We used to trust the news, but now some polls and surveys show that our confidence has eroded. Recently, the Us & Them team partnered with West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media for a conversation on diminished trust in journalism. Host Trey Kay spoke with Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of PBS Frontline, and June Cross, director of the documentary journalism program at the Columbia Journalism School.
Trust is in short supply in America as social and political divides continue to erode our faith in our democratic republic. National surveys and polls show that people distrust each other as well as our government and institutions.
Us & Them Host Trey Kay recently partnered with West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media for a conversation focusing on diminished trust in journalism and the news media. He spoke with special guests Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of PBS Frontline, and June Cross, director of the documentary journalism program at the Columbia Journalism School.
The panelists agreed that the rise of social media and the hollowing out of local news have been part of the problem. The event included thought-provoking audience questions and comments about who and what they trust. This episode of Us & Them draws from that live event as we figure out where to turn for reliable information.
This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the CRC Foundation.
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Professor June Cross (left) of the Columbia Journalism School and Raney Aronson-Rath (center) editor-in-chief and executive producer of PBS Frontline, speak with Us & Them Host Trey Kay at West Virginia University.
Credit: Julie BlackwoodRaney Aronson-Rath is editor-in-chief and executive producer of Frontline, PBS’s flagship investigative journalism series. She is a leading voice on the future of journalism. Under her leadership, Frontline has won every major award in broadcast journalism.
Courtesy PhotoJune Cross is Columbia University’s Fred W. Friendly, professor of media and society, and director of the Documentary Journalism Program. Her work has been awarded with the highest honors in broadcast journalism, and her career has highlighted stories of the dispossessed and the intersection of race, politics, and public health. She joined the Columbia Journalism School in 2001, and she is now a tenured faculty member.
Courtesy Photo“We’ve heard from many people who say that the erosion in public trust in America is an existential threat to our democratic republic. We believe this is the issue of our times.” — Trey Kay, Us & Them host
Credit: Julie BlackwoodAn audience of students, faculty and community members from throughout West Virginia came to West Virginia University’s Reynolds Hall to listen to a discussion about diminished trust in the news media and journalism.
Credit: Julie BlackwoodI’m 18 and journalism has been so skewed for my whole life. My political consciousness kind of was there during the Trump presidency, and we know that since then the media has been so biased… Have you noticed any trends of apathy or ignorance among teenagers in my generation towards politics and current events? Because we just don’t care what the media has to say, because it’s been so bad.” — West Virginia University student
Credit: Julie Blackwood“I want to talk to you about the role and impact of technology and journalism. Should journalists be rushing towards new technologies? And what about also the impact of AI [Artificial Intelligence]? Raney, you said that you know journalists are trained to be able to distinguish reality from fake. What if we are soon or if not already in that time where we genuinely cannot tell what is true and what is not?” — Prof. Robert Quick, director of Marshall University’s W. Page Pitt School of Journalism & Mass Communications
Credit: Julie Blackwood“My trust in West Virginia media was diminished after the West Virginia Broadcasters Association and West Virginia media, including Public Broadcasting, changed the debate rules to exclude third party candidates. How do we restore our faith that we can return to a structure where outside voices and not just the two corporate parties have a seat at the table?” — Joel Brown, West Virginia University staff
Credit: Julie Blackwood“There is something to be said that we’ve splintered and that we’re getting news from TikTok instead of just the CBS Nightly News. That it’s not just Walter Cronkite, it’s a variety of voices that are doing this online. But at the same time, you both also mentioned that, that part of this splintering and this distrust resulted as a [democratizing of] the media ecosystem since more and more people have entered. And so I’m wondering, is part of restoring faith in the media, actually restoring some sense of gatekeepers?” — Amy Eddings, reporter from Ideastream Public Media in Cleveland, OH
Credit: Julie Blackwood“When do the individuals that are beholden to media, have a love for media and actually care about the reputation of media, begin to step in and say, ‘For the integrity of my profession, I need to show some authenticity and fix how we as a profession are seen, not the problems of the world per se, but how we conduct ourselves in this profession?’” — Meshea Poore, vice president for West Virginia University’s Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
The Reed College of Media at West Virginia University is hosting a virtual summit on Thursday to discuss incarceration in the Mountain State.
For two years, students have been working on the Women Beyond Bars project, highlighting the issues that women and their families face in prison and after prison.
