Ken Rudin joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about his career as a journalist at NPR, hosting his podcast, The Political Junkie and why he's changed his nonpartisan orientation in the Trump era.
Monica Campbell
At a time when democracy feels fragile and newsrooms are shrinking, Monica Campbell has spent her career asking how journalism can still serve the public good. She is Director of the California Local News Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former editor at The Washington Post and The World. Her work has focused on press freedom, disinformation, and the civic role of journalism. In this conversation, she reflects on the state of free press in the United States, what she learned reporting in Latin America, and what still gives her hope for the future of the profession.
You have worked in both international and U.S. journalism for decades. How would you describe the current state of press freedom in the United States?
Press freedom in the United States has always been tested. What we see now is a mix of political pressure and economic strain that makes newsrooms fragile. Yet at the same time there is a strong commitment among journalists and editors to defend the core values of a free press.
There are real threats, from lawsuits to attempts to limit access to institutions like the Pentagon or to redefine how the White House press corps operates. But there is also renewed energy to protect our rights. That determination is encouraging. It shows that, even under pressure, journalists in this country still understand the importance of their mission.
Many countries once looked to the United States as a model of free speech. Do you think that image still holds true?
We need to look globally for inspiration. The United States has been one important example, but there are others now. What matters is how journalists respond when their freedom is challenged. That is the real test, and we are seeing it today.
Many reporters refuse to accept new restrictions or codes of conduct designed to control access to government institutions. They continue to cover protests and political movements across the country. That resilience is part of the DNA of American journalism.
Some major media outlets have yielded to political pressure. But I see smaller local newsrooms that, despite limited resources, keep reporting daily on what happens in their neighborhoods. That persistence is courageous and deserves attention.
How should journalism schools prepare new reporters to work in this polarized environment?
We need to start by telling the truth about journalism itself. It has never been easy or comfortable. There has never been a time when it was simple or well paid. There have always been attempts to silence or intimidate journalists.
So journalism schools must teach students to know their rights, understand the history of press freedom in the United States, and be prepared to act if they are challenged. They also need to understand the business side of journalism. Running a newsroom is not something most people learn in school, but it is vital to the survival of our industry. And now, technology is another pillar of training. Reporters have to understand new tools, especially artificial intelligence, and know how to use them responsibly.
What role do you think artificial intelligence will play in journalism?
It is essential to understand how AI works and how it can be used carefully in newsrooms. It should not happen to us, it should happen with us. Journalists need to know what AI can and cannot do, and find ways to use it to strengthen reporting.
In several newsrooms where I have worked, resources are already being dedicated to studying how AI can help journalism. At Berkeley, the goal is to learn about it, not fear it. My position is simple. We must study AI, understand its power, and make sure journalists remain the ones making editorial decisions.
The term “fake news” has changed how people see the media. How has it affected public trust?
It has been devastating. Every day new platforms appear that spread misinformation. That is now a permanent feature of our information landscape.
Still, there are independent creators, podcasters, and local initiatives producing very good, reliable content. That is important to recognize. Not everyone outside the traditional press is harmful. But the challenge for professional journalism is to rebuild trust.
For too long, news organizations have told people what they should know instead of listening to what they want and need to know. We have ignored parts of society and missed stories that matter to people’s lives. That has to change.
In California, I see local newsrooms hosting public events and community meetings to understand what people care about. That kind of listening is what will help us reconnect with the public and repair trust.
You have worked at The Washington Post, The World, and reported from Mexico, Cuba, and Haiti. Which experiences most shaped your view of journalism?
My years in Mexico changed me completely. There, being a journalist can cost you your life. When I was the country representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, I documented cases of reporters who were threatened, attacked, or killed. That experience made me realize that journalism is an act of civic courage, not just a job.
It also made me appreciate the privilege of working in the United States, where most of the time you can report without fearing for your safety. But even here that sense of security is becoming more fragile. I have spoken with reporters who worry about consequences for covering protests or controversial topics. We are not immune.
