Heidi Stevens: When newsrooms shrink, so does our capacity to know and understand one another
My son was unimpressed.
I don't blame him, really. The film was released in 1976. It's heavy on procedure and light, by modern standards, on action. The actors use pay phones. I might have chosen 2015's 'Spotlight' if I were in charge of getting a room full of high schoolers excited about the power of the press.
Still, I'm glad he glimpsed that moment in time — one that had no parallel before or since. And one that, I'm afraid, could never happen now.
It's important, obviously, to understand Watergate, an event that shaped and shifted American politics and, indeed, America. I'm grateful he got that lesson. But I'm also grateful he got a look at a time when American discourse and American opinion could be swayed by the facts in front of them.
Because America back then was, for the most part, looking at the same set of facts in front of them.
In 1974, three networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — owned the evening news, and daily newspapers were still the primary source of news and analysis for people. In 1974, the number of people who said they had 'a great deal' or 'a fair amount' of trust in newspapers, TV and radio was close to 70%, according to Gallup polling.
By 2024, that percentage had shrunk to 31.
Some of the mistrust plaguing mainstream media is self-inflicted, to be sure. The industry has long been too homogenous, too insular and too slow to evolve. You likely have your own 'too' to add to that list.
A healthy dose of that mistrust, though, is being fed to us by corporate conglomerates, crooked politicians and other folks with a vested interest in hoarding power and keeping knowledge and truth away from the masses.
And it's working. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, according to Northwestern University's Medill Local News Initiative. More than 200 counties across the country don't have a single news source, Medill found, which means entire communities have no one chronicling and illuminating their lives.
The same week I was writing this, my former employer — The Chicago Tribune — laid off 10% of its remaining newsroom staff, which had already shrunk precipitously since I joined in 1998 and left in 2021.
Who's to blame? The aforementioned mistrust, for sure. Corporate greed and mismanagement, definitely. But also shifting consumer habits. Outdated business models. The disappearance of classified ads. Our phones.
It took a village to dismantle mainstream media.
But now the village is less connected than ever.
What we're left with is an increasingly fractured and polarized media landscape that means voters arrive at polls, families arrive at dinner tables, neighbors arrive at block parties, students arrive in classrooms, colleagues arrive in workplaces and parishioners arrive at houses of worship with a vastly different set of news and narratives in their heads.
This isn't all bad. Stories that were going untold, voices that were long ignored, perspectives that went unexplored fill some of the spaces that opened up when the too homogenous, too insular, too slow to evolve publications started to shrink.
But the situation is certainly not good. It's not good for getting to know each other. It's not good for understanding each other. It's not good for creating and cultivating a collective conscience — one that knows and believes our fates are intertwined and our communities are connected and suffering serves no one. And, as Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us: All flourishing is mutual.
It's not good for popping the bubbles we sometimes place ourselves in. The bubbles that tell us we're safest when we stay away from people who don't look like us or love like us or worship like us. The bubbles that tell us those people don't deserve our protection. Don't deserve our advocacy. Don't deserve our grace. Don't deserve our hearts.
When I used to walk into Tribune Tower, greeted by soaring ceilings and marble walls etched with inspiring quotes, the words that always stopped me were from playwright Arthur Miller: 'A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.'
So many of you take the time to write and tell me, week after week, what you think of my words. Sometimes you hate them. Sometimes you hate me. But then sometimes you read something that complicates that. My politics don't match yours, but you appreciated that tribute to my friend's dad. I'm all wrong about the president, but you had similar feelings dropping your kid at college. My hair is horrendous, but you also bought your Christmas tree at Costco.
That's what happens when we read and watch and listen to things that aren't pre-set to mirror our tastes and our belief systems. When every voice that enters our head isn't echoing and amplifying what's already in there. When we turn a page and see a take we loathe, next to a take we love. That's what happens when a nation talks to itself.
I hate to see that go. For me, a newspaper softie and a journalism romantic. But, honestly, for all of us. We do so much better when we stop and listen to each other's stories.
