shows that local media is the most trusted media in the United States today.

Today's guest transformed a successful career in advocacy, philanthropy, and the Academy into the morning voice of news and information in one of America's great cities.

She's Tiziana Dearing this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Tiziana Dearing, a regular voice on public radio since 2019.

Earlier this fall, she became the host of WBUR's Morning Edition.

Tiziana, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me.

- So, you know, we chatted a little bit the other day about your transition from academia to public radio and now taking on this role at WBUR.

But what drew you to broadcasting in the first place?

- You know, it's interesting because I now remember that I wanna say maybe 15 years ago, I said to somebody when I was in a different role in academia that I thought maybe one day I wanted to do that.

And I remember it was a faculty member at Harvard sort of looking at me like, "Why on Earth would you do that?"

(panel laughs) And I think I shelved it away for years.

I went onto an another nonprofit role, 'cause I was in nonprofits for years.

But what happened was, a couple of things.

One, I wound up doing a lot of commentary.

And two, I started to realize how important it is if we're gonna solve our public problems, which is where I spent a lot of my career.

Well, you have to understand them.

And if I could be a part of helping us encounter and understand what was happening in our world, that was a really helpful way to go after those problems.

And it turned out I was good at that, and this was another way to be a part of that side of things.

- So your biography before moving into broadcasting, your resume before moving into broadcasting is really kind of- - No, it makes no sense.

- Well, it's remarkable.

You taught social innovation and social work at Boston College.

You had been, you had run a startup foundation that sought to end cycles of poverty in Boston.

You'd been the first female president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston.

Where did that sense of social justice and that commitment to social justice developed for you?

- Yeah, so childhood.

So I was the, I am the youngest of nine children, eight living children.

And I grew up in a household where service and well, service was just a constant feature.

I remember a long stretch of my childhood where I would come down to the breakfast table in the morning and never know what extra teenagers were going to be there, because my parents were taking in kids who were homeless, you know, lost.

My parents founded the first chapter of Habitat for Humanity in my town.

And so service was a thing that I grew up with.

And when I graduated from college, I wanted to go into non-profit organizations.

And I remember I was at the University of Michigan, the career center there, literally didn't understand what I was talking about.

I mean, now that's a thing.

- Right, right.

- But then they literally didn't understand what it was I was telling them and had no way to help me do that.

- So what did your parents do?

Where did that sense of giving back come from?

- They were realtors.

I think it was the church, but I think it was the 1960s.

- The Catholic church, obviously.

- Yeah, but I think it was a flavor of, you know, the post-Vatican to council men and women for others, Jesuit-influenced church of the sixties and early seventies.

They lost a baby at eight months old.

And I think it really heavily shaped how they viewed the world.

- Yeah, I would think so, for sure.

What is your sense of the role that local media play in America today?

And this is a very long topic that we could get into, but just give us an overview.

So the role today, you know, things have, you know, if you look back over the years, the demise of the legacy newspapers, but there are a lot of new outlets.

And I could go on, you know, where.

- Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause it feels like in your question, the emphasis is on the word today, but I think the role is the same role.

I think the import is the today piece.

So the role of local media in the United States is two or three things.

One, the free flow of quality information is necessary to the functioning of democracy, full stop.

And media, good media does that.

Two, local media helps us hold our local and elected leaders and the holders of power of all forms accountable.

And it shines daylight on the levers of power.

And three, good storytelling and honest storytelling done powerfully and well creates empathy and a sense of shared understanding.

Those things, I think, have always been true.

What the today part is, is how incredibly important all of that is.

Both, because we are disintermediated media is through social media and methods of communication where you really can't tell what's real anymore, you really can't tell what's true anymore.

We've understandably questioned, well, who's the arbiter of what's truth?

Because we had racial lenses, gender lenses, conservative lenses, you small c, all kinds of lenses on what information made it through in media for generations.

And I get that, but at the same time, what social media does is completely unfiltered.

And so I think that's a key piece of local media now is trustworthy sources that, you know, have done the hard work to verify, create real fact to bring it to you honestly and truthfully.

But I think the other piece is this sense of shared connection, a sense of empathy, you know, deep storytelling that helps us understand what our common bonds are as our social fabric has been so deeply disrupted both by politics and social media in the last 10 to 15 years.

- So you have a prominent role at WBUR, host of Morning Edition.

Do you feel the burden is, burden might not be the right word, but do you feel the weight of that responsibility to get it right?

- Tremendously so.

I mean, I can't even explain, tremendously so.

And every single word that comes out of your mouth matters.

The way you sequence those words matters.

Even little things, I'll give you an illustration.

There's been a very internationally-publicized trial that ended in a mistrial, about the murder of a former Boston police officer, John O'Keefe, that became famously known as the Karen Read trial.

The person murdered was John O'Keefe.

And that's a choice.

And that's just one example of all the little ways.

And then there are the big ways.