At The Washington Post I saw another side of journalism, the power of large institutions. One story can change a life, influence legislation, or reach the president. Behind every article are layers of editing, fact-checking, and debate. It is a reminder that serious journalism is built on care and precision, even if the public does not always see that.
Do you still see journalism as the fourth estate?
Yes, but a more fragile one. Journalism can still hold power accountable, but only if it has resources and public trust. Without those two elements, influence fades.
The fourth estate exists only if citizens believe in it. When the public stops trusting us, we lose our ability to challenge authority. Protecting journalism is not just a media issue, it is a democratic one.
Many local newsrooms have closed or downsized. Is there still a path to rebuild strong local journalism in the U.S.?
It is difficult, but I think it is possible. I see energy and imagination in many small outlets that are trying to survive through collaboration and community support.
The economics are harsh. Media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands, and even the large companies are struggling. But many citizens still understand the value of reliable, fact-based information and are willing to support it. That gives me hope.
Depending only on philanthropy or temporary grants is not sustainable. We need public investment in journalism. Other countries have models that treat information as a public good. The BBC is one example, imperfect but instructive.
In the United States, public funding for news has declined sharply. That makes local and state initiatives even more important. In California, our fellowship is funded by the state government, which shows that some lawmakers still understand that good information is essential to democracy.
You work closely with new journalists through the fellowship. What role do you think this new generation will play in the profession?
They are vital. This generation is more diverse, brave, and socially aware. They enter journalism because they care about truth and community. That gives me enormous hope.
Many of them also come from other careers, which enriches the field. At Berkeley, we have students from science, law, and healthcare. They bring new perspectives that journalism badly needs. Their sense of purpose and openness to change inspire me every day.
What gives you hope for the future of journalism?
There is real public hunger for good, verified, local information. People want to know what is happening in their schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods. Many small newsrooms are meeting that demand.
I see reporters reinventing themselves and finding creative ways to connect with their audiences. Despite the disinformation, polarization, and economic pressures, the need for journalism is not disappearing.
What keeps me going is seeing new people enter the field every year. Students, mid-career professionals, people from all backgrounds still choose journalism. They believe it matters. That belief is what gives me energy and optimism.
Profile
Monica Campbell is Director of the California Local News Fellowship at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. She previously worked as an editor on The Washington Post’s audio team and spent nearly a decade as a senior editor and correspondent for The World, covering Latin America. Earlier in her career she served as the Committee to Protect Journalists’ representative in Mexico, documenting threats and attacks against reporters.
Her work earned a national Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Equity and Inclusion, and she was a finalist for the Mirror Award, which honors excellence in media reporting. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she is fluent in English and Spanish and collaborates with organizations that support Latino journalists in the United States. From Berkeley she continues to teach, mentor, and advocate for a resilient and inclusive future for journalism.
Alex Segura is a bilingual, multiple-platform journalist based in Southern California.
The digital public square rewards outrage over empathy. To save democracy, we must redesign our online spaces to prioritize dialogue, trust, and civility.
A headline about a new education policy flashes across a news-aggregation app. Within minutes, the comment section fills: one reader suggests the proposal has merit; a dozen others pounce. Words like idiot, sheep, and propaganda fly faster than the article loads. No one asks what the commenter meant. The thread scrolls on—another small fire in a forest already smoldering.
It’s a small scene, but it captures something larger: how the public square has turned reactive by design. The digital environments where citizens now meet were built to reward intensity, not inquiry. Each click, share, and outrage serves an invisible metric that prizes attention over understanding.
The result isn’t just polarization—it’s exhaustion. People withdraw from civic life not because they’ve stopped caring, but because every exchange feels like stepping into crossfire.
