The commoditization of the news media

The politicization of the news media

Despite all the challenges and shortcomings of traditional news media, it continues to serve a vital purpose. Just as signal fires were critical to the survival of our distant ancestors, the news is essential to the survival of our democracy.

“If there’s not a free press,” says Johanna Dunaway, research director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, D.C., “then all the information we get is coming directly from campaigns or office holders or candidates or interest groups. [All of them] have an interest, so they don’t have an incentive to tell the whole truth.”

For the roughly 63% of U.S. adults who follow the news only some of the time, now and then, or hardly ever, Dunaway emphasizes the need to instill the importance of keeping up with public affairs – even if the reporting is skewed. “All too often I think people are super unhappy with what’s happening in government, and they don’t know how we got here,” she says.

Instilling the significance of staying informed, however, mandates a return to the bread and butter of news reporting — that is audiences. As Picard points out, the first thing any news media outlet needs to know is who its readers, viewers or listeners are. This task, however, has been a challenge for journalists, who have traditionally cared little for their audience.

“Quite frankly, journalists historically didn’t pay very much attention to their audiences,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute. “Newspapers used to do lots of audience research, but it all went to the advertising department. They didn’t really like their listeners or their readers or viewers because all they ever did was call to complain and write nasty letters.”

But through all the industry’s turbulence, there’s one medium that’s continued to maintain a close relationship with its audience. Literally.

“What we hear over and over again when we look at readership studies is people want local news,” Picard says. “They want local information. They want to know what’s going on in their schools. They want to know what’s going on in their town halls.”

At its best, local news fosters not only trust between and among reporters and the public, but transparency and engagement as well. “One of the hallmarks is you have a sense of dialogue and connection between the news organization and the people in that community,” says Zachary Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. “There’s a lot of trust, there’s a lot of dialogue, there’s a lot of openness – and you get coverage that speaks to the issues that people care about. You get coverage that’s helping people make decisions about how to go about their lives.”

The State of Local News Project is part of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism — an initiative focused on helping local news survive and thrive in today’s media landscape. “We’re interested in conducting research on local news, including what’s successful within the local news world and how the industry is changing,” Metzger says, “and then trying to apply that research to help different outlets pursue sustainability and innovation.”

In his role, Metzger tracks the history and evolution of the local news industry to understand the ramifications of different levels of access to local news — i.e., what varying levels of access means for communities and for us as a nation more broadly.

Despite maintaining a high level of trust – unlike most national media outlets – local news has faced its fair share of challenges over the years that have affected access to and the quality of the news it provides.

Because local newspapers’ readership is smaller by nature, some of the problems that have plagued the industry overall have hit local newspapers hardest. The Internet’s impact on ad sales – classifieds in particular – being one.

“There’s been an effective collapse of that revenue stream over the past 20 years,” Metzger says. “So most news outlets have had to try to pivot to a subscriber-based revenue model. The problem is that a subscriber-based model can’t hope to account for what you would have been able to charge for advertisements. This has been one of the driving factors behind why we’ve seen so many news outlets disappear over the last 20 years.”

In addition to closures, Dunaway – who wrote her dissertation on local news, with a specific focus on media ownership – points to mass acquisitions and consolidation as an outgrowth of these cash-flow issues.

“The bad boys on the block are the Alden Capitals of the world (i.e., venture capital firms) that buy these outlets, strip them for their parts and sell them — and they don’t even pretend to care about news,” she says. “They’re unapologetic that the only reason they’re buying the outlets is for whatever profit it can bring them.”

All of this has led to a reality in which “something like 70% of all dailies are owned by just 10 companies,” Metzger says, and in which there are significantly fewer outlets — “thousands in the last, say, 10 years,” Dunaway notes.

She’s largely correct.

Over the last 20 years, the number of local U.S. newspapers dropped from 7,325 in 2005 to 4,490 in 2025 — a net loss of more than 3,200 papers over two decades, per the State of Local News 2025 report. “Where previously you might’ve had 15 outlets in a given place,” says Metzger, “now you’re down to three because they’ve all been combined.” Some towns have it worse, with not a single local news source to speak of.

Coinciding with the decrease in outlets is the reduction in staff. Since 2005, there’s been a 75% decrease in newspaper jobs, according to the report. “This leaves a lot of local papers in particular really understaffed, where they might only have one or two reporters on staff who are now responsible for covering an entire county’s worth of news by themselves,” Metzger says.

At the same time, more and more people are going to news aggregators like Google or Apple News for their information. This draws readers away from local news sites where they might have seen advertisements or paid for a subscription.

“Instead they’re just seeing headlines, they’re seeing AI-generated summaries, and they’re not engaged in the same way,” says Metzger. “The ability for news outlets to attract new readers and turn them into reliable subscribers goes down when you have these walls of technology that create a level of separation between the readers and the product.”

This barrier coupled with the lack of resources for reporting the news means that the quality of local news is constantly at risk. As local newspapers continue to bleed subscribers and revenue, much of the content in suburban and rural newspapers becomes either fluff or recirculated content from the nearest city newspaper, Metzger notes. Thus these vital community resources end up losing the unique, local angle that attracted readers in the first place.

This, Metzger says, has ramifications for civic life.

“Part of the challenge when you lose local news is that local politics become national politics,” he says. “Everything starts being viewed through the lens of our national political discourse. But local news helps to cut through that; it helps to say, ‘This is the partisan discussion that’s happening around these national issues, but this is what the impacts would be for our community.’

“That level of nuance and that level of localized analysis is one of the things that local news does so well. In the absence of that, you’re only getting partisan political discourse, you’re losing that nuance, which is dangerous for credible information.”

As Metzger and Dunaway note, the decline of local news has larger behavioral and societal implications.

“When local news outlets disappear from an area, the voting behavior in that area becomes more polarized,” Dunaway says. “You get more straight-ticket voting, partly because people don’t get the information they need about down-ballot elections. So even if someone wanted to vote for a different party for mayor or the House, they don’t because they know nothing about the candidates.”

“Voter participation can go down, civic engagement can go down, incumbents tend to be re-elected more often,” Metzger adds. “Corruption can increase, police misconduct can increase, taxes can increase. So there are very real, measurable impacts.”

What people are looking for in their local news, he says, is pretty basic. “Candidly, what a lot of people want is a source of information about their community, what’s happening in their community — restaurant openings, events,” says Metzger. “They want to be able to see their kid’s name in Little League results. And I think there’s a lot of attention on the role of local news in holding people in power accountable — that’s an incredibly important function.”

Local news also serves an important function in reducing polarization, Dunaway notes, as the issues it focuses on help humanize the community and its members.

“It focuses on the issues that remind us what we all have in common,” she says. “A lot of local politics is more about schools and your garbage collection. Everything is less about these big ideological, conflictual issues that the two parties fight about all the time.”

For all the problems plaguing local news, however, a willingness to pay has not traditionally been one.

“People really value their local news source,” Metzger says. “The problem, and where we see some of the willingness to pay for local news start to disappear, is when their local news becomes extremely diluted – the quality and diversity and breadth of reporting is extremely diluted. That’s when we start to see the desire to pay for what has become a lackluster product really start to go down.”

Thus local news finds itself in a quandary: “We’re kind of in that challenging middle ground where there’s actually quite a bit of demand for strong, vibrant local news, but there’s not a whole lot of supply to meet that demand,” says Metzger.

The bright-ish side? Metzger says that some news organizations, acknowledging that the old model is no longer working, are making changes. He points to a “reorientation” back toward audiences – outlets actually engaging with and asking readers what they want, and the curtailment of national news reporting by local outlets.

Some, however, are taking a completely different approach, including re-organizing as nonprofits — a move that, as Metzger says, “provides some insulation from some of the market factors.” At the same time, however, “Nonprofit is a tax code,” he says. “It’s not a business plan. So a lot of these places still need to have some sort of revenue model. But, we are seeing some really successful nonprofit newsrooms emerge in cities around the country.”

While Metzger emphasizes there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges faced by local news, one overarching change he’s seeing is a shift back toward hyperlocal. This includes building connections and trust between reporters and members of the community — effectively acting as the “glue” that holds a community together. The smoke signals of the modern age.

At a time when trust in leaders and institutions — including national news media — is at record lows, local news still has an integral role to play in democracy’s survival.

“Local media are still more trusted than national media,” Dunaway says, “so if we think news should matter at all, if we have the one level of news that’s still trusted going away, that’s a problem.”

“Whether people are listening to the radio, whether they’re reading stories or watching videos on a website or on TV, regardless, the model is to keep people engaged,” says Syracuse University professor Johanna Dunaway.

Research Director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, D.C., Dunaway studies the intersection of news media and politics. Her research has focused on the impact of changing communication technologies on public opinion, political behavior, polarization and civic engagement. And what she’s learned about the news media’s revenue model has implications for each of those areas.

“For-profit news media, especially those in a super competitive environment, are going to default toward covering politics in a more sensational way,” says Dunaway. “In the world of politics, especially in the U.S. right now, the way to do that is to cover the controversies between the two parties and between politicians.”

The news media’s current obsession with politics is rooted in both psychology and history — calling to mind the “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra of the yellow journalism era of the late 19th century. Characterized by newspaper magnets William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s prioritization of violent or tragic stories to boost readership, this sensational style of reporting was popularized by television news in the 1980s.

Today, however, politics has usurped violence and tragedy.

“The more vitriolic someone is, the more extreme they are, maybe even the edgier they are, the more coverage they’re going to get,” says Dunaway. The most obvious example she points to is President Donald Trump. “One reason he got so much attention from the media early on, even before the 2016 primaries, was because he’s great [for] the media because he says exactly what he thinks,” Dunaway adds. “He speaks in quotables and frequently says outrageous things, and that’s all really appealing fodder for media outlets that are dependent on attracting as many eyeballs as possible.”

In the competitive world of journalism, Trump is a microcosm of the conundrum that news outlets find themselves in. Through interviews with journalists, Dunaway has repeatedly heard the same thing: “Even when we, journalistically, don’t think we should necessarily cover something because we know he’s trying to manipulate us,” she recalls, “we can’t not [cover it] because we’ll lose those audiences.”

When journalism becomes a race to see who can report the most garish political remarks of the day the fastest, the potential for error and manipulation is high. The natural outgrowth of such sensationalistic reporting is tribalism and division, which brings its own set of problems.

“The more polarized everyone becomes, the more they are willing to believe anything the politicians on their side say,” Dunaway says. “That’s a real problem because if the people who are leading your party are not being honest or not representing all the facts, and you won’t even listen to anyone on the other side, you can really get led astray.”

But it’s not just politicians who are prone to misrepresenting or distorting the facts, it’s the news media itself. A little pressure from advertisers can go a long way.

