April 14, 2025
On February 25, 2025, the Suburban Illini Club hosted the College of Media for “Engaging in a Divided Society: Lessons from Journalism,” a panel discussion on how to engage with others in an age of polarization.
Moderated by College of Media Dean Tracy Sulkin, panelists included journalism faculty and alumni:
- Leon Dash, Professor and Swanlund Chair, Department of Journalism; 1995 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Explanatory Reporting while at The Washington Post
- Colleen King, Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism; Director of the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media; former Executive Producer for MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams
- Dan Balz (BS ’68, MS ’72, journalism), Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post covering national politics, the presidency and Congress
- Stephanie Lulay (BS ’08, journalism), Executive Editor and Co-Founder, Block Club Chicago, an award-winning, reader-funded nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods
The webinar was a continuation of a College of Media series launched in Fall 2024 called “Bridging Divides: Conversations on Media and Disagreement.”
Read excerpts from “Engaging in a Divided Society” below. Note: Answers have been condensed for length and clarity.
Sulkin: It strikes me that a threshold that we discuss a lot is the lines between news versus commentary. And many see the lines between those two as becoming increasingly blurred. I wonder what your thoughts are about the extent to which that seems a useful theoretical divide, and then what the consequences are of the blurring of those lines.
Dash: News columns are very clear that they are news columns, and I try to point that out to the students, in terms of understanding what a news column is. An opinion column is very, very different from a news column, in which you have a lot of leeway to express your opinion. I think social media has blurred the lines between what is considered news and what is considered an opinion. But I think the conventional publications have continued to distinguish between the two and keep them separated.
Lulay: I think Twitter/X and TikTok are full of opinions. We’re in a period where newsrooms are rapidly disappearing and we’re in an era that the world really needs more truth tellers. Something I’ve seen, engaging with readers for a long time, is that readers on the whole really aren’t able to distinguish between news-driven reporting and opinions on the Op-Ed page, and I think that that damages trust.
Balz: One of the things we’ve noticed is that commentary and opinion writing draws a huge audience. And we know that because of the siloed nature of how people get their news, that people seek out opinion journalism that conforms with their points of view. And in the in the digital age, particularly when you’re looking at a homepage for—whether it’s the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal—the commentary pieces are right there smack next to the news pieces. In a printed paper, the opinion pages are in a separate place. They’re clearly marked. But in a sense the, the presentation has helped to blur the lines.
Sulkin: We’ve been talking about the public’s trust in the news and looking at polling about what people think about the media. There’s been a slow decline in trust in all sorts of institutions over the past several decades, with the news media being part of that. Pew reports that over three-quarters of Americans and majorities from both political parties think that news organizations tend to favor one side or the other. Yet large majorities also say that news coverage keeps politicians from doing things that they shouldn’t. So that scrutiny, that watchdog role, still holds. What are your views about what would help the public to regain trust, if we think it’s been lost, or where could we build on some of those pockets of trust?
Lulay: I’m really happy to be in a local newsroom these days. I think we can make a real impact in terms of trust. Trust is built from the ground up and there’s no better place to build relationships with readers than in a local newsroom. Rebuilding trust in our city is key to why Block Club was founded.
When we started this newsroom, there was a study that trust, particularly on the South and West sides of our city—these are under-resourced areas of our city—trust was at an all-time low with the media. And that was because of generations of the media either only reporting on crime or chaos that happened in those neighborhoods, if they ever showed up at all. At Block Club, instead of covering a traditional beat like courts and education in such a big city where there’s too much going on, our reporters are assigned to two to three contiguous neighborhoods. And when they’re covering a smaller area like that, they really are able to build close relationships with readers, which we believe ensures the news that we’re reporting not only reflects what they most care about, but also leads to a more accurate portrayal of their neighborhood.
King: I would say it’s very tricky because the skills that we teach our students to cover Chicago and maybe go work for Stephanie [Lulay] are not different than skills I would teach up-and-coming reporters to go work with Dan [Balz]. I think people are turning off the news in large part because it always seems like bad news right now. So perhaps we can be more creative in our angles, but I also think transparency is a big part of reporting. And being honest in what we know and what we don’t is a big part of it, too. You know, it is our job to hold people accountable; that’s why we do what we do. Hopefully over the course of time, people can see that our reporting holds up and is fact-based and we’re just trying to report the truth as best we know it.
Balz: Repairing the decline in trust is a very difficult job that we can’t do in and of ourselves as news organizations. What’s happened in terms of the decline of trust is a societal-wide problem. Just as the polarization of the country is a societal-wide problem. And it will take time to begin to overcome that. We have a role to play in that. There are things we can do about that. Colleen [King] is exactly right. Transparency is important. The idea of being open about what we know and what we don’t know is important. But we also have to do what we’ve always done, which is to be aggressive in our reporting and follow that wherever it leads us and live with the consequences of that. Our first obligation is to find the truth to the best that we can find it on any day or week.
Sulkin: We had Chuck Todd visit the College of Media in December right before he announced that he would be departing NBC News after a long career there. I think a narrative thread he was pulling was that local news is the cure to what ails the news ecosystem. I think part of the argument was that maybe if folks have the opportunity to engage with local news, that helps with some spillover to how they think about national news. But the growing news deserts mean a lot of folks don’t have local news. As we are preparing students and launching them out into their careers, Colleen and Leon, what are we doing to correct some of these news desert issues?
Dash: My emphasis with my students is fact-based reporting. It’s a no-no in my classes when they say, ‘I assume’ or ‘I think.’ I say you shouldn’t be ‘assuming’ and you shouldn’t be ‘thinking’ anything. You should know. If you don’t know, you should say you don’t know. And transparency is a big part of that. Being honest and upfront. I don’t even know how you overcome this divide in this society today. But in terms of conventional journalism, fact-based reporting is very, very important and transparency is also very important.
King: And I would say we’re training our student journalists to learn all kinds of skills. Our students are leaving our universityknowing how to podcast and write, do audio and video journalism, and write online or for print news outlets. So they could really drop in anywhere and cover any community they want to. While we’ve got many who want to return home to the Chicagoland area, or make it big in New York or LA or Washington, we do encourage them to think about covering smaller communities— at least getting a start there—and understanding what it’s like to cover a community where you do get to know your audience and the people you’re covering and in government as well.
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