KF News and Ideas

Earlier this year, journalist Amanda Ripley spoke to Kettering Foundation staff about her book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. In this second in a series of two blog posts, Jennifer Brandel, who has collaborated with Kettering on journalism experiments in strengthening democracy, writes about the implications of the book’s insights for the media.

Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict provides the following list of questions that reporters can ask to produce more complex, nuanced stories and reduce unproductive conflict:

In November 2022, we invited Kevin C. O’Leary, director of Saving Democracy, to join us. Saving Democracy seeks to build a pro-democracy coalition from Liz Cheney conservatives to Bernie Sanders progressives and will conduct educational “deep canvassing” in selected congressional swing districts, focusing on the nation’s democratic tradition and individual liberty in a constitutional democracy. They plan to ask the business community to use the power of their political donations to reward political leaders who are committed to democracy. A research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine, O’Leary also teaches in the Political Science Department at Chapman University. He is the author of Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America (2006) and Madison’s Sorrow: Today’s War on the Founders and America’s Liberal Ideal (2020).

Valerie Lemmie, the Kettering Foundation’s director of exploratory research, joined an illustrious panel of development and civic engagement professionals at the annual meeting of the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) on September 19. Lemmie’s video presentation was on strategies to incorporate democratic practices into community and economic development civic engagement initiatives.

In May 2022, we invited Shayla C. Nunnally, professor and head of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, to join us. We asked, what challenges related to social and political mistrust might we expect when attempting to engage a diverse citizenry in collective action and public deliberation?