Author Amanda Ripley on the lamentable rise of ‘conflict’ journalism

Journalist Amanda Ripley reflects on the tumultuous year behind us and sketches out some promising ways forward.

By Alexander Russo

I’ll take any excuse to talk to Atlantic contributor and book author Amanda Ripley, who’s written extensively about education issues. And so I was delighted when she agreed to chat about her new book and its implications for education journalism.

In recent years, Ripley has written a series of important pieces related to how journalism is practiced, including a long essay called Complicating the Narratives and a more recent op-ed in the Washington Post decrying the rise of cartoonish, simplistic narratives in journalism and more generally in society.

Her new book, “High Conflict,”  published Tuesday, goes deeper into these topics. However, as you will see, this interview veers quickly into more immediate issues of journalistic concern.

“The coverage I have seen has been extremely unhelpful, particularly with regard to education and fear,” said Ripley in a recent phone call. “There has not been the kind of soul searching or reflection that I would have expected.”

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The coverage I have seen has been extremely unhelpful, particularly with regard to education and fear. There has not been the kind of soul searching or reflection that I would have expected.

Alexander Russo: For those of us who haven’t yet read the book, can you tell us what “High Conflict” is about?

Amanda Ripley: We’ve all been experiencing a lot of conflict lately. And it’s pretty exhausting, right? So this book is about how to interrupt really toxic unhealthy conflicts, personal and political, and how to make conflict more useful.

To do that, I spent four years following half a dozen people who moved themselves, and in some cases their communities, out of what you might call high conflict, which is unhealthy conflict, and into something that I call good conflict, which is still conflict but it’s a kind of conflict that is productive.

I was very skeptical about this myself initially. However, I’ve seen it happen enough now that I can attest that it is a real thing. And it is kind of more important than ever. Because right now our culture and our media platforms and our incentives all accelerate high conflict.

Russo: How does the current education debate play into your idea of high conflict?

Ripley: Some parts of the book talk about the pandemic. And the pandemic is really just an extreme case study in high conflict. So you can really see the way the preexisting distrust distorted everything else. And that’s particularly true when it came to school reopening debates, where the debate often really wasn’t about science.

Long before the pandemic, America suffered from profound distrust, right? Between many union leaders and district and city leaders, between many rank-and-file teachers and their principals and superintendents and politicians, between many families and schools. Not all of them, but many. That distrust goes way back into our history, but it meant there was no goodwill in the bank.

So every COVID calculation was filtered through the same old us-versus-them lens (and often covered by journalists that way, too). That distrust made it very hard to reopen school in person—even when it was safe to do so. And it’s a tragedy for the country, one we won’t recover from for at least a generation.

Millions of kids were effectively abandoned by our society—even if the society didn’t do it on purpose. And kids watched it happen. They saw restaurants and nail salons reopen while their schools stayed closed. In some places, like where I live in Washington, D.C., there were students who were told they could not come back to school in person — even after their teachers were vaccinated. Other kids saw that their parents did not trust the schools enough to keep them safe. All of these things, kids observe. For a lot of them, any illusion they had about whether school really, truly matters in our society just evaporated. How could it not? It was a brutal, costly reminder that until we rebuild trust in our institutions, we just won’t be able to thrive as a country.

Right now our culture and our media platforms and our incentives all accelerate high conflict.

Russo: You mentioned that they were places that you now see your own journalism having sort of gone along with the standard practice of journalism. Can you tell us what things you figured out or wish you’d done differently?

Ripley: There’s just no denying the fact that whenever you allow yourself to see just two sides to an issue, you’re in trouble. And it’s almost never the case that everybody neatly fits into two camps.

Doing education coverage, it’s really easy to see the world in two camps: the unions versus the reformers, or management versus union, or charter schools versus traditional public schools. I tried not to be partisan or take a side, you know. I don’t want to exaggerate my former sins. But I think I did sometimes fall into that trap of seeing two camps, and that informs your reporting.

There are villains in stories that we write. There are people who do things that hurt others. Sometimes it’s on purpose, sometimes not. But the harm is real. I don’t think you want to lose that passion. That can motivate the story and the reporting and also make it much more vivid in the writing. But I’m trying to get much more sort of suspicious of that feeling I might get when I’m sure that one side is evil and the other side is right.

That feeling of righteousness, I’m not saying it’s never relevant, but it’s almost never good for a story or for a reporter. It does not serve you or your readers. You really can’t have any impact on their views unless you can kind of complicate their existing narratives.

Russo: You’re saying that regular readers might actually be able to tolerate that, and actually welcome it?

Ripley: I think readers can actually handle way more complexity than we think. We underestimate our audiences when we think we have to simplify everything. The complexity is where it gets interesting.

We as journalists are constantly encountering activists, and it’s way disproportionate to the population. And it really warps our perspective, much worse than ever before.

Most people aren’t on Twitter, and the people who are on Twitter are much, much more politically partisan. But there’s just a lot of feedback that we get that is not calibrated for its relative frequency. It’s very hard as a human to take that in and right-size it in your head.

There are villains in stories that we write. But I’m trying to get much more sort of suspicious of that feeling I might get when I’m sure that one side is evil and the other side is right.

Russo: I’ve always been conflicted about journalism. And in the five years that I’ve been writing about journalism, my ambivalence has gotten worse. I felt like there was a real chance for education journalism to shine. And instead of shining, journalism has often amplified fears. While there’s been a lot of reflection around diversity and inequality in journalism, I haven’t seen the same kind of reflection going on about pandemic coverage. How about you?

