Our Body Politic

I am a third generation Black female American journalist. My grandmother, who grew up too poor to go to college, reported for the Baltimore Afro-American in the 1940s while raising three of her six children. My mother made it through graduate school and reported both domestically and in Zambia before race and gender discrimination prematurely ended that career. And despite enduring my own race and gender harassment and discrimination in the industry, I am still here. I am here because my family showed me that being a journalist is a responsibility worth taking on, despite the pain; and that Black women and women of color are critical to the teams which compose mainstream newsrooms. If I win the Elevate Prize, I would use the funding for my civic newsroom, Our Body Politic, to fund our existing work in radio/podcasts/data in the U.S. and help draft our expansion plans into a global network of podcasts. I personally would be deeply grateful for the mentoring and advising on how we can take this work to scale.

I created the syndicated public radio show/podcast Our Body Politic as a means of not only providing content by and about U.S. women of color, politics and civic power, but also as a way to transform the journalism ecosystem. As a veteran journalist who has worked at companies including CNN, ABC, and NPR and covered every Presidential election since 1996, I have been a critic of the news media as well as a fan. So where so much major media is exclusionary, we are inclusive -- I am Black, my executive producer (EP) and senior producer are Latina; my marketing and ops director is white; our editor is Asian-American. Several of our teammates, including our EP, are immigrants. This is not feel-good diversity but a reflection of our belief that it takes people from many backgrounds bringing their lived experience to journalism to create the best understanding of the world.

The diminishment of women of color voices in the media, both as subjects of coverage and as journalists, has helped undermine the quality of news coverage. As I stated during an April 2021 talk to the Aspen Commission on Information Disorders, mainstream media helped disseminate disinformation including weaponized racial rhetoric that undermined democracy, and many news outlets benefitted financially in the process. The problem we are solving for is the deficit of relevant, factual, culturally competent and contextual information that elevates civil society in an era of racial reckoning and disinformation. The scale of the problem was revealed on January 6, during the siege of the U.S. Capitol. Our civic health depends on facing the reality of America head-on, engaging multiracial newsrooms to cover a divided nation. Our Body Politic covers legislation, national security, law enforcement, Covid and the economy in ways that battle disinformation -- including having disinfo expert Mutale Nkonde as a contributor -- and improve civic health, for the good of all.

We are using a very traditional public radio format to do some radical things. We simply don't both-sides questions about race and gender and human dignity. We discuss politics, policy and power in a non-partisan format that does not gloss over the fact that we are in a civic crisis where some people and institutions are challenging the viability of multiracial democracy. We question constructs that others take for granted, and try to reference lived experience in our exploration of the issues. A recent example is our coverage of the Chauvin verdict, where our lead interview was Ms. Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, who was killed at the age of 12 by police. Ms. Rice is asking the Department of Justice to open a federal investigation into her son's killing, for which officers were not charged. She is just one of many experts we have on our show who are credentialed via their lived experience as well as any titles or degrees they may or may not have. Both our non-both-sides-ism and our focus on lived experience, as well as our work on extremis and disinformation, are unique and disruptive to the corrosive complacency of media-as-usual.

Our Body Politic is changing how women of color are represented in mainstream media and in the civic space, for a more equitable representation on issues of national and international importance. One of our stated goals when we designed the show was to have ecosystem impact past our listeners and consumers. When I hosted the NPR show News and Notes a decade ago, a Black interest show for a general audience, we put people on the air who were nontraditional or new guests, and help them launch into regular rotation as guests and even hosts on other shows. Our Body Politic is helping to circulate the names of experts and civic leaders who don't get enough shine; and is giving those who are already appreciated or visible the chance to speak more extensively and deeply about their work. We are also doing engagement with our audience to build a network of civic-minded women of color and allies. One of our donors, a wealthy Black entrepreneur who has funded us two times already, says that the way we cover issues that usually make her angry with a sense of exploration and humor are also key to the success of our show.