“Because media companies are so dependent on money from advertisers, if [an advertiser] happens to represent a particular tribe, they can bring a lot of pressure to bear on the owners or operators of media companies to try to reign them in or to try to get more of the views they support into the media,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute.

The way in which we consume news has implications for our politics and civic life as well.

Despite the fact that the news is consumed by politics, we rarely engage deeply with it. The medium may be at least partly to blame.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 56% of American adults often get their news from a mobile device. Additionally, 21% often get their news from social media, while about half (53%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media. These seemingly innocuous insights have major ramifications for not just how we engage with the news, but how we view and engage with the world and people in it.

Cellphones and social media, it turns out, are terrible for attention.

“It’s a cognitive bias problem where it’s harder to focus for longer periods of time when you’re on a tiny screen compared to a larger screen,” says Dunaway. “Social media also increases the tendency to jump around and look at stuff but not engage with it deeply. That’s probably even more true if you’re on your mobile device.”

Much like the root problems faced by traditional media, however, the greatest issue with social media is the way in which “the algorithms prioritize vitriol, hostility and sensationalism,” Dunaway says, noting that most people aren’t aware of the economic model behind that. “They don’t understand that the reason that stuff is getting preference in their feed is because it’s hostile and negative and sensational. They assume it’s naturally generated.”

The reason for this is the same as with all media – this type of content is head-turning. Not to mention, cheap to produce, Picard notes.

And although there’s no easy solution — some outlets have tried paywalls, others fundraising campaigns — both Picard and Dunaway agree that media literacy is at least part of the problem and, thus, the solution.

“I think media history is more important now than ever as we get more kinds of media,” Picard says. “People need to understand how to analyze the content they’re getting, where it’s from, how to use it and how to look for good information. This is becoming more and more important as we become tribalized. But also, as we’re diving into AI – which is making it much worse – [media literacy] should probably start by middle school and continue on from there.”

Dunaway, however, believes there’s something bigger at play that needs to be addressed if we’re to solve the issue of the warped news media.

“I think it’s broader than [media literacy] in the sense that there are plenty of people out there who are media literate, but who just can’t be bothered or are uninterested or turn away from politics for whatever reason. It’s almost like civic literacy is the issue. We need to be able to train and educate people to be more equipped to make these hard decisions about what’s truthful, or credible, and what isn’t.”

But there may be a silver lining to this dilemma. Independent journalists, as well as self-made ones, have been turning en masse to online platforms, such as YouTube, Substack, Patreon and Rumble, to share news and information – via articles, videos and podcasts – with audiences fleeing mainstream media.

“We’re seeing an awful lot of journalists, many of whom have been laid off from various media [outlets], who are doing exactly that,” says Picard. “They’re moving to where they can cover niche stories and do things that they want. So we’re getting a lot of specialties out there that are meeting the needs of smaller groups of people or people who are interested enough to pay for it — and I think that is a very healthy thing. … Those are replacing some of [what’s] been lost in legacy media.”

That’s not to say these new forms of media don’t also face challenges or pitfalls. They, too, can fall prey to the sensationalism, tribalism and conflicts of interest faced by more traditional news outlets.

When trust is low and polarization high, opinions and conspiracy theories run rampant. And these online platforms offer an ideal breeding ground.

“The bad side of it is … you’ve got people who don’t know as much about news or public affairs, who can’t tell the difference between an opinion-based podcast versus one that’s trying to retain some of the values of journalism – where they’re trying to be objective or look at things from all sides,” Dunaway says. “And your average citizen doesn’t have a very refined ability to distinguish between opinion and news, and that extends to these formats as well.”

The emergence of these outlets, however, points to the public’s desire for a return to more human-centered news.

Beyond their core content, many of these independent journalists, writers and creators offer robust online subscriber communities, which often include chats, livestreams and roundtables, but also in-person events. This type of connection, Dunaway points out, harkens back to the defining era of television news characterized by trusted reporters like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. And it may be one way to regain public confidence in this modern, monolithic media age.

“It’s almost like we’re cycling back to a model that looks more like [when] people used to follow the evening news,” Dunaway says. “If you always read this Substack or you always listen to this podcast, then you’re getting to where you trust the person doing the podcast or the person writing the Substack – and that’s [where you get] that brand loyalty.”

Check back next week for the third and final installment in this series about the demise of local news and the implications for communities.

Long before modern technology enabled us to know the results of an election in France or of an invasion in Ukraine or of a new policy out of Washington — before streaming platforms, cellphones, TV, radio, newspapers and even couriers — humans used smoke signals to share critical information long distances. Useful for conveying important one-word messages — danger!, help!, victory! — the medium had its limitations.

Beyond its inability for nuance, smoke signals depended on factors like weather, visibility, timing and vigilance for effective delivery. Thus messages were easily muddled, mistaken or missed altogether. A tribe or village’s proximity to the sender affected its receipt of a message; the closer you were to its creator, the more you could accurately decipher its meaning – so long as there was a shared understanding of the signal code.

Over time, as signal fires became the telegraph became newspapers became TV, the information delivered by these media moved beyond that which is critical for our immediate survival. No longer limited by carbon communiques, we can now know what’s happening around the nation and world instantaneously, using not fire and smoke, but light and waves. Every presidential tweet, the latest celebrity gossip, every conspiracy theory, the latest outrage.

Yet while our communication has advanced, what of our ability to decipher the meaning and motives behind it?

The result of the proliferation of the news media has been an amalgam of outlets and information — and fierce competition for our attention and dollars.

But when news becomes commoditized, what gets lost in the smoke?

In the 1970s — a decade defined by the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam war, Roe v. Wade, high inflation and unemployment — the news media in the U.S. was more trusted than the government. Public confidence in mass media hovered between 68% and 72% during the decade, according to Gallup’s first measurement of trust in the media.

Since that time, that trust has dropped markedly. In a 2025 Gallup poll, just 28% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in news media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately.

Somewhere in the decades that gave rise to talk radio, cable news, the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet, cellphones and social media, Americans lost their faith in the news media. At the same time, trust in government and our willingness to vote across party lines has declined, while our negative views of the opposing political party have risen. Politics have become increasingly tied to a person’s personal identity, and bipartisan cooperation is nearly nonexistent.

So, is this the chicken or the egg? Did news media help create the problem or does it simply report it? How well do news media companies serve the needs of the public and our republic? And are all mediums and outlets created equal?

To begin to answer these questions, we have to go back.

“The real issue has always been who’s going to pay, because somebody has to pay,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute. For nearly 50 years, Picard has been studying the economics and management of media companies – specifically, how well they serve public needs and the needs of democracy. “We started out with newspapers where there was very little advertising,” Picard notes, “so people had to pay.”

That was in the late 1700s, when a paper cost about $5 for one to two pages of content. Limited readership, however, meant newspapers weren’t big moneymakers.

“The average people couldn’t afford a newspaper,” Picard says. “Newspapers were intended for the elites, for the emerging merchant classes, but they really weren’t for the public. Most of the public couldn’t even read at the time.”

As literacy improved and Westward Expansion spawned new towns, newspapers exploded in number. “Chambers of commerce would essentially subsidize a printer to come and run a newspaper,” Picard notes.

Yet through most of the 1800s, readers remained the primary funders of news media. But with automation came a new financier.

“What happened in the late 1800s was industrialization – the rise of machinery that made printing faster and cheaper, particularly in big cities,” says Picard. “So, we began seeing the rise of newspapers that were aimed at the masses.”

Industrialization also enabled the manufacture of consumer goods – and with that came advertising. Coupled with reductions in printing costs, advertising transformed the news media’s methodology.

An industry once narrowly focused on news began to cast a much wider net.

“Suddenly you had lots of sports, you had lots of society news, you had women’s pages, cooking pages,” Picard notes. “They began sprouting dramatically to try to appeal to everybody in the population. This was a time before there were any other media, so the newspaper was basically something for everybody and … everybody would get it.”

With the boom in U.S. consumer goods products, advertising went from making up roughly 25% of newspapers’ overall revenue in the early 1900s to 80% by the end of the century.

“You had all of these branded products and stores starting to advertise heavily,” says Picard, “with consumers basically only paying the distribution costs.”

But as is always the case when a new medium comes along, newspapers took a hit when radio emerged in the 1920s. After that came television — which “nearly killed radio,” Picard says. Despite the prevalence and convenience of television news, newspapers continued to hold their own until around the turn of the century.

Around 2005, advertising and circulation growth peaked, even as many newspapers migrated to the Internet. “At that point you had essentially 40% of U.S. households getting a newspaper,” says Picard.

As they lost advertisers to television and eventually streaming news, newspapers attempted to hand more of the cost back to readers who, by this time, had grown accustomed to getting their news for free or cheap. The Internet, however, all but ensured the failure of this reversal as “there was so much advertising on the Internet,” Picard says, “that the prices of advertising plummeted.”

The loss of classified ads to the world wide web all but sealed newspapers’ fate. As they struggled to turn a profit — a challenged amplified by the 2008 recession — newspapers began reducing their special sections, followed by their news departments. Mergers, mass consolidations and closures followed, hitting small, local newspapers hardest.

The result has been fewer journalists writing more stories using fewer resources, at a time when attention is declining.

“If you go back 50 years or so, [newspapers] had lots of dedicated writers doing the news, and they might only write one or two stories a week,” Picard says. “What that meant is they were doing a lot of research, talking to a lot of people, digging into a lot of things in the community.

“Today, the average journalist is writing anywhere from eight to 15 stories a day, which means they’re not able to do a lot of research — they’re just knocking stuff out.”

While more pronounced in the newspaper industry, the problem isn’t confined to it. All media – even the now dominant streaming news platforms – are struggling to remain relevant and profitable.

“The quality has diminished simply because they don’t have the time, money or effort to [go that deep],” Picard says, “and that’s a real problem for all communities across the U.S.”

But when news outlets are so reliant on advertisers for their survival, it’s not just the quality of the news that suffers, but the integrity of the entire news media apparatus. “We’ve seen lots of conflicts of interest – particularly with advertising – where stories get killed or buried simply because the advertisers don’t want them [reported],” Picard says.

The outcome is a media landscape in which the needs of the audience, and thus those of democracy, are superseded by those of the people writing the checks. But advertisers and news outlets need eyeballs to both make and justify spending money. So, in the race to attract audiences, competition is often cutthroat and the tactics questionable.

As Syracuse University professor and Research Director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship Johanna Dunaway points out, “Whether people are listening to the radio, whether they’re reading stories or watching videos on a website or on TV, regardless, the model is to keep people engaged.”

Check back next week for the next installment in this series about the politicization of the news media and the implications for American civic life.

“If you lose money, you lose much; if you lose friends, you lose more; if you lose faith, you lose all.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Early in 2025, when government cuts resulted in the loss of funding for refugee resettlement, a group of faith leaders in Northwest Arkansas worked together to raise money for a local refugee resettlement organization. By hosting a benefit concert, they were able to raise more than $10,000 to help the organization stay open.