Ripley: I feel less alone hearing you say that because I have the same reaction. And I agree, there has not been the kind of soul searching or reflection that I would have expected. And it’s very painful. Because, you know, part of our identities is around our work. And you want to feel like you’re part of something that you can be proud of. And part of that I am super proud of, and I’m sure you are, too. I don’t want to otherize all journalists. It’s easy to do that. There are huge, huge differences from one outlet from one journalist from one editor to the next. But I would agree that the coverage I have seen has been extremely unhelpful, particularly with regard to education and fear.

I actually canceled my New York Times print subscription for the first time in like 15 years because I was so saddened by the way that – again, not all, but some of the coverage, maybe not even most – some of the coverage just felt like my profession had been captured by the conflict. There was not enough critical thinking and courage and creativity in the coverage. You know, even simple things like just the coverage of COVID case numbers without a denominator. I mean, every major news outlet has covered COVID without basic standards with regard to how you convey risk. I mean, really basic stuff. The Post still runs numbers – just absolute numbers showing how many people have died in D.C., with no sense of compared to what or percentages. I think that has to do with polarization. I don’t totally understand all the connections, but I think the more you get captured by high conflict, the harder it is to be useful.

Increasingly, and this is so painful, I see these more rigorous news outlets start to fall into a lesser, but still harmful, version of conflict entrepreneurship. One of the diabolical things about high conflict as a system is that eventually you start to mimic the tendencies of your adversary. Sooner or later, if you are in an us versus them kind of feud, you will start to mimic them, whether you notice it or not, whether you mean to or not.

Increasingly, and this is so painful, I see these more rigorous news outlets start to fall into a lesser, but still harmful, version of conflict entrepreneurship.

Russo: What kinds of things can journalists do to restore trust?

Ripley: In some countries, like Nigeria, for example, journalists routinely turn off the microphone when interviewing a political candidate who starts lying. That’s normal there. Whereas, you know, we had to go through a lot of being used by politicians and still we don’t really do that.

There’s also a kind of collaboration that happens across different news sites in other countries because they can’t all be everywhere at once, particularly around elections, because they know that elections are flashpoints for violence. So in these places, which have endured horrific political violence in recent memory, journalists see it as part of their mission to prevent more political violence—by working together to investigate claims, snuff out rumors and get eyes on the scene, at polling places or protests.

In other cases, it’s as simple as not cutting certain things out of the story. Like, certain things that don’t quite fit the theme or the hypothesis, or the conclusion. I’m actually amazed, every time I try to do this, I don’t want to do it. I want to cut it out. And then I find it actually makes the story better.

One of the things I learned from people immersed in high conflict and people who study high conflict is to get much better at identifying conflict entrepreneurs in our midst. These are people and platforms that intentionally incite and tweak conflict for their own ends. And they often [do it] for profit, but more often, it’s for power, attention, camaraderie, a sense of purpose, meaning, those kinds of things.

One of the side effects of journalism in high conflict is that it starts to become relentlessly and inaccurately negative, even when things get better. If we actually want to have an impact on humans, which I think we all do, we have to start looking at the psychology of humans and be aware that that kind of relentless negative headlines does a lot of damage. The same way we don’t cover suicide clusters without care for how it affects humans, we need to think about how that kind of negativity distorts reality, and what it leads to is burnout and avoiding your coverage.

So I do think that there are examples of newsrooms that have shifted from high conflict to good conflict, and they are mostly not in the United States.­­

Russo: Is there a piece of journalism that you produced that you look back on with horror or pride? It’s so helpful when journalists reflect on their coverage, creating vulnerability. I don’t think it diminishes the work, but rather increases the credibility – especially when the work is award-winning.  

Ripley: It’s funny that you mention awards. All these forces are set up to do ‘us versus them’ stories, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the strange and insular world of journalism prizes. This adversarial model that we’ve got going in education, journalism, and politics no longer serves us. “There’s a good guy and a bad guy and everything’s super clear,” it just breaks down. And we keep awarding prizes in that model. But 99 percent of stories are not that clear-cut. In real life, people are complicated, and there’s a big gap between how journalists think of their work and what the public actually needs.

In terms of my own writing, here is an example of something I would write very differently, knowing what I know about conflict. This is a post I wrote in 2011 trying to debunk the false claim that America’s affluent schools perform better than schools in Finland, which Diane Ravitch among others repeated over and over, because it took the onus off of schools to educate poor kids and put it on poverty and policy makers.

Having been to Finland and having studied the data for several years, I knew this claim wasn’t true, and I was baffled by the fact that it kept getting airtime anyway. What I didn’t understand was that laying out the facts was not going to matter. Criticizing the “stunning lack of sophistication” of those making these claims was counterproductive (that one really makes me cringe now!). That’s just not how people change their minds in conflict. (Something we keep learning in our political coverage. Or rather, we should be learning it, but I’m not sure we are.)

Education debates in America have been dysfunctional for many years, polarized by us versus them thinking and deep, dangerous levels of distrust. Way before Trump and QAnon, education was hijacked by conflict entrepreneurs and conspiracy theories, and the coverage was distorted by motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, the fundamental attribution error, false binaries and on and on.

I wish I’d wasted less time and energy trying to persuade people (or writing a clever comeback on Twitter) and spent more time trying to understand where the distrust came from, why it was so intense, and what had happened in the outlier places (and schools) where trust had been revived. Belonging, trust and fear matter much more than facts in high conflict, but journalists are much more comfortable ignoring that reality. I know I was!

Previously from The Grade

‘Complicating the narratives’ in education journalism

Bright spots in education journalism