The Hidden Cost of “Engagement”
Modern engagement systems have perfected the art of provocation. They learn which emotional triggers keep us scrolling and replicate them endlessly. The more friction, the longer we stay. Over time, disagreement itself becomes contaminated; good-faith debate feels naïve, and empathy becomes a liability.
When every interaction is filtered through algorithms that amplify certainty and suppress doubt, public discourse loses its gray zones—the space where problem-solving once lived.
The Vanishing Middle
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, public trust in government now hovers around 43 percent across member nations. That number doesn’t reflect ideology so much as fatigue. Many citizens have retreated to private corners of the internet or quit talking politics altogether.
This hollowing of civic space is dangerous precisely because it’s quiet. Democracies don’t crumble in one grand collapse; they erode in the pauses between conversations that never happen.
Many citizens aren’t angry so much as weary. They’ve learned that sharing a thought online often leads to ridicule, not discussion. To protect their peace, they disengage—leaving public dialogue to those loud enough, or reckless enough, to endure the backlash.
The Responsibility of Design
Every system teaches its users something about how to behave. The town square once taught patience: you listened, you waited your turn, you saw the person you disagreed with standing three feet away. The modern interface teaches speed and certainty. It trains us to respond before reflecting and to assume before asking.
Design is never neutral. A comment box can encourage curiosity or contempt, depending on how it’s built. Civic design—whether physical or digital—quietly scripts our norms. When design prioritizes humanity, civility follows. When it prioritizes attention, outrage does.
If democracy depends on dialogue, then design has become a form of governance in itself. How we architect our platforms, classrooms, and public spaces will determine whether future citizens see discourse as risk or responsibility.
Designing for Dialogue
Repairing this requires more than content moderation or media-literacy campaigns. It calls for re-engineering the environments where dialogue occurs.
Imagine digital forums that remove the perverse incentives—no ad targeting, no engagement scores, no algorithmic bait. Instead, discussion guided by shared principles: listening first, disagreeing without disdain, remembering that persuasion is earned, not imposed.
That’s the philosophy behind Bridging the Aisle, a nonpartisan platform I created to make civil, ad-free conversation possible again. It isn’t perfect, but it’s proof that design can serve democracy rather than distort it. The same approach could guide journalism, education, and civic technology: build spaces that treat dialogue as a public utility, not a product.
The Cost of Waiting
We’re approaching a point where the habits of polarization could outlast the systems that produced them. If cynicism becomes culture, no platform redesign or new regulation will be enough to reverse it. The longer we normalize ridicule as civic participation, the harder it becomes to remember that dialogue once felt ordinary. Rebuilding trust isn’t just about protecting democracy—it’s about preserving the capacity to coexist at all.
Toward a Culture of Trust
Rebuilding trust won’t happen through new laws or louder slogans. It begins with redesigning the systems that shape how we see one another. When technology amplifies curiosity instead of contempt, people start to remember that disagreement isn’t a threat—it’s the raw material of progress.
Trust isn’t a luxury; it’s infrastructure. Without it, even the best institutions lose coherence, and every public challenge becomes a private war of opinion.
Trust doesn’t mean agreement; it means believing you can speak without being attacked for it. That confidence—that your voice won’t be punished—is what keeps people at the table long enough to find solutions.
Educators can teach the art of dialogue, not just debate. Policymakers can model transparency over performance. Citizens can practice restraint online, remembering that every reply sets a tone someone else will follow.
Civic renewal starts where someone dares to ask, What if we listened longer than we reacted?
Linda Hansen is a writer and the founder of Bridging the Aisle, a nonpartisan platform fostering honest, respectful dialogue across divides and renewed trust in democracy.
Last month, Matthew and Maria Raine testified before Congress, describing how their 16-year-old son confided suicidal thoughts to AI chatbots, only to be met with validation, encouragement, and even help drafting a suicide note. The Raines are among multiple families who have recently filed lawsuits alleging that AI chatbots were responsible for their children’s suicides. Their deaths, now at the center of lawsuits against AI companies, underscore a similar argument playing out in federal courts: artificial intelligence is no longer an abstraction of the future; it is already shaping life and death.