Composed of people from various faith traditions and political ideologies, this group is a testament to the good that can come when we stop fixating on our differences and, instead, focus on what we have in common — and it’s part of a larger movement: the One America Movement.

An organization committed to reducing toxic polarization by working with faith leaders and faith communities, One America Movement is using the “wisdom of the faith traditions” to achieve its mission, says Chandra Whetstine, the organization’s chief operating officer (COO).

“We’re building a network of people of faith who speak and act against toxic polarization in accordance with their own faith traditions,” she says. “Our approach is that if we can support those Americans, to help them have healthy group dynamics inside and between their groups, then that becomes kind of a stabilizing force for the broader society.”

One America’s vision is “a resilient, strong and united country working together to solve our common challenges.” With nearly 110 million Americans (almost one-third of the country) who attend worship services regularly, the organization sees a tremendous opportunity to have greater impact — as its partnership in Northwest Arkansas illustrates.

“That’s an example of something that individually they would not have been able to do,” Whetstine says, “but because they were working together and crossing divides, they were able to have a bigger impact in their community than they otherwise would have.”

The movement’s approach – and the best tool against fear, anger and division, Whetstine says – is decidedly simple: building relationships. “There’s an old saying that it’s hard to hate up close,” she says, “so the more we can get people into real relationships with people who are different from them, the better off we’re going to be.”

Fortunately, despite all the differences between faith communities, there’s a core conviction that unites them: a belief in something greater than themselves, Whetstine notes.

But in a world that increasingly venerates Earthly power over a higher power, politics has displaced religion in the modern zeitgeist. As Whetstine says, “Our religious identity has been co-opted.”

“One thing we hear again and again from the faith leaders we work with is things like, ‘I have my congregation for an hour a week, and they are being’ — to use a Christian term — ‘discipled by cable news the rest of the time,’” she adds. “Politics is trying to make itself the highest good, but in faith traditions, we recognize that politics is not the highest good. That releases some of the pressure for us to be perfect and, instead, really lean on the highest good, which is God.”

As One America sees it, toxic polarization runs deeper than blue or red, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Rather it’s a spiritual dilemma — and one that can be solved by seeing religion not as part of the problem, but as the answer to it.

“We’re thinking about it as a spiritual crisis because it’s not just a question of what kind of society we’re going to have or what kind of government we’re going to have, but what kind of people we’re going to be,” Whetstine says. “Toxic polarization is convincing us that the people across our divides are evil, that they’re hateful, that we have to stop them at all costs — and that has an impact on who we are inside.”

Through its work, One America is building a network of faith leaders who can speak and work against polarization in alignment with their faith traditions. In no small part, the organization is helping faith communities “put their identity as a person of faith above their political identity,” Whetstine says, while respecting each faith.

“We leave a lot of room for the uniqueness of each faith tradition, and we recognize that those values are often at the heart of this,” she says. “For us, faith is the answer to the spiritual crisis of toxic polarization.”

More than politics or religion

In addition to being COO of the One America Movement, Whetstine is a mother of three, a trained doula, a Peace Corps volunteer, a seminarian at Wesley Theological Seminary and a member in discernment in the United Church of Christ. And while each of these are integral components of her identity, these personal dynamics are often what’s left out of conversations around religion or politics.

“In a healthy society, we all have many different identities, and depending on who we’re with, different aspects of who we are surface in the way we’re relating to [those people],” says Whetstine. “But right now, our political identity is kind of subsuming everything else.”

Thus, she believes the first step toward building relationships is acknowledging and appreciating nuance — even among people in one’s own faith community. That’s why One America focuses both on in-faith and cross-divides work.

The organization’s in-faith work — that is, efforts among people of the same faith — considers the question, “How do we shape the dynamics inside of our own faith tradition when toxic polarization is putting our congregations into a pressure cooker?” Whetstine says.

With evangelical pastors, an imam and a rabbi on staff, One America conducts outreach to and works with faith leaders across the country to gain insight into what they’re seeing in their own congregations. Then, working with experts in the social science of polarization, One America staff build workshops for these leaders “that apply the wisdom of their faith to those dynamics,” Whetstine says.

Workshops include How to Talk to Your Neighbor, the Science of Polarization, the Science of Listening, and Peacemaking and Polarization — all focused on teaching faith leaders how to have difficult conversations across divides. Faith leaders then take what they learn in those workshops and share it with their congregations via sermons, homilies and Sunday School lessons, for example, with topics ranging from what it means to love your neighbor to misperceptions about people across divides.

The latter, Whetstine says, is one of the greatest obstacles One America faces in combating toxic polarization — which is why building trust is crucial.

“So often we think people across our divides hate us, we think people across our divides are extreme in their views,” she says. “The thing we have to do is build trust enough so that people are willing to come into the room and get to know each other just as human beings.”

To help people do this, the movement partners with More in Common, a research organization whose mission is to address the underlying drivers of polarization, and Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit focused on conflict resolution. Using both organizations’ research on the perception gap and negative meta-perceptions, One America Movement facilitates both in-faith and cross-divides workshops that bring the language of faith traditions to bear on the issues of the day.

By challenging assumptions and addressing misperceptions, Whetstine says people often realize the other side isn’t as extreme as they thought. “We see a lot more overlap in views,” she notes — a fact that enables more progress.

With staff members embedded in different faith communities across the country, One America advocates for and leads both cross-divides collaboration that not only helps bridge divides, but also makes it possible to resolve real issues affecting those communities.

“[We’re helping bring] people together across divides to take action on things that matter to them in their communities,” says Whetstine. “What that looks like is bringing together an evangelical church, a synagogue and a mosque to do service projects together.”

The group in Northwest Arkansas, for example, worked with One America to plan and host a regional summit focused on bringing understanding of polarization — including the social science behind it — to more people in their community. Additionally, a group in another region came together to paint a domestic violence shelter.

“It’s really hard to have negative meta-perceptions, to have false assumptions, to hate someone when you’ve been a part of that kind of personal moment,” Whetstine says. “When you get people together up close and give them an opportunity to start to build those relationships, that’s really how we can address antisemitism, racism, all of the big bads; it really stems from fostering those relationships first.”

One America’s cross-divides work also helps build understanding across racial and religious groups, with ongoing efforts focused on combating these -isms and heading off toxic polarization. In Chicago, for example, the organization has been bringing together faith leaders from black churches and the Jewish community to foster understanding between both groups.

“They’ve spent the last 18 months together building relationships, learning about the history of each other’s communities, talking about antisemitism and how it shows up in the community, talking about racism and what different people in [the black community] have experienced, and sharing Sabbath meals together,” says Whetstine. “Nothing specifically has happened – there hasn’t been an incident among their communities – but they’re trying to build those relationships so that if something did happen, they would stay together.”

“The idea is how do we bring people together across divides so they can build those relationships and create an identity for themselves that transcends what divides them,” she adds.

Restoring our faith in each other

Preemptive and preventive efforts guide much of One America’s work, but in a country that has become increasingly more polarized, the organization has seen the need for restorative work as well.

Two years ago, the movement created a Rapid Response Toolkit in collaboration with its social science partners to support faith leaders when people in their community have been attacked. Designed with cross-divides initiatives in mind, the toolkit is meant to keep people from withdrawing from depolarization work “even in the face of traumatic events,” Whetstine says.

Yet, as One American learned in the face of events like October 7 and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, coming together across religious or political divides can take time.

“People in those times of stress often retreat to their corners,” says Whetstine. “One thing that we found after October 7th was that people are not necessarily ready in those moments to work across divides. People don’t always want to come together in the [direct] aftermath, but that doesn’t mean that the work stops; it just means the work looks different.”

Success, in One America’s book, is based on action — but as with any movement, that can take time. Ultimately, though, when it comes to toxic polarization, Whetstine says the best way to gauge success is through behavioral change: “Will you build relationships across divides? Will you speak up when people in your own group are moving toward extremes — and will you do that publicly and independently of One America’s prompting?” she says.

“When we’re seeing people who are giving sermons about polarization, for example, when we see people doing things like the cross-divides work to raise money for the refugee resettlement program,” she says, “those are the kinds of actions that we’re using to measure success.”

Practically speaking, for people feeling overwhelmed by our current polarization, Whetstine recommends two things. “It sounds very trite, perhaps, but start with prayer in your own faith tradition,” she says. “It puts us into a relationship with God that is on a different level than our politics and … helps us to recognize that there is something bigger than what’s happening with our elected officials.”

The second is to be hospitable. “Even if it simply means calling your uncle before Thanksgiving — the one you’re going to disagree with — to build the relational muscle outside of the conversation about politics,” Whetstine notes.

Ultimately, she acknowledges that coming together will take more than just our personal faith; it will require restoring our faith in each other.

“No program, no piece of paper, no five-step solution is going to be better than a deeply rooted relationship when something terrible happens in the world,” she says.

How has your faith informed your willingness and ability to listen to and learn from others across divides?

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences.”
—Audre Lorde

American college campuses were once the centerpoint for intellectual debate and civic dialogue.

Today, they’re more often flashpoints in the culture wars. Places where openness is discouraged and opposition stifled.

But BridgeUSA is working to change that. It’s mission is to empower young people to engage in constructive dialogue and disagreement. With BridgeUSA’s help, a new movement is growing on college campuses across the nation — one focused not just on civil disagreement, but on friendship.

We recently spoke with CEO and Founder of BridgeUSA Manu Meel and President of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville BridgeUSA chapter Nicholas Huber. You can read the full story at the link below:

To read more from my interview with Meel and Huber — in which we discuss the connection between the loneliness crisis and polarization, what Meel believes the true divides are between Americans (hint: it’s not between the Right and Left) and the role that colleges should be playing with regard to dialogue and disagreement — become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

Read more

“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”
— Margaret Heffernan

If we, as Americans, can’t disagree civilly or engage in respectful dialogue, how do we expect to overcome our greatest challenges or innovate as a nation?

We have to stop turning what is a positive — that we have differing opinions and ideas — into a negative. As Braver Angels’ Gabbi Kearns says, we have to get out of our own way.

We recently interviewed Kearns, who is director of communications & marketing for Braver Angels, an organization focused on bridging partisan divides. In the first article in our “Bridging Divides” series, we share how Braver Angels is using marriage and family therapy principles to bring us back together again. You can read the full story at the link below:

To read more from my interview with Kearns — in which we discuss the national security implications of polarization, what’s at risk if we can’t engage across the aisle and the role of people on the fringes of both parties — become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

Read more

“If free speech is not protected on campus, you can’t expect it to last
all that long off-campus.”
— Greg Lukianoff, FIRE president

When Nicholas Huber entered the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as a freshman, he found himself engaging in deep conversations about religion and politics with a student, whose name was Jack, who lived across the hall from him.

