold different political views better understand each other, while giving student reporters a valuable learning experience in the creation of solutions reporting.
A program of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, News Ambassadors is directed by Shia Levitt, a longtime public radio journalist who has reported for NPR, Marketplace and other outlets. Levitt has also taught radio reporting and audio storytelling at Brooklyn College in New York and at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., as well as for WNYC’s Radio Rookies program and other organizations.
TODAYS FEATURED STUDENT REPORT
Radio station partner WUGA, recently worked with students at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Solutions Journalism Hub of the South, to cover efforts advancing around the country to remove books from the shelves of libraries and schools, and the state of Georgia is no exception. Chloe Beaver, a Grady College senior majoring in journalism and business administration, covered the community of Athens, GA., as part of Charlotte Varnum’s podcasting class.
In her radio piece, she explores how one Athens bookstore is responding to what critics call book censorship.
Enjoy Beaver’s Audio story report.
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H OW NEWS AMBASSADORS WORKS:
News Ambassadors enlists journalism students to help local newsrooms fill gaps in coverage of underreported communities by fostering collaborations between journalism schools and local radio stations to create community-responsive reporting that reflects local concerns and priorities. In the spring, News Ambassadors introduced students to two key reporting strategies:
Solutions journalism: rigorous, evidence-based reporting on how people have responded to existing problems.
Complicating the narratives, a conflict-mediation–informed framework designed to help journalists improve their reporting on polarizing issues.
Student participants report stories informed by one or both of these approaches as well as by local community priorities surfaced during preparatory community engagement work. The best stories are shared with local newsrooms for vetting and potential broadcast.
This collaborative project helps young reporters better understand the perspectives of people outside the bubbles where they live and helps American communities that hold different political views better understand each other. Throughout the process, the project links journalism students to counterparts in politically or demographically dissimilar areas to collaborate on stories exploring solutions to contentious issues.
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.