And these teens are not outliers. According to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families, 72 percent of teenagers report using AI companions, often relying on them for emotional support. This dependence is developing far ahead of any emerging national safety standard.
Notwithstanding the urgency, Congress has responded with paralysis, punctuated only by periodic attempts to stop others from acting. Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz insists that a ten-year federal moratorium blocking states and cities from passing their own AI laws is “not at all dead,” despite bipartisan opposition that kept it out of the summer budget bill. He has now doubled down with the SANDBOX Act, which would let AI companies sidestep existing protections by certifying the safety of their own systems and winning renewable waivers from agency oversight. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” rolls back Biden-era safety standards, threatens states with punishment for regulating, and promises to “unleash innovation” by removing so-called red tape.
This reflects a familiar but flawed assumption: that innovation and safety are fundamentally at odds, and that America must choose between technological leadership and responsible oversight. The idea that deregulation is the path to leadership fundamentally misunderstands American history—not to mention the law.
Far from stifling growth, regulations have turned legal uncertainty into public confidence, and confidence into robust industries. The railroad industry did not flourish because the government stayed out of the way. It flourished because congressionally mandated standards, such as block signaling and uniform track gauges, restored public trust after deadly collisions. The result reshaped America’s conception of itself, and railroads became the sinews of American economic dominance. Similarly, aviation did not become central to American power until Congress established the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate safety, unify air traffic control, and manage the national airspace system. Pharmaceuticals did not become a global industry until drug safety regulations gave consumers confidence in the products they were prescribed.
When Congress stalls, power moves elsewhere. Already, courts are left to improvise on fundamental questions such as whether AI companies bear liability when chatbots encourage suicide, whether training on copyrighted works is theft or fair use, and whether automated hiring systems violate civil rights laws. Federal judges are making rules without guidance. If this continues, the result will be a patchwork of contradictory precedents that destabilize both markets and public trust.
The internet age serves as a cautionary tale: when Congress chose “light-touch” regulation in the 1990s, courts issued contradictory rulings, forcing lawmakers to scramble. Their fix—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the “twenty-six words that created the internet”—prevented courts from holding platforms liable and, over time, was interpreted so broadly by some courts that even its co-author noted the law had become misunderstood as a free pass for illegal behavior.
In addition to courts, state legislatures are filling this vacuum. About a dozen or so bills have been introduced in states across the country to regulate AI chatbots. Illinois and Utah have banned AI therapy (bots that provide therapy services), and California has two bills winding their way through the state legislature that would mandate safeguards. But piecemeal lawsuits and a smattering of state laws are not enough. Americans need and deserve more fundamental protections.
Congress should empower a dedicated commission to set enforceable safety standards, establish the scope of legal liability for developers, and mandate transparency for high-risk applications. Courts are built to remedy past harms; Congress is built to prevent future ones by creating agencies with the technical expertise to set safety standards on highly complex and evolving technologies before disasters strike.
Bipartisan momentum around federal coordination is already growing. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham have introduced legislation to create a new Digital Consumer Protection Commission with authority over tech platforms. Representatives Ted Lieu, Anna Eshoo, and Ken Buck have proposed a 20-member national AI commission to develop regulatory frameworks. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley announced a bipartisan framework calling for independent oversight of AI. Even senators who hold views as varied as Gary Peters and Thom Tillis agree on the need for federal AI governance standards. When progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans find common ground on AI regulation, the time is ripe for action.
To be clear, this is not about choking innovation. It is about ensuring AI does not collapse under the weight of public backlash, market confusion, and preventable harms. Regulation is what stabilizes innovation. America doesn’t lead the world by racing recklessly ahead. We lead when we set the rules of the road: rules that give innovators clarity, give the public confidence, and give democracy control over technologies that already touch life and death.