Emily Allen spoke with Professor Mary Kay McFarland and student Patrick Orsagos about their reporting.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
ALLEN: How did this topic first kind of come to you? And how did you and the students determine where it went?
MCFARLAND: The dean of the Reed College of Media, who is now the provost at WVU, and the dean of the Gaylord [College of Journalism and Mass Communications] at the University of Oklahoma, they were actually looking for a project to do together. At that time, we were looking at the headlines in the news, and the headlines were that West Virginia and Oklahoma had the highest rates of incarceration for womenin the country.
And it was No.1, because they were counting the women in federal facilities as well as the state facilities here. So, once they once they started assigning the women in federal facilities to the states they came from, then West Virginia isn’t No. 1 anymore, but it’s still in the top states for incarcerating women.
ALLEN: Turning to Patrick, in one of the stories on the website, you wrote about how a quarter of the women in West Virginia’s prison system aren’t actually in prison. They’re in regional jails, which typically are overcrowded.
Can you talk to us about what you’ve heard, and why stories like these should matter to West Virginians who ultimately have little to do with state corrections?
ORSAGOS: Whether you know somebody or not who’s incarcerated, your tax dollars are going to that. So when there is such this huge increase of incarcerated women, you know, the people of West Virginia are paying for that. And they’re paying for women to be treated — people, I shouldn’t say just women, [it’s] men and women — to be kind of treated unfairly.
What’s the most shocking thing, at least for me, is the fallout from that. So not only were these women sitting in regional jails, but a lot of these women were, you know, suffering from substance use disorder, and they had to detox in a regional jail without any help from anybody. Or, they were disconnected from their families, and they couldn’t talk to their kids for however long. And that affects more than just the person going through the system, that affects a whole lot of people. So the fallout definitely goes much further than just one person.
ALLEN: What’s interesting to me is that this project takes this focus on women in incarcerated situations, but we only have very little options for actually putting women in prison. Have these stories been difficult to pursue, since there’s not much space for them?
MCFARLAND: We did run into women who feared recriminations [from] talking to us. Women who were hoping to appeal, or on parole, and they were not willing to talk to us, because that was a process that could hurt them.
But once a few women began talking to us, I think we found that it was really empowering. It was an empowering thing for people to be interested in their stories.
ALLEN: What about this project and these stories have surprised you the most?
ORSAGOS: There are so many years when the jails are so overcrowded, and it’s been reported in official government documents. And nothing changes. Nothing happens. I think that’s probably the most shocking for me.
And certainly, the Division of Corrections has been spending money with the Justice Reinvestment Act, they’ve spent millions of dollars on rehabilitation and programs to decrease that number. One of the problems is that as the opioid epidemic has escalated, that number has just continued to increase.
WVU is hosting the Beyond Bars summit Thursday, beginning at 3 p.m. Registration for the virtual event is open to the public. Find out more online at the Women Beyond Bars website.
With the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, our nation’s drinking water — and what’s in it — has been on everyone’s minds.
West Virginia has also had its share of issues with contaminated water. While the coal industry helps create jobs in the state, it also creates the potential for another water crisis.
Credit Colleen S. Good / WVU Stream Lab Project
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WVU Stream Lab Project
Paul Baker, with Save the Tygart Watershed Association, stands next to an unnamed tributary of Three Fork Creek that the group has been monitoring with water quality sensors.
West Virginia University graduate students Shishira Sreenivas and Colleen Good were part of the WVU Stream Lab experimental journalism project at the Reed College of Media this year. The project tested Do-It-Yourself (DIY) water quality sensors and dug into water issues in the state.
This past spring, they focused on a relatively new coal mine’s potential impact on a stream near Grafton in Taylor County.
Mining in Appalachia: Benefits and Risks
In West Virginia, people have a close relationship to the land and its resources. From the rivers, to the mountains, all the way to the coal underground.
For some, their relationship with coal is built on family history and means their livelihood. For Paul Baker, though, coal also means problems.
“What you have to realize when you take coal out of the ground and dig holes in the ground and dump refuse in the streams and stuff, you inherently negatively impact the environment. I mean there’s no getting around it,” Baker said.
Credit Colleen S. Good / WVU Stream Lab Project
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WVU Stream Lab Project
Shishira Sreenivas, center, interviews West Virginia DEP basin coordinator Martin Christ. FROM LEFT: Martin Christ, WV DEP basin coordinator; Shishira Sreenivas, WVU journalism graduate student; Emily Corio, assistant professor at the WVU Reed College of Media; and Paul Baker, with Save the Tygart.
