Draft Four: Life is a jungle

Read on for a Q&A with Amanda Ripley.

RECOMMENDATION: Before we start, a reminder. Along with journalist friends from the region we’re hosting four 90-minute Zoom conversations, all *free* to attend. They will cover funding (June 18), org culture (June 19, I’m hosting), product (June 21), and mental health (June 26). FYI, you have to sign up for *separately* for each. See you there!

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The scene below happened last Sunday, soon after I voted for mayor of Bucharest, and in the European Parliament elections. I was in an Uber, heading for the airport; Marius (not his real name) was my driver.

He is in his mid-thirties and over the past year has clocked over 1,000 five-star rides in a white Renault. He’s neatly trimmed, bearded, and dressed in a T-shirt and shorts to better withstand one of the most ruthless June heat waves ever. He has no intention of voting; he laughs when I mention the polls opening at 7 a.m. “See, they can work early mornings, when it suits them,” he says.

“It’s not for me,” he continues when I ask if he’s voting. “They’ll do whatever they want anyway.”

He hasn’t voted in previous elections either; doesn’t see the point. He knows someone in a village, a friend’s father, who has been trying to become mayor for years but couldn’t win: neither as an independent, nor through his own party. Now he’s trying with AUR, because he’s a nationalist who says he “wants to protect the country from thieves”. But even now, the wannabe mayor isn’t very upbeat about his chances. But he’s not worried: the stakes will be higher in December’s parliamentary elections, and he hopes Marius will give him a vote when needed.

“Godfather,” Marius says he told the man at a recent christening, “I’ll vote for you, but for 200 euros. That’s the price. I’ll bring other relatives, too, if you can afford it.” There’s a sly smile when he recounts this. Or – though Marius he doesn’t like this solution, as it would mean being at the man’s mercy –, once he wins, he could Marius as a driver, so he can quit Uber.

He now works 12-14 hours a day, sometimes 16, Monday to Monday. He recently had another politician in his car, a parliamentarian from PNL, the liberal party, who promised a big tip if he could get him to Adunații Copăceni in 20 minutes instead of the estimated 30. And who knows, the PNL guy told him, maybe in the future he gets him a job as a driver to Parliament. “Would I make 10,000 lei a month?”, Marius asked him. (Around 2,000 euros). “That’s just the per diem at Parliament,” the guy supposedly replied. “Oh, leave me naked,” Marius recounts to me, laughing. “Luck must have struck me. I’ll get rich.”

At the end of the ride, the man told him to send a CV, saying he’d take care of things. Marius later  checked the app, curious about the promised big tip. “0 tips,” he tells me. The man just paid the fare.

Uber is better than promises. He works hard, no breaks with coffee cups on the hood or the dashboard, maybe a sandwich, then back to pedal to the metal. He can’t imagine working for 4,000 lei a month. It wouldn’t be enough. He’s been married for about two years, and he and his wife have a baby. She’s more than a two hours’ drive away, and he goes home for a fortnight after every 6-7 days of driving. They’re based there so she can provide care to her grandmother – just the woman helping costs about 2,500-3,000 lei. Then there are the grandmother’s diapers, creams, medicine. Plus the costs of the baby. His wife brings in income from maternity leave, but they’re still struggling.

How long will he keep doing Uber? He doesn’t know. There’s no way of saving for a house yet. He has debts. A bank loan to close by the end of the year. Maybe then he could work less. He sees others who don’t put in 14-16 hours a day, and still make more money.

“Something must be wrong with me,” he says. “But I don’t know what yet.”

*

Marius’ reality makes sense. When you struggle day in and day out, when you work your ass off and you are still in debt, who cares about a politician’s promises? Especially since they don’t come true – not just the ones they make in campaigns, but the ones they make to you after slamming the door to your car. Marius doesn’t want to depend on anyone because he doesn’t really trust anyone.

Would it matter to him if I said I was a journalist equipped to deliver trustworthy information that would make his life better? I think he’d laugh his ass off, and I don’t blame him.

*

This brought to mind another conversation I had in an Uber, back in December 2018, arguably a more innocent time when it comes to who and what we believe.

The driver is a nice guy, rated highly for conversation. Shaved head, sunglasses. You work in IT?, he asks. I wish, I reply. Journalism. I try to explain my work, which back then was editing DoR. We write about people’s lives, I say, the whole complicated mess of it.

“So, like stories”, he says.

“Yes!”, I say happily.

“So how do I know they are real?”, he counters.

He insists all stories could be fabricated. True, I say. But I tell him that we print photos of people, we talk about, and show the reporting process, we even bring the people we write about on stage at live shows.

“Yes”, he agrees. “That’s better.”

But they could all be in on the scam, he adds. I’m disarmed. I admit to him that could also be true.

