“Student journalists are uniquely positioned to take on the challenges of complicating the narrative about how we see each other, putting forward new solutions to how we can work together and have dialogue across difference,” said Maxine Rich, the Program Manager with Common Ground USA. I had the chance to interview her earlier this year about Common Ground Journalism, a new initiative to support students reporting in contentious times.
A partnership with The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network (LNN), I joined Maxine and Nicole Donelan, Program Assistant with Common Ground USA, as co-instructor of the first Common Ground Journalism cohort, which ran for six weeks between January and March 2025.
The sessions integrated Common Ground USA principles of “campuses, which can model our nation’s highest ideals: coming together across differences to serve the common good,” and Solutions Journalism Network’s “to transform journalism so that all people have access to news that helps them envision and build a more equitable and sustainable world.”
Concepts like The Power Of Self Narrative, about how our lives can powerfully shape our resilience to challenges, and help others through their blind spots, resonated with cohorts like Maggie Rhoads, a student at George Washington University. “My problems as a journalist are often the same as others from across the country. Knowing this definitely makes me feel less alone in my reporting journey,” she said.
Maggie now writes regularly for the Fulcrum. I invite you to read her stories on how legislation and policy impact communities by clicking HERE.
Georgetown University student Alexis Tamm agrees. “I had an amazing experience as a member of the first Common Ground cohort! The program introduced me to solutions journalism very thoroughly,” she said. Solutions journalism is rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems, which includes these key elements: response, insight, evidence, and limitations.
Instead of just highlighting the problems challenging a community, solutions journalism’s approach to news reporting explains how and why responses are working, or are not working. The goal is to present people with a truer, more complete view of these issues,
I am mentoring Alexis with an upcoming article that will be published on the Fulcrum, about a program helping formerly incarcerated individuals get the resources they need to integrate back into society properly.
Feedback collected at the end of the Common Ground Journalism initiative found that most students in the first cohort agree or strongly agree that Common Ground Journalism made them feel more comfortable reporting on minority perspectives and humanizing opposing political opinions.
I am happy to share that the Fulcrum and LNN will join the next session, which will begin in September! Students interested in applying can get more information and fill out a form by clicking HERE.
By reporting on diverse viewpoints and issues, journalism fosters public debate and encourages civic participation. That is why the Fulcrum is committed to mentoring students with valuable guidance and feedback, allowing them to navigate the challenges of journalism while fostering a deeper understanding of their responsibilities as journalists.
The publication has a longstanding relationship with Northwestern University's Medill on the Hill Program. Student journalists pitch stories about how democracy unfolds in Washington, D.C. Their quality reporting, often featured on the Fulcrum, provides valuable perspectives that widen our audience’s viewpoints.
Through that alliance, I met Atmika Iyer, a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs reporting program who is an intern with the Fulcrum this spring. Check out her work by clicking HERE.
I will work similarly with Duke University student Bennett Gillespie, who will join the Fulcrum as an intern in June.
The Fulcrum has joined LNN and NPR’s Midwest Newsroom in sponsoring Jessica Meza from the University of Lincoln - Nebraska, as this year’s Hortencia Zavala Foundation Summer Intern. Meza will not only benefit from the coaching and visibility of three news outlets, but will work side by side with journalists in the Nebraska Public Media newsroom.
This summer, I will lead the first Fulcrum Fellowship, where five students from across the country will be trained in solutions journalism and complicating narrative techniques to produce stories that counter the one-dimensional narratives too common in mainstream media.
I am currently teaching a solutions journalism focused class at the University of Washington. Students like Lindsay Kim are producing stories that will be published on the Fulcrum, like The World’s Displaced Populations Are Being Displaced in Washington State.
Following months of research, canvassing, and listening to community needs, I am mentoring young journalists in a News Ambassadors project, which will provide greater visibility to marginalized communities in Chicagoland. Learn more by clicking HERE.
Nurturing the next generation of journalists is a collaborative effort that the Fulcrum takes seriously. After all, a well-informed electorate is essential for a healthy democracy, as it enables individuals to engage meaningfully in the political process.
Editor’s Note: Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and a board member of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, the parent organization of The Fulcrum. He is the publisher of the Latino News Network and the only person to serve twice as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).
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.