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NBC News
30 minutes ago
- NBC News
Even at 1%, new tax will burden African immigrants who send money back home
A new remittance tax set to begin in the new year has one university student reeling from the implications it will have for her family in Nigeria. Edidiong Chrys, a second-generation Nigerian American, said she thinks the 1% tax passed as part of President Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill ' would directly affect the financial lifeline she sends overseas. This tax will be applied to anyone in the U.S. who sends money abroad. 'We regularly send money home to support loved ones, including our elders, children in school, newborns and others in need,' she said. Chrys, 38, said some of the funds sent home have gone to new parents in her family, helping ease the cost of food and traveling to doctors' appointments. The funds also help her uncle, who has a job but also must pay for his five daughters, who are all in school. He and his wife work, but it's still not enough 'to accommodate all the things that need to hold the household down,' Chrys said. And then there's Chrys' 80-year-old grandmother, who was weathering back pain when Chrys visited in January. 'We are paying for the live-in nurse to help her during the week,' she said. 'That's an additional expense that we need to have for her so that she's not bending over.' The tax applies to anyone in the U.S. who sends remittances to their home countries. In 2023, remittances from the U.S. totaled $98 billion, according to the World Bank. Chrys contributes to the $56 billion in remittances sub-Saharan Africa received from people around the world last year. In fact, she said she regularly remits cash — more than 50 times a year — to family and friends. The Center for Global Development, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on reducing global poverty through economic research, published an analysis last month that listed the tax as yet another financial setback for many nations, given the recent reduction in American aid. Liberia is highly dependent on foreign aid as well as remittances. In 2023, the U.S. accounted for a quarter of the country's foreign aid, and remittances surpassed Liberia's bilateral foreign aid by three times, according to the report. The African Union's outgoing ambassador to the United States, Hilda Suka-Mafudze, said hindering such funding 'threatens to reverse gains in financial inclusion and development across the continent of Africa.' Witney Schneidman, a nonresident senior fellow with the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development program, said, 'To put this tax on is just a further constraint on the U.S. effort to work with our partners on the continent.' 'It's not transformational. ... It's just another obstacle to partnership, and it's another obstacle to development,' he said. Schneidman, who also served as deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, condemned the Trump administration for building barriers and not bridges. 'When you add it up with the visa blockages, with the end of the [African Growth and Opportunity Act] AGOA, with the end of USAID, it's just building a wall,' he said. 'The U.S. is building a wall between itself and the world and certainly between itself and Africa.' Suka-Mafudze, whose focus will turn toward the Southern African Development Community region, said that beyond hurting diplomatic ties, blocking remittances is also 'a human issue, because diaspora remittances are lifelines for millions of African families and these remittances often cover essentials, which are food, school fees, medical care and a lot of things. And to impose a tax on that is deeply unjust.' Chrys said the financial burden of sending money home is already heavy, with some stretching limited resources to make ends meet. 'Some people are not making as much to be able to try to support their family back home,' Chrys said. 'When I do get a chance to send money home, sometimes I'm spending it from my refund check.' Democratic Reps. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida and Jonathan L. Jackson of Illinois introduced new legislation called the African Diaspora Investment and Development Act, or AIDA, aimed at reversing the tax's impact. It would also create more transparency in money transfers, among other things. Suka-Mafudze backs the legislation, warning the new tax 'could push people toward informal or unregulated channels, making transactions riskier and less transparent.' Cherfilus-McCormick, the only Haitian American member of Congress right now, warns that a remittance tax would unfairly burden families already struggling to support their loved ones overseas. 'I strongly oppose any effort to tax remittances and will continue fighting for policies that protect immigrant and diaspora communities,' she said in a statement. 'H.R.4586 — AIDA intends to reverse course and instead focus on incentivizing and leveraging on the nearly 100 billion of dollars that Haitian, African and Caribbean Americans send home each year to build sustainable partnerships and strengthen economic development.' Schneidman said the tax has the potential to impact education, health care and families because the bulk of the remittances are family-to-family. That reality is felt most by those sending the money, who see firsthand how even small amounts can make a big difference. 'In the U.S., it might feel like, 'Oh, that's nothing.'' Chrys said. But in Nigeria, 'It's everything because every little money counts.'