“This happened pretty consistently — I’d say maybe once a week,” recalls Huber, who is currently a junior finance major at UT-Knoxville.

A seemingly unremarkable occurrence, discussions like this have long been a defining characteristic of college campuses. Considered bastions of free speech, American colleges and universities have been the centerpoint of dialogue, debate and protest since even before the 1960s — the first reported protest, known as the “Butter Rebellion,” taking place at Harvard University in 1766 (when students protested the poor food quality).

The Free Speech Movement as we know it, however, began in 1964 on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus. Student activists staged sit-ins that resulted in the administration overturning restrictions on political free speech and advocacy on campus. This and the many demonstrations that followed effectively earned UC Berkeley its title as “home of the Free Speech Movement.”

The campuses of today, however, bear little resemblance to those of the 1960s — including Huber’s own.

His experience is notable not just because he’s having these discussions, but because he and Jack agree on very little. “I came from D.C. where it’s very liberal. [Jack] came from Memphis and grew up deeply religious, as a Christian, and ended up converting to Catholicism. I grew up not at all religious,” Huber says. “Even though we came from vastly different backgrounds and we have very differing opinions, we really enjoyed the conversations — to the point that we kept coming back.”

Huber and Jack’s interactions, however, are the exception — not the norm.

No longer the centerpoint for discussion and debate, colleges are instead often flashpoints in today’s culture wars — the atmosphere one that no longer fosters openness, but rather stifles opposition.

Just ask the students.

Every year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys college students to assess the state of free speech on U.S. campuses. FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, which polled 68,000 students at 250-plus colleges, found that 28% of respondents self-censor in the classroom (up 2 points over last year), while 24% self-censor among fellow students.

Consider also a 2024 BestColleges survey in which 44% of the 1,000 students polled said they feel comfortable expressing their opinions on campus without fear of punishment (that’s 56% who don’t feel comfortable). Disaggregated by political party, 54% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans feel comfortable sharing their views on campus.

Huber, however, like a growing cohort of young people, is committed to changing this.

After receiving an Instagram DM from someone at BridgeUSA, an organization whose mission is to empower young people to engage in constructive dialogue and disagreement, Huber started a chapter at UT-Knoxville and now serves as its president. With 108 chapters on college campuses across 41 states, BridgeUSA engages nearly 22,000 students each year. Founded in 2017, the organization is growing in spite of – or perhaps because of – political polarization.

“That’s basically what [Jack and I] were already doing — we were just chatting about politics in a respectful manner; we weren’t getting angry,” says Huber. “We were doing it between the two of us anyway, and we decided to spread the love, so to speak, to other students.”

Imagine — instead of an emotionally charged, hyperpolarized, regressive national climate — a thriving U.S. democracy where leaders and citizens engage in respectful, productive dialogue. That’s not a pipe dream; it’s BridgeUSA’s vision. And it only seems natural to start on college campuses.

“The leaders of tomorrow are on today’s college campuses,” says Manu Meel, founder and CEO of BridgeUSA. “If you can’t settle the most complicated issues of our time on a college campus, then where will you settle them? Campuses need to be homes of intellectual inquiry — not just free speech, but free speech that enables us to really serve and understand each other.”

Learning to respectfully disagree

In 2017, following the contentious 2016 election, Meel was a pre-med student at UC Berkeley, when violent protests erupted ahead of right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos’ planned appearance.

Approximately 1,500 protestors, including 150 masked agitators – some not affiliated with the university – came together to protest the then editor of Breitbart. According to reports, they threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police, hurled Molotov cocktails, smashed windows and attacked two Berkeley College Republicans. By the time university officials made the decision to cancel the event “out of concern for public safety,” protestors had caused $100,000 worth of property damage and injured six people.

Meel recalls the moment vividly.

“I was walking past a cafe and the window was shattered. There was a TV screen that said, ‘UC Berkeley students protest Breitbart speaker’s speech,’ and the television crew that was filming that was standing right next to me,” he says. “That sort of shattered the fourth wall for me — you suddenly feel like you’re not a spectator, but that you’re actually someone who has some responsibility to do something because you’re a member of this community.”

Born in New Jersey and having moved around every two years as a kid, including to India, Meel says he was already someone who was naturally a “bridger” — a term he uses to refer to people who believe their views can be “strengthened, improved or refined” by speaking with people with differing views. In response to the events of that day, he, along with a few friends, launched BridgeUSA to address what they saw as the downward spiral of campus politics and free speech.

“The goal was very simple,” says Meel. “It wasn’t to create compromise, nor was it to try and get people to find common ground. It was to help people understand why the people they disagree with believe what they do.”

Thus, on the campus that was once the paragon for civil debate and disagreement, Meel and his peers spearheaded a new movement — one focused on cultivating respect for differences of opinion.

“The goal is very simple: It’s [to] enable the next generation to adopt and champion pluralism in one of the most divided times in American history,” he says. “The work is driven by a very simple proposition — that the United States is the most diverse democracy in the history of democracies, so we believe that ‘bridging’ and dialogue are going to be 21st century skills if this democracy is going to succeed. Our goal is to enable that.”

BridgeUSA does this by building up its chapters; Meel hopes to get to 800 over the next five years. The bread and butter of the organization, chapters are focused on driving a sense of civic community on campus through events large and small, professional and social.

These include intimate bimonthly dialogues where students engage in conversations about modern challenges and issues. Although these are led by a moderator who creates questions to spark discussion, Huber says participants can talk about any topic or a personal experience, if they’d like. “Ultimately, people stay more engaged if they can talk about personal experiences,” he says. “I think it makes it feel less like a classroom if the students have more autonomy and more control over the conversation.”

“The goal,” Meel notes, “is to create a constant space where students can show up because they know that’s the place where they can talk about contentious issues affecting the community.”

BridgeUSA’s more formal workshops are experience-based and are designed to provide students the tools and skills for effective dialogue and leadership, with a focus on critical thinking, empathy and inclusive communication. But perhaps more than building these critical skills, BridgeUSA hopes to make these conversations welcoming.

“How do you make pluralism and bridging not some kumbaya, esoteric, abstract activity, but a way for people to find genuine friendships and connections?” says Meel.

He believes loneliness is fueling much of the current polarization and hopes to address both issues by bringing students together to form friendships across differences.

“What we try to do is create an environment where talking about politics is fun and it’s not taken so seriously,” Huber says. “We try to remove the stigma from it. A lot of times when people hear the word ‘politics,’ they’re like, ‘Oh, this is going to lead to an argument. Let’s not talk about this.’ We try to make it so it’s like, ‘Hey, just come talk, just come have some fun. There’s no harm if you don’t want to talk. You can just come and listen. It’s free food and a good time.’”

The organization surveys participants both before and after each event to gauge how their feelings about discomfort around dialogue and disagreement may have shifted. Called the Bridging Polarization Index, it assesses attitudinal changes along four vectors: listening, curiosity, pluralism and the ability to disagree. “We look at that measure over time to see whether or not students are actually experiencing statistically significant changes in how much more tolerant they are through their participation in BridgeUSA, or how much more likely they are to listen to the other side,” says Meel.

And while Huber doesn’t think anyone’s ever changed their political party because of these events, that’s not really the point.

“As far as success goes, we mainly look at attendance and, this is going to sound really lame, but the vibes in the room,” Huber says. “If people are laughing, having a good time, staying after and talking to one another, then we consider it a success. If people are eager to leave, then that’s indicative of a problem on our end.”

Having the courage to disagree

For young people used to self-censoring, coming together to speak frankly about their political views with others, particularly those across the proverbial aisle, can feel unnatural and unnerving.

The problem isn’t necessarily that students don’t want to share their views; it’s that they don’t want to discuss or debate them with someone they disagree with. “I don’t necessarily see a hunger to listen — it’s more to be heard — and I think that speaks to human nature,” Huber says. “I think everybody inherently wants their voice to be heard, which is fine, but I think students especially need to overcome that feeling.”

“When students protest on campus, ultimately they end up seeing many students walk right by them with their earbuds in,” he adds. BridgeUSA events, however, offer an opportunity for these students: “the promise of a group of 30 to 40 students who are here to talk, but also here to listen to what you have to say,” Huber says.

But, in an era of increasing political violence, BridgeUSA has its work cut out for it.

In FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings poll, 34% of students said that using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, while 72% said shouting down a speaker on campus is acceptable — at least in rare cases for both. A study by the Skeptic Research Center revealed a similar sentiment, with nearly 1 in 3 Gen Zers and millennials expressing support for political violence, with support highest among those identifying as “very liberal” — particularly Gen Z women.

But for those students who still believe in the value of free speech and tolerance, BridgeUSA offers a much-needed refuge.

In the hours following Charlie Kirk’s assasination, students at BridgeUSA chapters across the country began coming together to engage in conversations. “What was fascinating was the amount of ideological diversity we saw in those rooms that night because it was, frankly, the only place where students could go,” says Meel. “There’s a grassroots populous energy that I think motivates a lot of these students to trust BridgeUSA chapters just because that’s where their peers are.”

Although Meel disagreed with Kirk on more than just objectives, he says he “deeply respected” him for his willingness to engage. “He was one of the only people on the Right who would show up for any conversation,” he says.

Beyond the quiet halls and the held tongues, however, a quiet energy appears to be building on college campuses — Huber’s experience and BridgeUSA’s growth a testament to this. More and more students are finding not just the courage to speak, but to listen.

“There’s a real counterculture brewing on college campuses,” says Meel. “The norm in 2017 was not violence. The norm today is violence, which means that young people who are standing up and saying, ‘We’re going to have a conversation [in] the face of conflict,’ they’re actually the courageous ones.”

The simplicity of the goal — “adopting pluralism as the norm,” Meel says — doesn’t make it any easier to achieve, but he intuitively believes in the ability of young people to make a difference.

“College students have tremendous cultural power. I think historically of Vietnam War protests or the apartheid movement or the Civil Rights Movement,” says Meel. “College campuses can really drive the national conversation.”

Where do you see progress toward pluralism on college campuses?

What role should these institutions play in fostering in students the skills to disagree respectfully?

To read more from my interviews with Meel and Huber — in which we discuss the connection between the loneliness crisis and polarization, what Meel believes the true divides are between Americans (hint: it’s not between the Right and Left) and the role that colleges should be playing with regard to dialogue and disagreement — become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

Up Next:

One America Movement is preparing faith leaders and their communities to confront toxic polarization.

See also:

Braver Angels is using marriage and family therapy principles to bring us back together again. Read the story.

“Man’s enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.”
— Lao Tzu

When Bill Doherty was asked to develop a workshop to get liberals and conservatives together in a room after the 2016 election, he scoffed at the idea.