Monitoring the Tygart Watershed
Baker is a retired chemist and works with Save the Tygart Watershed Association. The group monitors the water quality of streams and rivers in Taylor County — an effort members started to fix coal-impacted watersheds.
They’re concerned now about a slurry pond — a waste pile that holds a mixture of water and chemicals used to process coal after it’s mined. The pond belongs to the Leer Mining Complex, a longwall mine owned by Arch Coal. It’s also close to Three Fork Creek, a tributary of the Tygart River.
Credit Colleen S. Good / WVU Stream Lab Project
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WVU Stream Lab Project
The creek where the WVU Stream Lab team dropped their sensors. Save the Tygart Watershed Association has been keeping tabs on the waterway since before the coal slurry pond was installed nearby.
Getting Messy: Collecting the Data
Save the Tygart Watershed Association has been collecting water samples in a creek near the Leer Mining Complex to see if the coal slurry pond could be causing water pollution.
But the students wanted to collect their own data. WVU’s StreamLab project taught journalism students, including us and our classmate Jillian Clemente, how to use do-it-yourself water sensors.
The project used RIFFLE data loggers with sensors that record temperature and conductivity levels. And we packaged it all in an empty plastic bottle.
“By definition, it’s a remote independent field friendly-logger electronic, but it’s basically a bunch of wires connected to a little board that’s like a smaller arduino. Which a riffle basically just measures one thing over and over again and can log that data,” Clemente said.
So the students sunk two sensors into the creek near the mine using marine ropes and a cinder block to keep them in place.
After a week, the sensors were retrieved.
Unfortunately, the DIY sensors were damaged and the data collected on the Taylor County stream was unusable. But failure is part of any experiment.
Results from Save the Tygart showed that conductivity levels have been unusually high. Levels taken before the slurry pond was in use were within the normal range, below 300 microsiemens. But after the slurry pond went in, levels rose, spiking last November with a conductivity reading of over 1600.
Conductivity Defined
But what does high conductivity even mean for a waterway? Dr. Nicolas Zegre, an Assistant Professor of Forest Hydrology at West Virginia University, provided some clarity.
“Just because it has a high conductivity or low doesn’t necessarily make it a good stream or a bad stream,” Zegre said. “The conductivity that you’re measuring is in the context of everything that’s gone on in that watershed over a period of time. And some watersheds or some streams simply have higher or lower conductivities.
“So that’s one of the things the EPA was trying to do related to mountaintop mining and valley fills is understand what conductivity threshold, if exceeded, would be indicative of a degraded stream,” he said.
While conductivity tells you somethingis in the water, it doesn’t tell you what it is. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued guidance on coal mining in Appalachia. It stated that conductivity levels above 300 microsiemens would not properly support aquatic life.
If these guidelines had been followed, it would have triggered more scrutiny for Clean Water Act permits. But the U.S. district court for the District of Columbia rejected the conductivity guidance in 2012.
Jason Bostic is vice president at the West Virginia Coal Association. He says the only significant evidence EPA has on conductivity’s importance are its effects on the benthic macro invertebrates, or the insects and other small animals living in streams. But Bostic questions whether that justifies hurting coal mining during what’s already a tough time for the industry.
Credit Colleen S. Good / WVU Stream Lab Project
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WVU Stream Lab Project
WVU student Jillian Clemente makes some adjustments to the marine rope anchoring the sensors to a cinder block. The rope helps keep the sensors immersed in the water, so continuous readings can be taken.
Water Quality Testing in West Virginia
In West Virginia, coal companies are responsible for doing their own water testing, and sending the results to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Office of Mining and Reclamation to show compliance for mining permits.
West Virginia DEP basin coordinator Martin Christ said conductivity as a way to measure stream health has a long road ahead.
“The DEP is in no hurry to put a standard for conductivity in the rules. And I’d say the Legislature is even less enthusiastic about it,” Christ said.
Still, Christ said it’s helpful to have community groups involved in measuring conductivity and other water quality indicators.
“Regulators can’t be everywhere. Citizens can’t either, but they certainly can extend the view and reach of the regulators and the laws that are supposed to be for and by the people anyway,” Christ said. “The citizens are the people, and it’s their passion for the environment that’s going to keep it together.”
Repeated requests to interview Arch Coal went unanswered.
