As co-publishers of The Fulcrum, we are proud to announce that, effective Jan. 1, Hugo Balta, The Fulcrum’s director of solutions journalism and DEI initiatives, will serve as executive editor.
Hugo is an award-winning, 30-year multimedia journalism veteran with multiple market and platform experience, including leadership positions in NBC, Telemundo, ABC, CBS, and PBS, among other storied news networks. A nationally recognized diversity in journalism advocate, he is the recipient of the 2024 Cecilia Vaisman Award from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Hugo is the only person to serve twice as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Hugo and his family live in Chicago.
He is currently the Publisher of the Latino News Network. LNN’s mission is to provide greater visibility and voice to the Hispanic, Latino community, amplify the work of others in doing the same, mentor and provide young journalists with real work experiences, and apply the principles of solutions journalism in producing stories focused on the social determinants of health, and democracy.
Hugo is also an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago, teaching journalism courses. He previously worked as executive editor at the Chicago Reporter, editor at WBBM News Radio, and news director at WTTW Chicago.
We’ve grown significantly in 2024 and, under Hugo’s leadership, we are confident that our growth will continue as we expand into new areas. We deliver more than 1.4 million web impressions monthly and roughly 380,000 page views per month through our daily newsletter, social media platforms, and numerous other national content-sharing relationships. In addition, in the first eight months of this year, our writings were picked up 3,549 times by local newspapers around the country, which added to our reach considerably.
The Fulcrum is now accredited by Apple News, MSN News, Smart News and the Latino News Network. They pick up our content daily, and we are working to expand our relationship with them and other national platforms in 2025 to engage more citizens on how our evolving democracy can better meet the needs of all the people. We do so by sharing many perspectives to build a pro-democracy constituency of millions of Americans by making it easier to find and act on local and national civic engagement opportunities.
In 2024, we strengthened our working relationship with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where young journalists regularly provided reporting for The Fulcrum We are also extremely proud of our working relationship with The OpEd Project, which offers The Fulcrum the opportunity to elevate the ideas and knowledge of underrepresented expert voices to accelerate solutions to the biggest problems facing our nation.
We’d like to give a special thank you to David Meyers, our current executive editor, who has been instrumental in the success of The Fulcrum. David’s vast experience after two decades at CQ Roll Call, a leading publisher of political news and information, was instrumental in guiding The Fulcrum team to the success we are now experiencing. David will be starting a new job in January with OpenSecrets as director of communications and marketing.
Despite our successes in 2024, we will not rest on our laurels. 2025 allows us to solidify further our position as a leading outlet for news and opinion so insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk and act to repair our democracy and make it work in their everyday lives. Our dedication to a solutions journalism model will continue as we explore what is dividing us on the issues, what information can be trusted, what is oversimplified about the issues, and the nuances and complexities of the many problems facing our nation.
Please contact Hugo at hugo@thefulcrum.us to submit your op-ed proposal, suggest news stories and news or ask questions.
Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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.