Do reporters have an attitude problem that is turning audiences off?

In a country where Fox News is the most watched network the answer is both yes and no.

Fox's most watched show last month was The Five. Two of the five are Janine Pirro and Jesse Watters, who owe their broadcast careers to being embodied attitude problems.

But let's remember that Fox News is not actually news. It is an emotional addiction, a soothing balm of confirmation bias, an entertaining outrage hit that helps some people feel alive. MSNBC is Fox's mirror on the other end of the political spectrum and offers much the same.

What Fox and MSNBC don't offer is any hope that collective action can make the world better for more than a select few. I also forgot about hope completely last week, and that was a mistake.

I can't write with any authority about the connection between hope and information overwhelm, or hope and civic health. I need to understand it better. What I think I know already is that you don't need to have hope to watch Fox News. You need hope to be interested in turning off Fox News.

I wrote last week that I want to "equip people to contend with, prepare for, and mitigate harm our reporting shows is likely to happen in the future without verging into opinion or broad stroke doomerism that only leads to news avoidance?" Hope certainly feels necessary to making this happen.

Providing a hopeful framework alongside my reporting is far outside the bounds of what I feel equipped to produce systematically right now. A critique of solutions journalism is best saved for another day, but suffice to say, it is not the answer I'm looking for.

I rail against news organizations that try to engage in agenda setting for their audiences. Is trying to help cultivate hope in these same audiences different? A critique of solutions journalism is best saved for another day, but this is not the answer I'm looking for.

In the absence of solid reporting, I will instead turn to anecdote, as many a reporter before me have done.

I've written about why I started the project that became Outlier, but not why I started working in news in the first place. That move was all about hope.

I began my career as a civil rights lawyer. I had thought it was a good way to change the world for the better and that I could be good at it. But I had not understood that the courts, although a pillar of democracy, are not democratic in practice. By definition, civil rights affect us all; voting, worship, work, heath, and more. But the cases in which these rights are interpreted and then will be extended to or rolled back from us all are not participatory. Instead, it is the arguments and ideas of just a few lawyers and judges that matter.

Maybe I should have understood more about the way the law really worked before going into serious debt for a legal education, but I didn't. I left after a year of practice.

I worked in nonprofit organizations for years after that before reporting came into my life. It was a confluence of events I'll move through quickly; I was living in Michigan with one kid already and one on the way, unhappily consulting. I was put on bed rest during the last few months of that second pregnancy and decided it was time to make a career move after the baby. To keep me busy during the day, my brother sent me podcast after podcast because this was in ancient times when only young people knew about podcasts. It did keep me busy, and I was totally inspired by how reporters were breaking down complex ideas and making them feel relevant and actionable (this Planet Money episode in particular moved me).

When I told my brother about my new podcast obsession, he let drop that the house I had recently moved into was directly across the street from a public radio station. It felt like a sign from the universe, and I started dreaming about trying my hand at radio. Soon after my son was born, my beloved grandmother died. She left me $12,000. So I went across the street and asked if they would take me on as an unpaid intern. It was the first time I had worked for free. I spent my grandmothers’ money on daycare and bills for three months and started to learn how to be a reporter. A job at the station opened up before my internship was up, and I put myself forward. I've worked in news ever since.

There are all kinds of problems in and with the news, but I have never lost hope in it. I objected to how narrow the law was as a profession and tactic, the few making decisions for the many. The news is expansive in contrast. Reporters and editors package the world's issues for our audiences so they can decide how best to fix them. It is a startlingly optimistic worldview. The news and our civic fabric are both fraying and feel weak right now, but I still have faith this can just be a detour on our way to a more equitable world.

I question to what degree my hope matters, and how much I should convey it as part of my journalistic practice. How much should reporters help cultivate an abundance mindset in our communities? Is it a factual antidote to President Trump's use of the news cycle to cry scarcity so he can sow fear and division?

This is not a fully baked question. It feels worth grappling with all the same to understand the value of hope and optimism for our audiences. Perhaps movement journalists, who have been approaching these ideas for longer and with more discipline, can help me here. If cultivating hope is part of your reporting practice, I would love to hear about it.