Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
A newsstand in Annapolis, Maryland, shows a copy of the Capital Gazette the day after an armed man killed four journalists and another employee in the paper's newsroom, April 15, 2019.
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is re-publishing this conversation.
In this week’s edition of The Open Mind, Center for Public Integrity CEO Susan Smith Richardson discusses the importance of local communities in national coverage of the Trump administration's corruption and the 2020 campaign.
Formerly editorial director of the Newsroom Practice Change program at Solutions Journalism Network, Susan Smith Richardson has edited leading newspapers from Texas and Chicago to Los Angeles and Sacramento. “The Center has a proud legacy of hard-hitting journalism. I plan to build on that legacy, focusing on making our work more accessible and more relevant to communities across the country,” Richardson said in the announcement of her appointment. “At a time of disinformation and disaffection with institutions we have to rethink what issues we cover, how we cover them, and whose stories define what is newsworthy, if we are truly to hold power to account.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Alexander Heffner: Your aspiration ultimately is to scale integrity so that at the national level there is that trust.
Susan Smith Richardson: Well, I think integrity is connected to two things. One, you build trust over time. You build trust because your work does have integrity. And I think we define integrity a lot of times as journalists in these very big and lofty ways. While we’re not going to let a corporation affect, you know whether or not we choose to tell a story, we won’t take pressure from special interests. Those are all key and fundamental measures of integrity. But I also think integrity comes down to this question of really thinking constantly about what’s in the public interest, not always as defined by us, but as defined by, you know, members of the public.
Heffner: Isn’t the thrust of the center’s work approaching 2020 to hold accountable an administration that has demonstrated a real corruption and problematic corruption in noncompliance with some of the constitutional standards?
Richardson: I think there are two issues that we’re dealing with right now in the national media. So first let’s just tease out the part that the Center for Public Integrity is responsible for. We do investigative journalism. We’re not in some of the day-to-day that you saw, over the last, I mean, on any given day about whatever President Trump decided he was going to say, whether it’s about, you know, Greenland or named the issue, right? Or gun control. We don’t do the day to day. That’s a conversation though that is very problematic because who drives the conversation is often the president. Then there’s a whole second level of work that we do, which is a deep dive investigative work. And in that one, yes, as you’re saying, our role is to expose abuses of power and how indeed this administration as does any other, participates with special interests and does not work toward, you know, a larger common good. That’s easy enough to define. So that is the work we do.
But kind of getting back to the essence of your question and the point I’m trying to make about defining the integrity. Yes, we’ve got the constitutional duties, we want to hold the feet to fire of policymakers, feet to fire and the elected officials feet to fire. But there still is this other question of, you know, fundamental, what are the key issues and concerns that are, that these policies and practices from, how are these policies and practices from Washington having a direct effect on people’s daily lives. What we’re trying to do is while exposing those abuses of power, think about them a lot more from the standpoint of how they are affecting people’s every day lives.
Heffner: So how do you guarantee in 2020 that we demand from our Fourth Estate, not just credibility but integrity.
Richardson: I used to use this term call embedded journalism. I don’t think it ever went anywhere, but the whole idea is that I think our ability to have integrity with the public is really, it’s an issue of, of being there. The more, you know, when you cover campaigns, you tend to fly into places and you drop in. I think the most valuable and the journalism that has the most integrity is the journalism that is most connected to communities. So I think if part of our struggle is being able to build stronger connections with the communities that we report about, and I think that certainly makes journalists more in the eyes of the public, less prone to the kind of attacks that we’re facing right now. So I think a stronger sense of connection with communities. And that’s why I’m thinking there is a conveyor belt between local and national.
We know right now we’re in a crisis in terms of State House coverage in local journalism. There’s a lot of funding going into trying to build that up because there’s an understanding that local communities feel they don’t have a voice. There isn’t enough investigative journalism happening on a state level and national organizations can certainly go in and help. I think the way we want to build that integrity is by being there as an ally to local and State House coverage. And that means not just coming in with resources, but really being intentional about going into communities that journalists haven’t always been good about covering and those tend to be divided along issues of race and class.
Heffner: Isn’t it important that journalists expose the connection between corruption and economic insecurity?
Richardson: I think that’s why we are creating an inequality beat. It is both about now, but it’s also a long-term issue. Inequality is a, you know, has been trending, you know, essentially growing, income inequality has been trending since the 70s. Well, what I really want to emphasize is that yes, we’re in a moment with a very specific president who is very much about, you know, using government as you know, some kind of private collateral. Long-term inequality existed. Inequality existed under Obama. Inequality will exist when Trump is gone. You are correct. Some government, some administrations exacerbate it, and we need to talk about it and we have, and I think why we choose the inequality lane is because we realize the very question you’re asking. Nobody was really consistently diving into what the tax policy meant in a meaningful way from going to Ohio where someone thought they would get a job to, you know, looking at what was happening in the last hearing. My point is that yes, journalists do need to do that on a national level and that’s why we’ve created this area of work.