A marriage and family therapist, Doherty had plenty of experience bringing people — specifically couples on the edge of divorce — together. Yet, the thought of bringing individuals from both sides of the political aisle together after a contentious election, he believed, was “just an awful idea.”

“He was hoping that he’d be busy the day they planned the workshop so that he wouldn’t have to be a part of it,” says Gabriella “Gabbi” Kearns, director of communications & marketing for Braver Angels, an organization focused on bridging partisan divides.

The people making the request were long-time friends and future co-founders of Braver Angels David Blankenhorn and David Lapp, who had reconnected after the 2016 election. On November 9, 2016, Blankenhorn, who lived in Manhattan, called Lapp, who lived in Ohio, to get a sense for how people were reacting to Donald Trump’s election.

As Kearns recalls, “Lapp said, ‘People are not that surprised. They kind of had a feeling Trump would win. They’re excited — that’s the general mood of Ohio right now’ — or at least in his area of Ohio. ‘That’s so interesting,’ Blankenhorn said, ‘because in Manhattan, everyone’s running around with their hair on fire; people are freaking out.’”

Surprised that two different areas of the country could have such disparate reactions, the friends had the idea to bring the two sides together. “Lapp is a very entrepreneurial, visionary, big idea person and moves quickly,” says Kearns. “So they were like, ‘OK, let’s put together an event in Ohio where we get conservatives and liberals together in one room and get them to start talking to each other.’”

Despite his misgivings, within 48 hours, Doherty, also a Braver Angels co-founder, returned with a workshop – based on marriage and family therapy principles – designed to get voters from both sides of the aisle to engage with one another.

The first workshop took place on December 9, 2016, in South Lebanon, Ohio, and brought together 10 Trump voters and 10 Clinton voters for a full weekend of exercises. The first of which was helping them recognize their own destructive behavior.

“A lot of this is not unlike an unhealthy marriage or an unhealthy relationship,” Kearns says. “In any marriage, there’s a dynamic at play. What Doherty often says is that what couples therapy does is it helps individuals see that every couple has a dance that they do — whether they’re conscious of it or not — and it helps them look at their dance, see the patterns they fall into and the steps they do over and over again.”

What this dance looks like can vary. For example, it may take the form of one person always attacking the other as the other person withdraws. In the often contentious relationship between Democrats and Republicans, this can take the form of stereotypes. Thus one of the first things Doherty’s workshop — now called the Red and Blue Workshop — has participants do is take on these broad and often incorrect labels.

For this, all the “reds” (i.e., conservatives) and “blues” (i.e., liberals) go into separate rooms.

“The blues will have a conversation – and the reds will do the same – about the stereotypes for their side. For blues that may be ‘elitist’ or ‘not religious.’ We try to go deep, so reds will often say ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’ — anything that people throw at either side. They say what the stereotype is, then they say why it’s not true.”

For the blues, this may include refuting the stereotype that all liberals are elitist. “Frankly, there are plenty of working-class people throughout the United States that vote for Democrats,” says Kearns.

The next piece is extracting the kernel of truth from each stereotype. “Are all liberals elitist? Certainly not,” Kearns says. “But is it true that Democrat leaders or people online seemingly talk down to other people who disagree with them?”

The discussion continues until each group has a list of five to 10 commonly used labels, along with why they’re not true and what is true about them.

“Then the two sides present to each other,” says Kearns. “So the conservatives go through all of their labels and the liberals go through all of theirs. The primary goal is to take the sting out of those words so they’re not thrown at each other throughout [the rest of the workshop].”

“It’s quite a vulnerable thing for each side to do, to take accountability and to hear the other side acknowledge where their side gets it wrong,” she adds. “It’s that mutual sharing that creates camaraderie.”

Despite Doherty’s concerns, and some “really strong feelings,” the event went off without a hitch. “What they say is that they captured lightning in a bottle,” Kearns says. “It was such a special experience to get the two sides to start talking to each other.”

The event went so well, in fact, that they embarked on a nationwide bus tour. “They were driving all over, staying at people’s houses, just doing whatever they could to put on these workshops throughout the country,” Kearns says. “Different people would write to them and say, ‘Can you come to my community in Vermont? Can you come to South Carolina? We really need this right now.’”

The farther they went, the more they recognized the need for this brand of dialogue. Thus, Braver Angels was born.

A movement “to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic,” Braver Angels has expanded beyond its bread and butter, the Red and Blue Workshop, to create initiatives across disciplines – from arts and education to media, politics and faith. In addition to in-person workshops focused on specific issues or relationships (like its Family and Politics Workshop), the organization now has a podcast, offers online courses, hosts debates, facilitates one-on-one conversations, distributes informational materials and much more. Braver Angels now has 125 alliances (AKA chapters) nationwide and 15,000-plus members, and has hosted nearly 6,000 events with over 68,000 participants.

“When I try to explain Braver Angels to someone who has zero context, the thing I often say is we’re kind of like a mutant octopus that grows a new tentacle all the time to touch some new aspect of society,” Kearns says. “We do so much across music, faith, college campuses, et cetera.”

Much of the organization’s growth has been organic, with ambassadors suggesting and leading new efforts in towns and cities across the country. A fact that speaks to just how essential this work is. “Polarization is … pervasive,” Kearns notes. “It’s on college campuses, it’s at the potluck; it’s everywhere.”

An openness to being vulnerable

Early in her involvement with Braver Angels, Kearns participated in the organization’s Red and Blue Workshop — an experience that both made her uncomfortable and surprised her.

“Healing may be a corny word, but I do feel like that’s one of the experiences of it,” she says. “I remember feeling vulnerable in a way, but everyone in that situation was open to being vulnerable.”

That’s the beauty of a Braver Angels workshop. Not only does it allow participants to better understand the views of their opponents, but it also forces people to examine their own beliefs.

During an activity called The Fishbowl, participants sit in a circle, as conservatives and liberals take turns discussing where they agree with their side and where they disagree. “What’s baked into it is asking questions that often don’t come up in political conversations,” Kearns says, “probing us to be a little more self-reflective about our own side.”

She emphasizes that the point of these conversations is not to change the other person’s mind, but “to learn about what they think.” To do so, Braver Angels encourages participants to be discerning and thoughtful, and to engage in what it refers to as “accurate disagreement.”

“If I start off a conversation by saying, ‘Republicans are blah, blah, blah,’ I’m already starting off on a wrong premise. So, one thing we talk about is having accurate disagreement,” she says. “So, if I were to say, ‘I feel like Trump doesn’t have our best interest in mind,’ that’s me stating something I believe, and it’s about one person. There are ways you can express your frustrations with things in a way that’s less generalizing.”

The crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives isn’t that they have different values, Kearns notes; it’s that they “stack” them differently. A Republican, for instance, may have been against the Covid pandemic lockdowns because he prioritizes freedom, while a Democrat may have supported them because she prioritizes health and safety.

Like in a marriage, all of these things are essential to understanding the relationship dynamic between reds and blues. That is, the role that both parties play in exacerbating an already toxic relationship.

But, as Kearns points out, unlike in a marriage, liberals and conservatives didn’t pick each other. “You don’t get to choose who your fellow citizens are; we just have to live with each other,” she says. “And we don’t have the option of divorce.”

The initial discomfort that Kearns had felt opening up to people she so strongly disagreed with, by the end of the workshop was replaced with feelings of optimism. The difficulty was in knowing how to move forward.

“You’re like, ‘OK, so what do I do when I go back into this polarized world? I had this beautiful experience, but what can I do going forward?’” Kearns says.

Challenging the cultural narrative

In the days following Charlie Kirk’s assasination, traffic to Braver Angels’ website jumped 700%, further vindicating depolarization efforts.

The event itself, and the social media reactions that followed, felt overwhelming for many, Kearns notes. “But there are things that people can do about it,” she says.

In a statement released by Braver Angels, Doherty urged Americans to do their part by toning down the “apocalyptic rhetoric.”

“When the survival of the American experiment is at stake, violence can seem justified and even heroic,” he wrote. “We must believe in ourselves that we can hold onto our democratic republic even amidst profound disagreement.”

He also advocated for some soul searching, urging Americans to challenge the cultural narrative that pits us against them.

“For years, we’ve unleashed bitter contempt on our fellow Americans who think, speak and vote differently, creating a toxic cycle to which both sides contribute. Change begins with each of us examining how we see and think about those who hold views we believe are wrong.”

The one thing he didn’t say, however, was to stop talking to one another.

“We’re trying to get productive conflict out there, because we need to hash out these issues. We need to be able to talk to one another,” Kearns says.

The language around one side being “pro-democracy” and the other side being “anti-democracy,” she notes, is antithetical to what democracy is all about. “The thing that’s so ironic is that to be pro-democracy is to be pro-relationship, is to be pro-maintaining-a-bridge-with-those-you-disagree-with. That’s how we keep our country that we love.”

Since working for Braver Angels, Kearns says she’s become more patriotic and has much more faith in the American people. “There are so many good people in our country across the political spectrum that it’s hard not to feel some hope,” she says.

And with organizations like Braver Angels, why should she not?

The organization continues to do its thing — providing couples therapy for a nation on the brink of divorce, in hopes of one day depolarizing itself out of existence. Until then, the movement will continue to attract those who refuse to conform to the current cultural narrative, who have the courage to do things differently.

“This is now counterculture,” Kearns says. “Everyone else is polarized, but you can be a part of the counterculture — it’s cool, and it’s growing.”

What do you think you get wrong about the opposite political party? What do you think they get wrong about you?

To read more from my interview with Kearns — in which we discuss the national security implications of polarization, what’s at risk if we can’t engage across the aisle and the role of people on the fringes of both parties — become a paying subscriber today.

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See also:

BridgeUSA is working to empower young people to engage in constructive dialogue and disagreement. With more than 100 chapters on college campuses across the nation, the organization is showing Americans that it’s OK to disagree. Read the story.

“Accepting others’ differences is the first step towards building a more inclusive and compassionate world.”
—Dalai Lama

In many ways, our society has become much more accepting over time.

In a 2023 Gallup poll, 71% of Americans said they’re supportive of same-sex marriage. While a 2021 poll showed that 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage.

Of course, views on marriage aren’t the only mark of “progress.”

More and more people have friends of varying races, ethnicities, sexual identities and national origins. Traditional male-female roles are no longer the norm. Mental health has lost its stigma. And we’ve moved away from rigid ideas of beauty and fashion to those that prioritize self-expression, body positivity and gender fluidity.

The rise of politics

At the same time that acceptance has appeared to be rising, religious affiliation in the U.S. has been declining. The share of U.S. adults who are “religiously unaffiliated” increased from 16% in 2007 to approximately 29% in 2023-2024. Subsequently, political activism has increased and, along with it, political polarization.