VR, he says. (He’d probably say AI today). That’s like cocaine. False. Now if a hologram popped out of the phone, that’d be better. Still not true, truer.

“My wife could be in New York, I could be in Athens, she could be floating atop my phone. Better.”

Yes, I admit.

So, who is behind your enterprise, he wants to know. No one. Just us: trying to sell, fundraise, get grants. He’s disappointed. You do this out of the kindness of your heart? Not quite, I say, but it’s true, I don’t make much money.

He says that’s not OK. Life is a jungle. Full of idiots driving Ferrari’s or other 100K euro cars, while he’s driving a 10K euro Fiat. He knows these people who have it all. Has nothing against them, but all could be lost in a moment. He lost all of it. 1 million euros. Gambling in a casino.

I’m tempted to ask for proof, but I don’t.

All the money. Gone in one night. But that doesn’t compare to the other loss. My wife, he says. I lost her soon after, at 21. Didn’t know she had a heart defect from birth; three blood vessels to the heart. Died in three months after she started feeling bad. Buried her in Alexandria.

“I drove from Bucharest with candles all the time. This is loss. Nothing mattered after that.”

He told me a few more stories about trying to make it as phone repair technician, but it wasn’t working. As we pulled up to the airport, he told me he had two kids – early 20s. He’s mid-40s.

“All those in power are in it for themselves. So you and my kids have to be, too. Focus on today. Stop dreaming of tomorrow.”

*

I recount these stories because they underscore the distrust people feel for institutions, politicians or bureaucracies. They don’t believe they’ll provide a decent life, nor an even playing field. But they also illustrate a profound distrust of journalists and the stories we tell.

People don’t trust our facts, because they don’t trust us. And they don’t trust us mostly because they don’t know us and/or because we have done little to make their lives better.

These are some of the themes that came up in a recent conversation I had with Amanda Ripley, a journalist and now a trained conflict mediator, who wrote one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years, High Conflict (Amanda’s name has come up in these letters before).

Amanda is an award-winning writer who, at one point, started asking whether journalists can do something about the polarized societies we’re living in. Her first answer, after talking to conflict experts, mediators, psychologists and others was to “complicate the narratives”. This essay from six years ago – hugely influential for me – paved the way to the book (which argues, among other things, that journalists are often “conflict entrepreneurs”) and to Amanda’s current endeavor, Good Conflict, which has trained about 500 journalists in how to cover conflict differently, and hundreds of others who are not journalists, but also are struggling with conflict and want better ways out.

I spoke to Amanda for my CUNY project on how to do journalism differently, and at more human scale. The question of trust came up immediately, as it was on her mind, too. What follows is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for clarity.

Amanda’s book, in English, and in Romanian, at Publica. (Read an excerpt in Romanian.)

Where are you at now in terms of your thinking on journalism and what is journalism for?
Amanda Ripley: This is a big hard question, as you know, and I am constantly struggling with it. It feels like we need to be much more specific about what is journalism for when it comes to a given community or goal.

But, in a world in which it will be very hard to know whom to trust – much harder even than it is now – it will be very hard to know what is real and what is not real. Barring a physical in-person encounter, it will be very tricky, I think, to know what is real.

So, where does that leave journalism? I mean, in some ways, we need it more than ever, right? Because we need to know what is true, what is not true, what to do, what is being done, what is happening. And we need sources that we can trust, not just for information, but for insight, for hope and solutions.

So, at the same time, the need is greater than ever, and the supply is dwindling. Because there's no way to easily meet that need given all the things: the incentives, the business model problems, the technology, the distrust, the exploitation of distrust, polarization, conflict, violence. So it's a real interesting kind of paradox, where we sort of need this thing more than ever, but it's harder and harder to supply it.

When I'm just kind of musing aloud – I know this is impossible –, I often think that maybe what we need is for everyone to have their own journalist, so that it was like a one-on-one relationship.

And maybe it's not even a journalist, maybe it's a public investigator or someone to sort through all the information, make sense of all the things, figure out how it applies to me, and tell me what I can do about it, which is the thing that’s missing most.

But it needs to be a relationship or else I'm not going to believe it.

It’s interesting that you brought up trust and things being real and this element of scale – they were not necessarily there or so prominent in your thinking when you started looking at conflict. What changed?
I wrote that before the pandemic, you know, and before the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models. So I think those things helped me see that the foundational problem of trust and distrust is one that we can't skip over. We can and should continue to work on how to cover conflict in ways that are more constructive, how to understand why people do what they do, showcase examples of communities trying to solve problems, all of those good things. But it's like, there's this foundational problem that undermines those efforts.