Choices that you make last week when Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, some places started using the word assassination.

Well, that has a very specific meaning.

And that's actually not what happened in this case is really forces did kill him.

But assassination is a certain type of political act and it's not what happened.

And those words matter.

So, and you're moving fast and there's a lot to get in and everything in between, every word matters.

- So if you take the time to fact-check, fact-check, you can usually find the truth about a news broadcast, a radio broadcast, something on TV, something you see online.

Why don't more people take that time?

And it does take time.

And I think that's an important point.

But why don't more people do that?

- Well, you know, I think one, not everything is everybody's job.

- Probably that's true.

- People have really busy, busy lives and they are inundated by content.

I remember back when we were... Do you remember when we were dismayed that the cable news channels were running 24/7?

- Yes.

- And there were only a handful of them.

And now think of all the different places that come at you with information.

- Yeah, way too many places.

- So, yeah.

- Oh my lord, sorry.

- So it's exhausting and overwhelming.

I think that's a part of it.

One, and that's one.

I think two, it was actually a long time before we started to teach ourselves and others that media literacy was a thing you needed.

For a long time our social habit and our media consumption habit was that you didn't need to fact-check that that was the thing that was done, because that was- - That was the job of the media.

- ... the social contractor, the media.

- That was their job.

- You would trust... Walter Cronkite was the most trusted person in America for a lot of years.

- That's right.

- [Jim] We don't have those interlocutors anymore.

- Or fewer of them.

And a fewer and less of a shared understanding of who they are.

Many people think they have them, and not everybody shares the same understanding of those are.

But so I think it's both of those things.

- Is there another factor too, which is that, you know, we live in such a divided society that some people only want to know what they believe in or the people they support, they don't wanna know another side.

- Well, you know, I do remember being involved in a project that led to a special on PBS at one point.

And as we were taping it, I remember a woman saying to me something to the extent of, "Well, you know, don't tell me what a fact is and what a fact isn't.

You can't tell me what my truth is."

And actually, I understand that statement of, "You can't tell me what my truth is."

Our sense of who we are is deeply personal, but that's different than what a fact is.

And yet in our colloquialisms, those two things can be interchangeable.

- So one of the things that's remarkable about Morning Edition is that you tell stories from around the corner and around the world.

And a lot of times those global stories have very local lenses that you tell them through.

How do you and your team decide which stories to tell?

- Well, so, you know, it's an interesting thing.

So every Morning Edition is presented by a local public radio station.

WBUR happens to be a very nationally-known public radio station that actually produces more national content than any other member station in the country.

But we're still a local station.

So some of the content comes from Washington or from California and it's the package that we get and that we present unless we lay our own content over it.

So we are then making constant decisions about what stories we're running of our own.

And that depends on your reporters, it depends on what you're booking for that day.

It depends on what the breaking local news is.

You know, I'll just give you an example.

I think it was my first week.

It's been about a month on Morning Edition.

It was when the Fed decided to raise interest rates.

We knew that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren had been at the Fed for months to do that.

We knew she had things to say.

So we actually laid over one of the national stories with a conversation with Senator Warren about her reaction to the interest rate hike.

And it was actually quite national in its content, but she was ours and we knew that she had a lot to say about it, so we talked to her instead.

- So take us behind the scenes or behind the mic as it were.

You mentioned you and your team do a lot of work on air time is a certain amount of time.

How much time off air do you folks spend every day?

I mean, just give us a sense of what a regular day looks like.

Obviously, it's way more time than you're on air.

- Well, and it depends on the person too.

Our executive producer starts a couple hours before I start.

But the team, the night before that is doing all things considered the evening broadcast.

And then into the evening they're also grabbing new content, curating and starting to prepare it, so that we've got that handoff when the EP, the executive producer gets in at two or three in the morning.

I'm there by 4:30 in the morning.

- Yow.

- And we're doing some writing and tracking.

We go live at six.

I'm on 'til nine unless we're doing a special broadcast, like when we did our ballot debates last week, and then it's 9:30.

And then, if you're doing any pre-tapes for the next day, or you're studying, so maybe 12:30 or one, you're done for that day, but you might have extra studying or prep, maybe you've got evening public events.

I've got three of those this week.

So evening public events, and then you grab that sleep when you can, and then the next morning you rinse and repeat.

And it's really- - It sounds totally exhausting.

- Well, you either love it or you hate it.

- And you love it.

- If you love it, you wanna do it.

And if you don't, go do something else.

It just depends.

- Well, yeah.

Well, and so we're all the more grateful that you took some time to be with us today.

- [Tiziana] I'm happy to be, thrilled to be.

- So in some ways we're, we talked a little bit about all the different channels, but there's so much content out there, not just on social media, but so many more platforms providing content.

We're in a golden age of content.

How do legacy broadcasters like WBUR and National Public Radio for that matter, continue to find audience when there's so much that folks can listen to every day?