Just over a decade ago, a poll asked Americans whether they agreed or disagreed that people in the opposite political party weren’t just wrong but, in fact, evil. Nearly half of respondents from both sides of the aisle agreed.

More recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 27% of Democrats said that last year’s presidential election negatively affected their friendships, compared with 10% of Republicans. In the same survey, 55% of Democrats and 43% of Republicans said that the other party can’t be trusted.

Redefining acceptance

That brings me back to acceptance …

Acceptance is a good thing.

So is tolerance.

But acceptance narrowly defined isn’t really acceptance.

Thus, we’ve found ourselves at a place where bearing it all on TV or changing our reproductive anatomy are acceptable, but disagreement is not. It’s a world in which political ideology has supplanted religious ideals, loyalty to a tribe supersedes love for our neighbor and acceptance only applies to those with whom we agree.

The path to progress, however, isn’t a desolate one.

If you want to change someone’s mind, you don’t avoid them, call them names or physically attack them.

Consider how people came around to the idea of gay or interracial marriage — or, more broadly, the equality and dignity of all people across races and ethnicities. It wasn’t by avoiding those individuals. It was by being around them, by talking to them, by getting to know them. And only by doing so were people able to finally see them as human, too.

Fortunately, there are people and organizations working to bring us back together, to fix our culture gone astray — one that increasingly sees political violence as justifiable. Organizations like Braver Angels, BridgeUSA and One America Movement are working to bridge partisan divides and redefine acceptance in our age of political polarization.

We’re pleased to feature them in our upcoming Bridging Divides series, which kicked off with a story about Braver Angels.

• Braver Angels – An interview with Director of Communications and Marketing Gabbi Kearns about the organization’s efforts to strengthen our democracy through a couples-therapy approach

• BridgeUSA – Interviews with CEO Manu Meel and President of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville chapter Nicholas Huber about the organization’s work to equip young people with the skills to have conversations (and even friendships) with those they disagree with

• One America Movement – An interview with COO Chandra Whetstine about the organization’s mission to bring faith communities together to confront toxic polarization

How do you work to bridge divides and be more accepting in your own life?

“A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.” –George Washington

For colonists living in pre-Revolutionary War America, every day was centered on subsistence and security. A poor harvest, a foolish mistake, a lax guard could mean the difference between life and death.

Afterall, the colonists were responsible for cultivating and harvesting nearly all of their own food, which included raising livestock and hunting. With no organized police force, and run-ins with bandits and indigenous people common, they had to ensure their own security; the constant British military presence offered some relief, but was also a source of tension. Faced with such demanding work and rampant illness, health and safety were both integral to the colonists' survival and impossible to guarantee.

One man, Jacob Housser, captured the precariousness of American colonists’ existence and the constant pressure that created: “We left our harvest standing in the field, our cattle wandering in the woods, and ran for the fort, not knowing if we should be alive the next day.”

This level of awareness and persistence – prerequisites to survival in the American colonies – is understandably difficult for many modern-day Americans to comprehend.

“In 1775, you’d walk a few miles outside of Boston and you were essentially in the wilderness,” says Tom Kehoe, chairman of the board of directors for Project Appleseed, an organization focused on keeping the values of our nation’s founders alive. “People living in the suburbs – if we can call them that – had to deal with dangerous animals, and there was a lot of conflict between the colonists and the various indigenous tribes of that area.”

Yet the enduring spirit and tenacity that served colonists well in the field and fort also enabled their success in more existential matters — specifically, in securing their independence. As Kehoe aptly notes, “adversity breeds strength,” and for the first Americans, the years of practicing self-reliance had cultivated in them qualities and abilities far beyond husbandry and basic self-defense.

“It was a death sentence to have participated in such a thing,” Kehoe says of Americans’ plan to revolt against the British. “It was treason, it was revolt against the king, and yet tens of thousands of people turned out to fight against the British knowing their lives were on the line. But they weren't just standing up for themselves, they were standing up for their community and for their neighbors. That spirit is something that, unfortunately, has really fallen away from us today in America.”

“So much of our lives has become automated that we've lost a lot of that pioneer spirit that our ancestors had,” he adds, “and I think we would be a better nation if we would return to that.”

Restoring that focus is the mission of Project Appleseed, and the way it works to achieve that mission is through cultivating what is a disappearing skill — one that nearly all of the first Americans possessed: marksmanship.

“We want to turn America back into a nation of riflemen and women; that is someone who knows their rifle, who can use it like an extension of their body,” says Kehoe. “This requires a degree of personal persistence. It requires focus and commitment, and it requires respect for values that are fading.”

Through its focus on marksmanship, Project Appleseed aims to connect people “with the attitudes of the people who founded this country,” Kehoe explains, “because guns were an essential part of their lives.”

“We want people to regain that feeling of this being a country worth fighting for — and how do you get that back?” he asks. “You change your community one person at a time.”

In colonial days, clean drinking water was hard to come by.

Aware of the risks of drinking such bacteria-ridden water and without a means of filtering it, the colonists largely consumed alcoholic beverages such as beer and cider, which were made safer for consumption through the brewing and distilling processes. It was amidst these circumstances that a young man, named John Chapman, began traveling west from Massachusetts planting apple seeds as he went. Better known today by the nickname Johnny Appleseed, Chapman exemplified the American pioneering spirit of that time period.

“Johnny Appleseed went around planting apple orchards in various places where he could find land cheaply, then he would harvest the apples, get an apple press going and make cider,” Kehoe explains. “He spread cider all over the colonies by doing this. It was an idea that took hold, and he was able to spread it from place to place.”

It was with a similar vision that Jack Daily founded Project Appleseed in 2006. “That was Jack's original vision — something that we could spread around the country to get people involved and inspire them both to become marksmen and to become more civically involved,” says Kehoe. “Part of Jack's idea was to inspire people to emulate the kind of sacrifices and commitments that our forefathers had made to liberty.”

A national nonpartisan, apolitical organization, Project Appleseed is committed to spreading the values of our forefathers, those that made securing our independence possible, through storytelling and marksmanship. To do this, the organization offers a series of nationwide clinics led by 700 all-volunteer instructors, who are all expert marksmen. With programs focused on 25 meters, 200 yards and 400 yards, the organization teaches participants marksmanship fundamentals, including “the precision and accuracy needed to hit their targets consistently,” per its website.

The first level program, and one of Project Appleseed’s most popular, is the 25M Marksmanship Clinic, an intensive two-day program where participants learn basics such as the six steps to ring a shot, natural point of aim, steady hold factors and more. Shot from three positions at 25 meters, the clinic includes targets scaled to simulated shooting at 100, 200, 300 and 400 yards.

In addition to being expert marksmen and women, Project Appleseed instructors are Revolutionary War buffs. During the clinics, they share the real-life stories of people who fought for and helped America secure its independence. “They're not only expert shots; they're expert instructors and they're great storytellers,” says Kehoe. “And when you come to an Appleseed event, we give you the finest instruction in field marksmanship that you'll find anywhere in the country, but you'll also hopefully realize why marksmanship is a part of our heritage as Americans.”

Participants scoring 210 or better out of 250 on the Appleseed Qualification Test earn a Rifleman’s patch. The ultimate goal of Project Appleseed’s programs is for participants “to be accurate out to 500 yards — the distance known as the traditional Rifleman’s Quarter Mile, which, according to the organization’s website, “has been part of America’s marksmanship repertoire since our country’s earliest days.”

While participants are welcome to come to just one clinic, the hope is that they’ll return over and over again, refining their skills and increasing their knowledge. As Kehoe notes, “Coming to one class, even a weekend bootcamp, is not going to make you an expert. It's going to give you a lot of solid fundamentals, but you have to take that and develop it yourself.”

For most first-timer shooters, and those who’ve never been around guns, the level of know-how that’s required to shoot a rifle successfully — not just once, but over and over again — is difficult to comprehend.

“Most people have no idea of the degree of skill that's required to actually shoot a rifle quickly and accurately,” he notes. “To be able to do that, you have to do more than be able to line up your sight. You need to be able to get into position quickly; you need to understand how to form a good shooting position in prone or even in an offhand position. You need to learn how to control your breath. You need to learn how to focus your mind. It's a much more difficult endeavor than most people think it is.”

When a person’s capable of doing all of these things at once, they enter into what Kehoe refers to as the “rifleman’s bubble” — a kind of “zen-like state where nothing really exists except you, the rifle and the target,” he says. “Everything else fades into the background.”

As Kehoe is personally aware, the benefit of being able to achieve this state is much greater than just being able to hit your target. “You gain self-confidence, but you also gain focus. You learn to deal with discomfort because getting into some of those positions is not particularly comfortable. You learn all about controlling your breath and mind,” Kehoe says. “There's a great deal that you can gain from seriously undertaking the study of marksmanship.”

For some Americans today,

the idea of “bearing arms” seems superfluous and antiquated – an excessive and outdated idea passed down from individuals who have no connection to our modern lives and the conveniences it affords. To that Kehoe reminds us that, while marksmanship is an honorable, useful and worthy pursuit in itself, it’s what it represents that is most important and relevant to our daily lives.

“When you make a decision to own firearms and learn how to use them, you're taking responsibility for your own safety — and the truth is, no matter how many police there are, no matter how big the National Guard is, everyone is fundamentally responsible for their own safety,” he says. “No one else can take responsibility for it. The old joke is, ‘I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy.’ Police are not in the business of protecting people; they're in the business of responding to crimes.”

“There's a different type of responsibility that comes with owning firearms and using them safely and responsibly,” Kehoe adds. “You get a different respect for life.”

But there’s also another, seemingly theoretical reason for owning and knowing how to use firearms — one that our predecessors know something about. “There's the famous line, ‘If you don’t know your history, you're doomed to repeat it,’” Kehoe says. “That's something we would really like to avoid.” Through its focus on history and storytelling, Project Appleseed is attempting to do just that: prevent what has happened in the past by reminding people of it.

“The marksmanship instruction is kind of a hook that we use to draw people in so that we can tell them these stories and try to inspire them — to explain that love of liberty is what this country is really about and how much people sacrificed 250 years ago to win it,” explains Kehoe. “So, yeah, we're a marksmanship program, but we're a very unique marksmanship program. We're focused on building the American character — rebuilding it, so to speak.”

The right to guarantee all other rights,

as Kehoe describes it, the Second Amendment acts as a deterrent to overzealous governments. But, as Project Appleseed reminds us, without constant vigilance, we’re doomed to see our liberties eroded once again. Something that Kehoe says is already happening in other countries.

“I look around and see rights being eroded in free countries all over the world, like what's happening with speech in Britain,” he says. “You may read the stories and say, ‘That couldn't really happen. Someone couldn't go to jail because they played a song that was deemed hate speech.’ Well, it does happen. We see that in our country today, too. The left wants to limit free speech in one way; the right wants to limit free speech in another way, and people need to wake up to that.”