What would you, what would you say that foundational problem is?
I used to say it was distrust, but I don't think it is, because people do trust things. I once interviewed this trust researcher from the UK and he said, you actually can't survive without trust. You need every day, especially maybe in the modern world, to trust that the things you ate for breakfast would not be poison. And there's a million examples.

Right. And people even trust their bad information providers.
So the problem isn't just distrust. It's, I guess, corruption of the trust signals, right? We don't know what to trust, so we can be easily tricked and manipulated, intentionally or not. I don't think it's always intentional. So we are trusting things, but the cues that tell us what is trustworthy have gotten really distorted. I think.

That resonates. I also interviewed community organizers and activists, mostly from here in Romania, and they all talked about a feeling of isolation they somehow can't seem to shake off. So I was wondering what you thought of that, that maybe we're in a crisis of connection.
Which is a parallel problem, right? The inability to know what to trust leads us to become more and more disconnected, which leads us to be more and more vulnerable to conflict entrepreneurs and disinformation and misinformation. There’s this kind of dynamic that's hard to interrupt. So then is the problem under this problem loneliness?

It does seem like the solution is the same, right? If it's one-on-one relationship building and connection, then that's the same, that's attacking the same problem.

I also asked Amanda about how we could solve for some of these problems in journalism. Say we had a newsroom that wanted to work differently: build relationships in order to build trust in order to then provide what people need to lead better lives. An important takeaway of hers? This: “I think there's a way in which journalists can be conflict mediators in a community.”

Amanda Ripley: So let's say you and I are building a local news outlet. Maybe we don't call it that, maybe we call it something else. Is it called journalism? Is it called news? I don't know. I'm not saying yes or no, but it's worth asking the question: has this thing, this institution, at least here in the States, lost so much credibility that you need to do something else entirely?

And I don't know. But let's say we're going to try to create some kind of local institution to help people make sense of the world and contribute to building a better one. Let's say that was roughly the mission. I suppose you would need to do everything horizontally: be constantly listening, talking to, and learning from your community. We need to know what it is people need help with, and what they trust us to do, or what could they trust us to do that they don't trust Twitter or their neighbor to do.

I think sometimes journalists think “well, of course people avoid news because it's hard, and news is hard, and life is hard”, and they get very righteous about it. But I think the biggest problem is that there's nothing to do with the news.

There's no job to be done with that information in the morning.
Right. So does that mean we would do something radical? If we were in our new organization, would we run every project through a litmus test which is basically: Do people already know about this? Is there anything to be done? And if there's nothing to be done by them – which is most of the time – then is anyone doing anything? Is there a vicarious sense of agency that we can help generate through storytelling and reporting so that even though I can't personally intervene in that conflict, it’s good for me to know what other people are trying to do? And even if it doesn't work, it's good for me to know. Because it might spark ideas for my community.

But if the answer is no, no, no – people already know about this, there's nothing they can do, and you have no reporting or data that would indicate that anyone else is doing something useful. I guess the question would be: should we cover it?

You said your earlier journalism work not necessarily fueling conflict but was still a bit ego driven or you had different metrics than you do today. So, I'm curious in the work that you do now, what's different?
I remember when I was working on the Complicating the narratives essay, I interviewed this woman who had been a journalist and she became a mediator, and she said that if she were to go back to journalism, she would spend a lot less time trying to be clever and more time trying to find the bits and pieces of people's stories that don't fit.

That really stuck with me; you know when something really lands, and you realize that you've been complicit in that.

I mean, the truth is I can be pretty clever, and it's easier to be clever in language when you're taking something down, when you're criticizing, and judging, and attacking. It's just easier. It's easier to be in any room the person who's attacking than the person who's inventing or trying to find a solution.

I think people are very hungry for some other ways to navigate conflict right now. So it's not hard. It is hard to learn the skills and to implement them and to go against the cultural grain that you're in, whatever it is. That is hard. So that's another thing we try to do: create some community around that so that you're not doing it alone.

And what's been hardest for you to retrain? From the skills you used as a reporter to the skills you're using as a mediator or facilitator?
I think the hardest thing is to let go of the control over it. You know, with a story, you can really control like everything that's in it. You can really obsess over every last detail and argue your point with your editor. But when you're trying to teach, you have to let the people you're teaching own the problem and the solution, right? Or else they won't really learn it.

So when someone will ask a really hard question, I'm trying to learn to let them grapple with it before I, offer a solution. And it's kind of like that with journalism, right? It's like, we have to release some of our grip over the process and let the community and the public in.

That's so hard, though.
But it's also refreshing. I mean maybe that's just my age, but my going out and writing another story about some politician and how terrible they are, it's not interesting. I think readers feel that way, too. Ten years ago it would be harder to get people to read a story that was a “good conflict” story, but these days we're all kind of desperate for something surprising, or hopeful, or unexpected, and these stories are easier in a way because people need and want them.