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's embrace of unchristian Christian nationalism
Pete Hegseth, widely considered the least qualified Defense secretary in American history, is hardly anyone's version of the ideal Christian husband and father. Only 45 years old, he's been married three times. His first marriage — to his high school sweetheart — lasted a mere four years, deteriorating after Hegseth admitted to multiple extramarital affairs. A couple of years later, he married his second wife, with whom he had three children. During that marriage, he fathered a child with a Fox News producer who eventually became his third wife. He paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault (he denies the assault). He routinely passed out drunk at family gatherings and misbehaved in public when inebriated, according to numerous witnesses. His own mother once accused him of being 'an abuser of women,' though she later retracted her claims when Hegseth was facing Senate confirmation. Still, the Senate's Republican majority, cowed by President Trump, confirmed his appointment. Hegseth has two qualities that Trump prizes above all others. He is blindly loyal to the president, and he looks good on TV. After his installation, Hegseth proceeded to fire top military brass who happened to be Black or women or both. He has restored the names of Confederate generals to Army bases (Bragg and Benning). His petty 'anti-woke' crusade led him to strip the name of the assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk, a former Naval officer who served honorably, from a Navy ship. And he has considered doing the same to a ship named in honor of the abolitionist and Civil War hero Harriet Tubman. He has said that women do not belong in combat roles, and has kicked out transgender soldiers, cruelly stripping them of the pensions they earned for their service. In March, he shared classified information about an impending American airstrike in Yemen on an unsecured Signal group chat that included his wife, on purpose, and the editor of the Atlantic, by accident. He is, in short, the least serious man ever to lead this nation's armed forces. As if all that weren't dispiriting enough, Hegseth is now in bed (metaphorically) with a crusading Christian nationalist. Earlier this month, Hegseth made waves when he reposted on social media a CNN interview with Douglas Wilson, the pastor and theocrat who is working hard to turn the clock back on the rights of every American who is not white, Christian and male. In the interview, Wilson expounded on his patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian and homophobic views. Women, he said, should serve as 'chief executive of the home' and should not have the right to vote. (Their men can do that for them.) Gay marriage and gay sex should be outlawed once again. 'We know that sodomy is worse than slavery by how God responds to it,' he told CNN's Pamela Brown. (Slavery is 'unbiblical,' he avowed, though he did bizarrely defend it once, writing in 1990 a pamphlet that 'slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.') When a new outpost of his church opened in Washington, D.C ., in July, Hegseth and his family were among the worshippers. CNN described Hegseth's presence as 'a major achievement' for Wilson. 'All of Christ for All of Life,' wrote Hegseth as he endorsed and reposted the interview. That is the motto of Wilson's expanding universe, which includes his Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the center of his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of more than 100 churches on four continents, parochial schools, a college, a publishing house and media platforms. 'All of Christ for All of Life' is a shorthand for the belief that Christian doctrines should shape every part of life — including government, culture and education. Wilson is a prolific author of books with titles such as 'Her Hand in Marriage,' 'Federal Husband,' and 'Reforming Marriage.' His book 'Fidelity' teaches 'what it means to be a one-woman man.' Doubtful it has crossed Hegseth's desk. 'God hates divorce,' writes Wilson in one of his books. Given the way sexual pleasure is celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, Wilson has a peculiarly dim view of sex. I mean, how many weddings have been graced with recitations from the Song of Solomon, with its thinly disguised allusions to pleasurable sexual intimacy? ('Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.') Wilson's world is considerably less sensual. 'A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,' he writes in 'Fidelity.' 'A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.' Mutual sexual pleasure seems out of the question: 'The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.' Ugh. There is nothing particularly new here; Wilson's ideology is just another version of patriarchal figures using religion to fight back against the equality movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They are basically the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church dressed up in respectable clothing. 'Some people may conflate Christian nationalism and Christianity because they both use the symbols and language of Christianity, such as a Bible, a cross and worship songs,' says the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism on its website. 'But Christian nationalism uses the veneer of Christianity to advance its own aims — to point to a political figure, party or ideology instead of Jesus.' What you have in people like Hegseth and Wilson are authoritarian men who hide behind their religion to execute the most unchristian of agendas. God may hate divorce, but from my reading of the Bible, God hates hypocrisy even more. Bluesky: @rabcarianThreads: @rabcarian
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Oklahoma will require teachers from NY, California to prove they back 'America First'
Oklahoma's new "America First" teacher certification test will require educators from California and New York to agree with conservative curriculum. Teachers from California and New York who want to work in Oklahoma public schools will be required to pass a certification test to prove they share the state's conservative political values. Regardless of the subject or grade they teach, they'll have to show they know "the biological differences between females and males" and that they agree with the state's American history standards, which includes teachings of a disproved conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 presidential election from President Donald Trump. The state department of education will implement the new certification test for teachers from the two largest Democrat-led states "who are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" to ensure newcomers "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids," Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, said in an interview with USA TODAY. Walters has dubbed the new requirement an "America First" certification, in reference to one of Trump's political slogans. Oklahoma's Republican Governor Kevin Stitt appointed Walters, a Republican, to the helm of the state's education department in Sept. 2020 and voters then elected