Introducing The News from Scene on Radio

Season 8 of 'Scene on Radio,' produced from Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics, launches with an episode focused on the troubled state of American news media. Hosts John Bewin and Chenjerai Kumunika — the latter a journalism professor at NYU with a PhD in mass communication — set out to examine not just what is wrong with the news, but what is really wrong, challenging common assumptions along the way.

The episode opens by establishing the scale of the crisis: a 2025 Gallup poll found only 28% of Americans had even a fair amount of confidence in major media, with 70% expressing little or no confidence. The hosts argue this matters existentially for democracy, echoing Thomas Jefferson's claim that self-governance requires a well-informed citizenry. They also note the collapse of local journalism business models and the proliferation of misinformation across a fragmented media landscape.

John Bewin spent time in North Carolina's 'border belt' — a rural, racially diverse, economically struggling region that is largely a news desert — interviewing residents about their media habits. One featured subject, Ethan Jordan, is a young Republican farmer in his late 20s who gets most of his news from the Newsbreak aggregator app, Facebook comments, and occasionally Fox News while operating farm equipment. Ethan's media consumption is largely algorithmically driven and community-oriented, and he voted for Mark Robinson — the Republican gubernatorial nominee who made international headlines for Holocaust denial and other inflammatory statements — partly because he had personally met Robinson and shaken his hand.

Media scholar Danigal Young, director of the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware and author of a book on misinformation, provides the episode's theoretical backbone. She argues that humans are not primarily motivated by accuracy when consuming news, but by three survival-oriented needs: comprehension (making sense of the world), control (feeling agency), and community (belonging to a social group). She contends that community is the most powerful of these drives, and that as social animals, people process news through the lens of their group identity.

Young traces the intensification of these tendencies to the mid-20th century political sorting of the two major parties, beginning with the racial realignment triggered by the civil rights movement. She argues that as the Republican Party became more homogenous — predominantly white, rural, Christian, and culturally conservative — the emotional intensity of group identity politics increased asymmetrically on the right. However, she notes that 'affective polarization' — the sheer dislike of the opposing party's members — has increased roughly equally on both sides.

The hosts also challenge the popular 'echo chamber' narrative. Young argues that empirical research largely finds echo chambers to be a myth in the sense that people on both sides are regularly exposed to opposing viewpoints — but those views are almost always framed as moral violations by one's own side. She illustrates this with the example of Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where the same events were framed very differently on Fox News versus MSNBC, but both audiences were watching coverage of the same proceedings.

Chenjerai Kumunika pushes back on the nostalgic idea that a return to a Walter Cronkite-era unified media landscape would solve polarization, arguing that the supposed consensus of that era excluded the perspectives of Black Americans, women, and others who were left out of the dominant narrative. The hosts also reference a 2014 Princeton/Northwestern study showing almost no relationship between public opinion and actual government policy, suggesting the media crisis is entangled with deeper failures of democratic governance.

The episode concludes with both hosts affirming that despite their frustrations with journalism, it remains indispensable — as the primary mechanism through which citizens learn about the world, hold power accountable, and organize for change. They preview upcoming episodes that will examine local journalism deserts, the role of political entertainment, the history of media and democracy, and potential solutions.