The parents who testified before Congress are right: their children’s deaths were avoidable. The question is whether lawmakers will act now to prevent more avoidable tragedies, or whether they will continue to abdicate their constitutional responsibility, leaving courts, corporations, and grieving families to pick up the pieces.
Aya Saed is an attorney and a leading voice in responsible AI legislation and the former counsel and legislative director for U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is the director of AI policy and strategy at Scope3 and the policy co-chair for the Green Software Foundation. She is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project in Partnership with the PD Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
With millions of child abuse images reported annually and AI creating new dangers, advocates are calling for accountability from Big Tech and stronger laws to keep kids safe online.
Forty-five years ago this month, Mothers Against Drunk Driving had its first national press conference, and a global movement to stop impaired driving was born. MADD was founded by Candace Lightner after her 13-year-old daughter was struck and killed by a drunk driver while walking to a church carnival in 1980. Terms like “designated driver” and the slogan “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” came out of MADD’s campaigning, and a variety of state and federal laws, like a lowered blood alcohol limit and legal drinking age, were instituted thanks to their advocacy. Over time, social norms evolved, and driving drunk was no longer seen as a “folk crime,” but a serious, conscious choice with serious consequences.
Movements like this one, started by fed-up, grieving parents working with law enforcement and law makers, worked to lower road fatalities nationwide, inspire similar campaigns in other countries, and saved countless lives.
But today, one of the biggest dangers to children comes with almost no safeguards: the internet. Parents know the risks, yet there is no large-scale “movement” when it comes to keeping our kids safe online.
This is a big missed opportunity. The internet is not going anywhere, but in order to make it safer for children and young people, parents are key - and they need to get mad on a much larger scale.
In 2024, there were 20.5 million reports of child sexual abuse material made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, and underreporting is a serious problem. These images represent real children who have been abused, their photos and videos of the abuse shared – exponentially – on platforms that we use every day. Add to that the rising number of teens who have died by suicide after being groomed and extorted, and the number of kids who are exposed to pornographic material on sites that are supposedly “safe” for children.
AI is complicating matters further, suggesting extreme dieting to teens and offering advice on how to commit suicide. According to Common Sense Media, 3 out of 4 kids have used an AI chatbot, and many parents have no idea.
Despite widespread acknowledgement of child sexual abuse, imagery, and exploitation on all major platforms, tech companies are still not required to proactively search for, detect, or remove content unless it is reported to them. Online safeguards are, by and large, voluntary, and tech companies are still rarely held accountable for crimes committed on their sites, creating a virtual playground for predators to groom children without consequences.
Much like the lax culture around drunk driving before MADD, the dangers online are often seen as an unfortunate risk that parents are forced to accept in order to let their children and teens exist in the digital world. Instead of anger, there is a sense of overwhelm and apathy at the scale and the ubiquity of online risks. Parents are mostly forced to throw up their hands, put in place whatever precautions they can, and just go along with it. This is unacceptable.
Congress is making some progress towards passing legislation that will help hold tech companies accountable and let law enforcement better prosecute these crimes. Other countries around the world, like Australia, the U.K., and Brazil, are starting to pass online safety legislation, too. But these achievements are largely uncoordinated, and they exist on a national scale, not a global one.
Since most Big Tech companies are based in the U.S., Congress must take the lead in making companies accountable for the risks children face online. We also need a collective, organic movement led by parents and the public that will drive a global movement for sustainable, meaningful change.
It is not up to parents to solve this crisis. But parents can – and should – be angry. And we must use that anger to fuel change. We must educate ourselves about the risks and not be afraid to talk to others about the risks our kids are facing. The tech companies will not bring themselves down, so parents, teachers, and adults who care about children must continue putting pressure on Congress to act. We can end online child sexual abuse and make the internet a much safer place for everyone, but only if we come together first.
Journalist and Political Junkie Ken Rudin