him for a second term in November 2022. Oklahoma is offering teaching bonuses that go up to $50,000 to attract teachers from across the nation and has seen "a dramatic increase in teachers wanting to come to Oklahoma," Walters said. The new test is meant to ensure they weed out teachers with opposing views from the state's standards. The state, like many others, has a persisting teacher shortage. He said the test will only apply to teachers from California and New York, for now, because those states specifically teach lessons that are antithetical to those taught in Oklahoma. "A lot of the credit goes to Gavin Newsom," Walters said. He alleged California under the governor has implemented lessons on "gender theory," and that won't be allowed in Oklahoma schools. (The California Healthy Youth Act, passed in 2016, requires that public school lessons across the state "must be inclusive of LGBTQ students" and same-sex relationships and teach students about "gender, gender expression, gender identity, and explore the harm of negative gender stereotypes" and "about all sexual orientations and what being LGBTQ means.") Oklahoma's 'America First' Test Nonprofit conservative media company Prager U is helping Oklahoma's state department of education develop the test. The company previously helped develop the state's new high school history curriculum standards, which includes lessons on how to dissect the results of the 2020 election, including learning about alleged mail-in voter fraud, "an unforeseen record number of voters" and "security risks of mail-in balloting." The new curriculum also teaches the contested theory that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak and removed a prior proposal for lessons about George Floyd's murder and Black Lives Matter. "These reforms will reset our classrooms back to educating our children without liberal indoctrination," Walters wrote in a post on X on April 29. "We're proud to defend these standards, and we will continue to stand up for honest, pro-America education in every classroom." The state superintendent said some of the history questions will about American government, how the nation came to be and its founding documents. Walters' office shared five sample questions with USA TODAY: Walters said the test will be finished by Aug. 15 and it will be available to prospective teachers the week of Aug. 18. "We're very close," he said. Oklahoma schools have become more has conservative under Walters' took the helm of the state's education department in Sept. 2020, and voters elected him for a second term in November 2022. Along with the changes to the state's history curriculum standards, Walters has ordered public schools to teach the Bible in June 2024. Bible lessons will not be on the new teacher certification exam, he said. Teachers' union leaders: Test will be 'a huge turn off' to teachers amid 'serious teacher shortage crisis' Teachers' union leaders decried the new certification test in interviews with USA TODAY. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Walters' new test is going to be a "huge turn off" to teachers and that it's not "going to solve a problem." "Teachers in this country are patriotic, and suggesting they're not is insulting," she said. Weingarten went on to criticize Walters for several of his conservative pushes for education in Oklahoma, including bible lessons, and support for a religious charter school, which was blocked by a split Supreme Court vote this May. She called those moves and the implementation of the new test "a major distraction." "Ryan Walters appears to be trying out for MAGA in chief, not educator in chief, because everything that he's doing is about the culture wars, not about the reading, writing and arithmetic," she said. "If he wants to be MAGA in chief then go be MAGA in chief. But let someone else be educator in chief and focus on other things people deserve, which is reading, literacy and wraparound services – and actual teachers who want to be in Oklahoma." Oklahoma and California teachers union leaders agreed. "This is a political stunt to grab attention," said Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association. "All of the mandates coming out of the Department of Education are baseless and are distractions from real issues in Oklahoma." One of those pressing issues is "the serious teacher shortage crisis," she said. "When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job ... We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused." The political climate in Oklahoma has contributed to the teacher shortage, she said, noting there are about 30,000 teachers in Oklahoma who hold state teaching certifications but are not working in classrooms. "We believe the political morale is making it scarier to teach," she said. "We know our jobs are so much more important and at the end of the day it's about the future of our students." The state teachers union told its members in a July 11 letter, which Elledge provided to USA TODAY, that Walters "has no legal authority to vet certified teachers based on political ideology." They say that's because "licensing and certification are governed by state statute, not personal opinion or partisan preferences" and state law "requires us to recognize out-of-state teaching credentials." The letter references part of the state education code that says it "must issue certificates to qualified teachers from other U.S. states and territories if they meet basic requirements, including a criminal background check." The union is also concerned about the state education department's partnership with PragerU "because it's not an educational authority and it's partisan," Elledge said. "OEA is actively monitoring this and other overreaches," the letter reads. "We remain vigilant in protecting the rights of Oklahoma's educators and students." Teachers in Oklahoma don't teach newly implemented conservative ideologies in classrooms, which are expected to be on the 'America First' certification test, Elledge said. "They're not here to give opinions in class; they're here to teach facts," she said. There are not many teachers in Oklahoma who come from California or New York, anyway, because of political differences. "People in Oklahoma have more conservative values," she said. "It's not a destination state for people from California and New York, which is sad because it's a really good place and students here deserve the best they could possibly have." David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers' Association, said he also hasn't heard of an influx of teachers who want to move from California to teach in Oklahoma. But at a time when states are trying to solve teacher shortages, the Oklahoma test is trying to "scare them away," he said. "This almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve," he said. "I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs." Goldberg rejects that what teachers need in California – "respect" and a livable wage – is different than what Oklahoma teachers need to thrive. Teachers have a responsibility to take care of kids in both places despite their different education systems, he said. Contact Kayla Jimenez at kjimenez@ Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.