Wikipedia. It’s the free, online encyclopedia that taps into the wellspring of public knowledge; it’s designed to be written and edited … by the public.
“That’s kind of the amazing thing about Wikipedia — it’s the end result of human curiosity,” said Wiki Education Foundation spokesperson Eryk Salvaggio.
But here’s the thing: 90 percent of contributors to the online encyclopedia are men. That’s according to Salvaggio and several sources. In fact, it’s a well-documented conundrum.
In a New York Times article last year Kat Stoeffel wrote that “Wikipedia famously bears one of the starkest gender gaps in contemporary culture.”
[Wikipedia] is a lopsided, Axe-scented version of the world, one where Sex and the City has fewer citations than a single character from Grand Theft Auto. – Kat Stoeffel/New York Times
“When mostly men are contributing to Wikipedia,” Salvaggio said, “it tends to make a lot of strong, quality articles on things that men traditionally are interested in. So for example military history is great on Wikipedia.”
But women authors? Female scientists? Biographies? Articles on these subjects are shorter, or altogether absent.
The problem with this picture is that about 15 million internet users turn to Wikipedia EACH DAY. 450 million users a month. Most assuredly less than 90 percent of them are men. Why such a gap?
“Well you’d have to ask a woman who doesn’t edit Wikipedia,” Salvaggio said.
It’s the million dollar question being discussed this week in Morgantown.
EVENT DETAILS
The free and public event is sponsored by the Reed College of Media, and WVU Libraries.
The panel will discuss what can be done to bridge the gap. Join in the conversation on twitter: #WikiGenderGap
Wednesday, March 4 at 7:30 pm — G20 Ming Hsieh Hall, WVU, Morgantown, West Virginia
Panelists:
Adeline Koh — Co-founder of The Rewriting Wikipedia Project (@adelinekoh)
Jami Mathewson — Educational Partnerships Manager at the Wiki Education Foundation
Sydney Poore — Wikipedian-in-Residence at Cochrane Collaboration (@SydneyPoore)
Frank Schulenburg — Executive Director of the Wiki Education Foundation (@fschulenburg)
Women make up nearly 60 percent of the professional workforce, yet they hold 25 percent of jobs in the area of computer science. That gender gap one reason why West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media hosted a Hackathon that focused on women, media and wearable technology.
Over 40 students signed on to participate in the “Women’s Hackathon on Wearables.” Few came with technical backgrounds. The event was co-produced by PBS Media Shift, an online publication that looks at changes in the media industry. Events Coordinator Beth Laing said the all-female environment created a more comfortable atmosphere for the participants.
“They don’t feel like they’re going to put themselves in a bad position by asking a question, be thought less of,” Laing said.
Hackathon Features:
Web-panel discussion with Google in California
Inspirational talks from female leaders in technology
Small-group innovation sessions where participants worked to develop a technology (a device or an app) that relates to wearables* and media.
Idea pitch
*Wearables: mini-computers that can be found in watches, glasses or bracelets. They can perform tasks like taking video or monitoring fitness.
Credit David Smith / WVU
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WVU
One of the Hackathon teams hard at work, developing their idea. Judges selected this group’s idea for the “BioBit” as the winning idea.
Innovation: BIOBIT
The Hackathon ended with eight teams pitching ideas. One team came up with what was applauded as the best idea: an accessory to the popular FitBit (a wireless, wearable device that tracks activity).
They call their innovation the BioBit. It would connect to the FitBit bracelet and could measure certain nutrient levels and notify the wearer if they’re deficient. Judges told the creators to try to patent their idea immediately. There was no monetary award, but Media Shift will publish an article on BioBit.
The take away for all was about process: the process of innovation.
Universities Represented:
West Virginia University
Carnegie Melon University
Penn State University
Howard University
Syracuse University
Georgetown University
Some thoughts going into the Hackathon:
Hilary Godin (WVU): “I think it will be a learning experience. Yeah. I think it will also help me decide if I want to major in something with technology.”
Maggie Kong (WVU): “I know that traditionally there is a gender gap in media and technology fields, so I really want to improve my skills in this event, yeah.”
Katherine Dye (Health Sciences and Technology Academy at WVU): “I’ve read all the collateral that was sent out prior and hoped that that would give me an idea, but I think part of what this weekend entails is not having those boundaries.”
Some thoughts coming out of the Hackathon:
Katie Heller (WVU): “I think that when women get in an uninhibited environment, then we do amazing things, and this really showcases our ability.”