Vigilance then, for the men and women (and children) who participate in Project Appleseed’s clinics, means becoming civically engaged in their communities. And the discipline and persistence that come from being a good marksman make them ideal candidates. This isn’t some arbitrary outgrowth of Project Appleseed, rather an intentional part of its mission. Inspiring Americans “to study and understand and apply the founding principles of liberty and freedom” and reigniting the “spirit of the American Revolution” are stated goals of the project — and are designed to “wake up sleeping Americans,” Kehoe notes.

“We want people to get involved in their communities, to make a difference, because everything starts with getting good people involved and getting people off the couch,” he says, noting that they’ve had some “Appleseeders” who’ve run for Congress, others who are Congressional aids and some who’ve joined their local school boards. “That's what we're looking for. We want to make participants into community leaders.”

And like the liberties we enjoy, Project Appleseed’s mission applies to all Americans.

“We want the folks who come to our shoots to become inspired and to become better Americans — we don't care whether they're republican, democrat or independent. We don't care what color their skin is,” says Kehoe. “We think the things that unite us as Americans, our shared heritage, are much more binding than the petty squabbles that divide us.”

Recruiting Americans of all backgrounds and demographics, however, is a constant challenge for Project Appleseed; that’s not to say it hasn’t made progress. In the nearly 13 years that Kehoe’s been with the organization, a lot has changed. “We jokingly referred to the period when I joined as the Hairy Legged Men Days,” he says. “Those days, mostly what you saw were old Army vets with hairy legs shooting centerfire rifles.”

Since that time, Kehoe has helped the project reach a much wider audience, now with more women, younger people and families coming in. Today, depending on the location, women account for 30-40% of all shooters in clinics. “We get teenagers and soccer moms and spandex on the line, and that's a good thing,” he says. Reaching Hispanic and black communities, as well as the LGBTQ community, has been another priority, and while success often eludes them, Kehoe and his colleagues continue to work at it, knowing how important everyone’s engagement is.

“When we say all are welcome, we mean everyone is welcome, and we strive to create an environment that is welcoming in itself,” he says. “So have we become much more diverse than we were in the earlier days? Absolutely. Are we looking to continue that? Absolutely.”

This is one reason that in the last several years, Project Appleseed added a pistol clinic – to serve a distinct and growing group of people. “People buy rifles and pistols for very different reasons,” explains Kehoe. “We've seen a huge surge in firearms ownership over the last six or seven years, but most of those folks are not buying rifles; they're buying handguns, and they're buying handguns because they're concerned about their personal safety. Millions upon millions of people, lots of women, are buying handguns, but they don't have any training, and they don't have any interest in buying a rifle. So, we draw them in by teaching them about safety.”

While Kehoe says Project Appleseed is “holding its own,” with between 7,000 and 10,000 shooters participating in events every year, it continues to face challenges with recruiting participants and instructors, with some aging out every year; finding ranges to host events at; and, of course, regional politics.

“There are places in the country, like my home state of New Jersey, where we basically don't do shoots anymore because the pressure from police and public officials around owning firearms is such that our instructors don't want to be driving around with firearms in their car,” Kehoe explains. “It's a struggle, no doubt. We're constantly trying to rebuild shooting programs in some states.”

California, which used to be an “Appleseed stronghold,” Kehoe says, is one such state. “Over the years, there have been so many restrictions on who could own firearms and who can use firearms in California that a lot of people have shied away from either owning them or being public about it — and, frankly, that's part of the reason they passed all of those regulations,” he says. “Maybe you can't ban people from owning firearms, but you can make it very difficult to exercise that right.”

The division we currently face as a nation, Kehoe believes, makes it much easier for those rights to be taken away. “When we can't agree on fundamental basics, when we can't agree on the value of civil liberty, it's very easy for groups to come and take those liberties away,” he says.

Kehoe and Project Appleseed believe, however, that the things that unite us as Americans – including our shared history and heritage – are more enduring than the things that divide us. If we fail to recognize those things, however, we may find ourselves in a far less advantageous position than our predecessors did 250 years ago.

“We tell people there are four boxes that guarantee your liberty: There's the jury box, there's the soap box, there's the voting box, and ultimately, there's the cartridge box. If we ever get to the point where we need the [latter] again, it will be a terrible thing,” Kehoe says. “It's important for Americans to make their voices heard, to stand up for what they believe in.”

“The things we've lost,” he adds, “we can regain.”

“As to the species of exercise, the gun is advised. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind ... Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.”
—Thomas Jefferson

"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity."
—Albert Einstein

In 2024, an estimated 80,391 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. — representing a 27% year-over-year (YOY) decline in overdose deaths. That same year, an estimated 90,000 people nationwide graduated from drug court, also known as treatment court.

Despite the reach and impact of these programs — with several studies showing reductions in recidivism rates for treatment court graduates — many people know little about them.

Comprehensive in nature, treatment court goes beyond the immediate, surface-level problem to address what is often a deep-seated, generational issue.

A specialized court docket program offering a structured, holistic and collaborative approach to tackling substance abuse and mental health disorders among justice-involved individuals, treatment court merges the judicial process with treatment services to promote recovery and reduce recidivism. As Judge Shannon Dougherty says, “We have to balance helping the individual with public safety.”

Dougherty oversees all the treatment courts in Jefferson County, Missouri — a combination rural-suburban, predominantly white county about 35 miles south of St. Louis. In 2024, more people were admitted to treatment court programs in Missouri than those who died from drug overdoses — 2,171 to 1,481, to be exact. That same year, 1,319 people graduated from the state’s treatment court programs.

While the reasons for the decline in U.S. overdose deaths are multifaceted — the decrease likely a combination of factors ranging from increased awareness to the wider availability of naloxone — treatment court no doubt plays a role. One study, conducted between 2000 and 2012, points to a possible correlation between the presence of a treatment court in a county and a decrease in overdose mortality. Specifically, counties with such programs experienced a reduction in overdose mortality of 2.924, after controlling for annual trends.

When it comes to recidivism, treatment court participants generally are 6-26% less likely to be re-arrested than individuals in traditional court settings. One study in particular showed a 28% reduction in felony re-arrest rates within a two-year period following the completion of a program, while a program in another county saw a 15% decrease.

Somewhere between 3,800 and 4,600 treatment courts currently exist nationwide, welcoming an estimated 150,000 participants annually. With an average national graduation rate somewhere in the range of 50-70%, these programs are helping participants do the hard work to overcome addiction and, as is the case with some individuals, manage mental health disorders.

“People who graduate from our programs have done hundreds of drug tests. That’s pretty awesome to say,” says Dougherty. “I want to educate people that it’s not easy for someone to graduate from our programs. It’s hard work for them to do that, so I hate when I hear people make comments like, ‘Oh, it’s easy,’ or, ‘There are no services to help people’ — because there are.”

A “big commitment”

Launched in the late 1980s in response to the crack cocaine epidemic, treatment court offers a twist on the traditional carrot-and-stick approach to criminal justice — one that offers a lifeline to individuals lacking an extensive criminal history.

“A lot of these people might be in prison but for this program,” Dougherty notes.

Divided into categories — Adult, DWI, Veteran, Family and Juvenile, depending on the state and county — treatment courts “provide judicially supervised substance abuse treatment and case management services to nonviolent, drug-involved offenders in lieu of criminal prosecution or incarceration,” one report states. Participation in each program, except Family, begins with a criminal case.

“Most of them involve some type of drug or driving while intoxicated charge,” says Dougherty. “We have, however, had some people who’ve had other types of criminal cases, but they’re related to their abuse of substances. We might have stealing, property damage or leaving the scene of an accident. However, they can’t have an extensive criminal history outside of substance use. For example, if someone was breaking into and stealing cars nonstop while on drugs, they probably wouldn’t qualify for a program. But if somebody had drug charges and stole a car or engaged in property damage once or twice, then we might consider them.”

In Dougherty’s treatment court, the way it works is when a case (i.e., a police report) comes in, it’s handed off to a prosecutor who decides whether or not to file charges. This person also makes a determination as to whether or not the defendant should be screened for treatment court. “This happens at the beginning of the case, before the person has pled guilty or been sentenced,” Dougherty explains.

However, there is one caveat: In Adult treatment court, a case could involve a deferred prosecution, meaning the prosecutor waits to file charges and, should the defendant successfully complete the program, never does. “It could be they’re on probation and they’re going to be revoked, and instead of going to prison, they could participate in our program,” says Dougherty. “But if they fail the program, they have to face the consequences with that criminal case.”

Should the prosecutor decide to hand the case off to Dougherty, she and her team — which includes the treatment court administrator, a probation and parole officer, two counselors, a defense attorney, a prosecuting attorney and, in the case of veterans, a VA representative — decide whether the person is a good candidate for treatment court. Beyond having reliable transportation, the defendant must be willing to adhere to all program requirements.

“We want to screen people because our program is not easy,” says Dougherty. “If somebody graduates from our treatment court, they have had to do a lot of things, and it requires a big commitment on their part.”

The “aha” moment

Every week in Dougherty’s courtroom, she hosts a drawing. Treatment court participants, if they’ve done everything they’re supposed to for the week prior, get to put their name in a hat for the chance to win a prize. “It’s nothing big,” Dougherty says, “just something to make them feel good about what they’ve done.”

For her, it’s about recognizing and celebrating even the small victories. “It’s not all about, ‘You’re in trouble,’” she says. “It’s about, ‘Hey, you’re doing great.’”

And with all that’s required of program participants, these minor achievements matter.

Every day, participants are required to call a drug testing line to find out if they need to go in to be drug tested. Once a week, they see their counselor, engage in self-help support group meetings and attend court. (The frequency of these meetings can decrease as the program progresses.) Dougherty also assigns a new topic each week that participants must journal about, with the first one being, “What has my use cost me?”

While all treatment court programs follow a standard operating procedure, they also account for the needs of each individual. Additional support in Dougherty’s programs can come in the form of a parenting class, anger management, inpatient treatment or something else entirely.

“If we see people struggling with certain things, we have different workbooks people can work on to go over with their counselor,” Dougherty says. “There are many layers to people beyond just using a drug. There are a lot of things that have happened in people’s lives that we don’t know about. So if we’re not able to treat something with our regular counselors, we help them get extra services.”

This is one reason why participants are given a planner at the start of the program to keep track of all their appointments and tasks. Those who fail to keep up or find themselves facing other violations risk being sanctioned or, worse, terminated from the program altogether. Sanctions could take the form of jail time, community service, an essay assignment or any number of things, depending on the offense.

“If somebody gets a speeding ticket, for instance, we know that for people who are justice involved and are struggling, traffic can be a big thing,” Dougherty explains. “They may keep getting these tickets and not pay them, and then it gets overwhelming and a warrant goes out for their arrest, so we take it seriously.”

“Sometimes we might have them review an accident, such as where you see a roadside memorial, and write a 400-word paper about speeding and its impact,” she adds. “Sometimes we’ll have people in the DWI program go to a victim impact panel as part of their probation to listen to someone who’s been impacted — maybe they lost a family member in a DWI crash — and write a 400-word paper reflecting on it. We try to think of things that will help the participant — we can get creative.”

If it seems like Dougherty and her team are tough on participants, it’s because they truly want them to succeed — as they get to know each person, it becomes personal. Dougherty expects accountability but also recognizes it’s a two-way street. This acknowledgement informs her holistic approach.

“Before court, as a team, we all sit and staff the cases that are going to appear for court. We discuss what’s going well, what isn’t going well, if there’s anything else we can do to help them or anything we’re missing,” says Dougherty. “We all play a slightly different role than we normally play in the real world. The prosecutor and probation officer are often rooting for the person and wanting them to succeed because they’ve gotten to know them.”

Once court’s in session, Dougherty calls participants up one by one to chat. “I try to spend a minimum of two to three minutes talking with each of them — about how they’re doing, if they feel like there’s anything else we could do to help them or, if they’re doing really well, I’m just like, ‘How are the kids doing?’ or ‘How is your job?’ It just depends on the person,” she says.

This personal touch is part and parcel to treatment court programs — and a component that Dougherty says is integral to participants’ success in them.

“My favorite part is when I can tell someone’s had the ‘aha’ moment — where they feel that ‘they’re for me, not against me’ — and you can see a whole change in their demeanor,” she says. “I love that because I know they’re not just putting on a show for me anymore, that they’ve really had a change in their soul.”

Helping “the whole person”

When it comes to success in Dougherty’s treatment court programs, there are no absolutes. It isn’t that a person graduates from the program. It isn’t even that they stop using drugs or alcohol. As Dougherty says, it’s that they “know how to help themselves.”

“We have a lot of people who reach back out, and they’re like, ‘Hey, I thought I could do this, but I’m not going to my meetings anymore. I thought, I’ll just have a few drinks,’ or whatever happened,” she says. “The treatment court administrator is able to quickly reconnect them with services — and that’s good. I think that’s a success when somebody slips up and they’re like, ‘OK, I caught myself. I want to get help.’”

For the individuals in these programs — many of whom grew up around substance abuse, Dougherty notes — to develop the ability to know how and to actually take the initiative to help themselves is significant. “For a lot of people in our program, it’s been generational and that’s how they were raised, so they didn’t have a role model,” she says. Because of this, much of what Dougherty and her team do involves life skills training. “We want to stop it there and not have another generation of children who are raised in that environment,” she notes.

Beyond learning time management as a byproduct of being in the program, participants also have the opportunity to learn financial and professional skills. Finance professionals have advised them on how to open a bank account, how to balance a checkbook and how to create a budget, while HR professionals have taught them how to create a resume and apply for jobs.

Other offerings have taken a broader view, with activities involving art and other hobbies with therapeutic benefits. A few years ago, Dougherty’s treatment court launched what it calls an alternative group, with sessions that include a photography class and a “Be Inspired” class in which participants color and talk, giving them “something tangible they can look at and reflect on,” Dougherty says, as well as helping them “get in touch with their feelings and express themselves.” She’s also been pushing for a regular cooking class — one that would focus on “how to shop for food … and make a healthy meal for yourself,” Dougherty says.

The program’s all-encompassing nature is not accidental, rather part of a strategic and concerted effort to address many of the factors that either contribute to or exacerbate participants’ substance abuse.

“We’re not just at the surface; we’re trying to help the whole person,” Dougherty says. “I think that’s really the formula for success, because if there’s something that’s really bothering you and we don't know about it and we’ve never addressed it, it’s still going to be bothering you when you graduate from the program, but then you won’t have all of us around to support you.”

Making “true change”

With all signs pointing to a decrease in substance abuse and overdose deaths — resulting in reduced recidivism rates and thus reductions in court, prison and healthcare costs, as well as foster care expenses — treatment court not only offers societal and personal benefits, but economic ones as well.

One analysis, conducted in 2025 and focused on Georgia treatment courts, revealed $168 million in cost savings for Georgia taxpayers — specifically, for every $1 that went to treatment courts, $6.60 was saved. That same report indicated an economic benefit of $45.9 million, or $25,921 per graduate of these programs.

More broadly, every $1 invested in treatment court yields an estimated $2-$4 in direct taxpayer savings, with a larger economic benefit sometimes reaching $27 per dollar spent, per one analysis. Additional data show that the ROI for these programs frequently hovers between 200-400%.

“We have people who start paying taxes and their kids are not in foster care, and they’re not having babies born addicted to drugs,” Dougherty says. “So you can look at it that way — the savings.”

But, for Dougherty — who’s seen firsthand the impact that substance abuse can have on people’s lives and families — these programs offer so much more.

“Sometimes people never had a chance growing up. Sometimes people just made a bad mistake and they really want to change their lives,” she says. “And I will tell you, there is no place you can go, without being in this program, where you’ll have a group of people around you who are all professionals and will tell you, ‘We are here to help you. You have to do the work, but we have these services for you.’ That is how you make true change — holding people accountable and being there for them as a safety net versus just saying, ‘Go see your counselor two times a month.’ Our goal is true change.”

The fruits of that labor are both tangible milestones and symbolic achievements. People who are successful in Dougherty’s programs put in the work to improve their lives — and credit scores — ultimately achieving the ability to do basic things such as buy their own car or home.

“It’s not about buying things or having things; it’s about what it represents,” Dougherty says. “They’re like, ‘I got a car. I can drive my kids safely to school and back or drive to see my mom and not have it break down.’ We’ve also had some people buy homes who never thought they’d be able to, so now they have a place for their child and significant other.”

“It’s about building that foundation,” she adds, “and I truly believe that if you’re getting up and working every day, and you have a family or you have the responsibility to pay your car or house payment, that’s going to be another layer that is going to encourage you to stay in recovery.”

The personal impact

The overarching impact of treatment court programs, though significant, isn’t as powerful as the individual stories of the people whose lives are touched by them. It’s those personal anecdotes that bring their full impact to life.

One man, a past graduate of the program, started an early-morning exercise and devotional for men, where they read the Bible and exercise. “I know these people are making a difference in this world,” Dougherty notes.

But perhaps the most striking example of treatment court’s influence is the difference between where participants started versus where they end up.

“In the beginning, a lot of people are only coming to us because they want to have a better outcome in their criminal case,” says Dougherty. “But then, there are a lot of people who are like, ‘I’m so glad I’m here. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’ They’re going to meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous and Celebrate Recovery; they’re also chairing meetings, or they’ll end up acting as a sponsor to someone. So, they’re making a huge difference outside of these programs.”

“They’re not just there because of a criminal case any more,” Dougherty adds. “They’re really trying to change their life.”

“We are here to help each other get through this thing,
whatever it is.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, “A Man Without a Country”

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
—Thomas Pynchon

The other day, as I was scrolling through Facebook, an article jumped out at me. It was from NPR, a publication I admittedly don’t regularly read, but the topic interested me, so I clicked. Once on the page, I received a pop-up that read:

I’m no stranger to the drama that’s been unfolding between President Donald Trump and the likes of publicly funded media outlets like NPR and PBS. But for those who may be, in May, Trump issued an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cease federal funding for the networks, stating that “neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” Additionally, on June 3, Trump formally asked Congress to defund the networks. They responded by suing the administration, claiming Trump doesn’t have the power to strip them of their funds and citing “viewpoint discrimination.”

I doubt many would disagree with the importance of having access to “independent, trustworthy journalism.” After all, a free press has been the backbone of this country; who can forget the muckrakers of the early 1900s, exposing corruption and raising public awareness of social and economic issues. This type of journalism has been a force for progress in the United States for more than a century, leading to tangible policies and regulations including the Pure Food and Drug Act (thanks to Upton Sinclair’s reporting and his book “The Jungle”) and child labor laws (based on images snapped by photojournalist Lewis Hines).

The difference — at least one of the most notable ones — between these pioneering journalists of the past and contemporary ones at NPR and PBS is federal funding. (Of note: Hines did some work for the Works Progress Administration that was unrelated to his efforts around child labor.)

Established by Congress in 1967, the CPB at the time reflected lawmakers’ concerns with commercial broadcasters prioritizing profits over public interest, as well as their belief in the importance of all Americans – regardless of income or geographic location – having access to high-quality media and information. Today, the CPB receives approximately $500 million in taxpayer funds every year to allocate to outlets like NPR and PBS, this year receiving $535 million in federal appropriations. Thus, “independent” seems to be a mischaracterization of these outlets.

More notably, continued funding for NPR and PBS comes at a time when access to independent journalism is at an all-time high (here’s to you, fellow Substackers) and as skepticism around the motives of mainstream media — NPR and PBS included — continues to increase. This is to say nothing of the many historical examples of state-owned/run and publicly funded media being used for nefarious purposes — Nazi propaganda dehumanizing Jews and the People’s Republic of China describing Uyghur internment camps as “vocational training centers” notable examples of this.

As Jed Rubenfeld recently noted in an article published by The Free Press, “NPR and PBS aren’t entitled to your tax dollars.” Correct as he may be, the question that many — including the Trump administration — are asking may not be the right one.

Whether NPR and PBS are biased and, as such, whether taxpayers should be funding them based on this is less important perhaps than the question of whether we should fund them at all. As Trump himself stated in his May 1 executive order instructing the CPB to cease funding for these networks, “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse and innovative news options.”

Similar to the now-obsolete Farm Security Administration that helped struggling American farmers during the Great Depression and the Paycheck Protection Program that supported small business owners during the 2020 pandemic, the CPB may have served out its purpose.

Of course, we must blame someone. And for that, you can look to the Internet.

As mainstream media outlets have struggled to remain profitable in the digital era, independent journalists have thrived (thanks to podcasts and platforms like Substack and Patreon). In this new era, which now includes AI, mainstream media outlets have experimented with a variety of strategies and formats to remain relevant and profitable, albeit with minimal success.

But the point is, they’re trying … because they have to.

When your revenue, at least in part, is guaranteed by your government, this creates a perverse incentive to continue with business as usual. When you’re not forced to innovate, as NPR and PBS have not had to, you become irrelevant, antiquated, obsolete.

The Trump administration said it itself: “Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter,” the executive order reads. “No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies.”

Our “right” lies in our ability as Americans to seek out the news sources that we see fit … because, as NPR states, “everyone deserves access to independent, trustworthy journalism.” Today, there’s no shortage of those — a fact that’s rendering what was once an “essential public service” nonessential.

“Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.”
— Felix Frankfurter