- Quality.

That would be my answer.

Quality and the range of platforms.

So for WBUR, we do podcasts.

We just recently had the number one ranking "True Crime" podcast, in podcasts.

Public events at our WBUR city space, our digital, our online reporting.

One of our reporters is actually up for an award for written reporting that the major papers, like the "LA Times" usually competes in.

So you've gotta be top quality on all fronts all the time.

It's quality.

Quality.

- Do you have a sense of how your audiences listen to you?

Is it drive time, and actually the old-fashioned radio?

Which is when I get a lot of my news and listen to talk shows.

Or is it streaming or what is it?

I mean, have you studied that?

Do you have a sense?

- We do.

- You obviously get a large audience.

- We do.

- You're coming outta Boston, which is a big metro area and beyond.

- Yeah, so, and it also depends on the time of day.

I mean, the pandemic changed everything.

Drive time just became less of the way people engaged with you during, and after the main part of the global pandemic.

Some people stream on the, you know, the web.

Increasingly people use an app.

There are those who still engage with their radio or their Alexa or whatever that device is in the house.

When I did a daily midday magazine that reran at three o'clock, I knew I was engaging with a lot of people in their car.

But for Morning Edition, it's a very different thing.

I am picturing people, you know, they're putting their makeup on, they're changing diapers, they're stuffing lunches, they're running, they're walking dogs, they're folding a quick load of laundry.

You know, they are just integrating us into their morning lives.

They're driving home from a night shift or they're on the public transportation.

So with Morning Edition, it's interesting, because, you know, you are encountering people in either the peace or the chaos of their daily lives in just so many different ways.

- Do you get feedback from your audience?

- Oh, sure, all the time.

- And what do they say?

- It depends.

When you run into people, most people, if you're gonna run into them in-person, are gonna come see you, because they want to see you.

So that usually they're gonna have good things to say.

If they think you've gotten something wrong on air, you're gonna hear about it then.

There's gonna be a social media post or a call-in or an email.

You're gonna hear it very quickly.

And I like that, accountability is a good thing.

And knowing from your listeners that they're paying attention and holding you accountable is a good, good thing.

And then, you know, I still get lovely letters.

People still write handwritten letters.

- Handwritten letters.

- And all of the above.

And it's fantastic.

- You love what you do.

- More than all the...

This is my fifth career.

More than all the other things I've done combined.

- What is it?

What's the magic?

- I think it's because I have loved public radio since I was 16.

And I still can't believe I get to do it every day.

I walk through the halls of that station every day and I see people that I have listened to for years and I see them during their work and I still go, "Hee, hee, hee."

(panel laughs) - So earlier in your career, you were an educator.

- Yes.

- What did you bring from that experience into broadcasting?

- Figuring out how to take something very complex and put it in simple words that people can understand.

I worked very hard at that as a teacher, and I try very hard to bring that into what we do now.

- That's a lot of work.

- It takes a ton of work and energy.

- So we're taping this two weeks before the 2024 election.

And as we well know, we are very politically-divided in this country.

Some would say dangerously divided.

And I think I would agree with that assessment.

I think Jim would as well.

Any glimmers of hope here or just give us your overall assessment.

And again, keep in mind we're two weeks before the election and this will be broadcasting after.

- So as God as my witness, I don't know what's gonna happen, but whatever it is, it will have happened by the time this airs.

You asked two very different questions.

One was glimmers of hope and the other is sort of what's gonna happen?

Or where are we?

You know, the glimmer of hope is that we have, "Better angels of our nature."

We always have.

And in the American project, in the American story, over and over again, yes, we have had terrible moments throughout our history where we've made the wrong decisions, but we have also had stunning moments throughout our history where, "The better angels of our nature," to quote Abraham Lincoln, although someone else actually wrote that line, have soared.

And I believe that's always possible.

Will it happen?

I don't know, but can it happen?

100%.

- Well, you worked on a project before the pandemic called Divided We Fall.

- Yes.

- Which was a really interesting public media project.

You were the facilitator, I'm not gonna do it justice.

Tell us a little bit about that project and if that gives us any insights into this divided moment in America.

- So the project was, it really started as an experiment to say, could you take these devices that have been used in reality TV and in some of the ugliness of reality TV, but use them to create encounters between people who ought to be quite politically-divided?

But when you create encounters, do they stay that way?

And we recorded two different casts, a cast in Boston and a cast in Chicago, and really gave people chances to encounter each other across divides in some pretty deep ways over a weekend.

And what we found was when you did that, people didn't stay across divides.

They had uncomfortable conversations.

They did reveal some pretty fundamental differences, but they developed curiosity about each other, a real desire to understand each other.

And people in those casts stayed close, stayed in-touch, even now are in each other's lives or stay in communication with each other, see the world a little bit different way than they did before.

And that encounter, that quality of encounter really did matter.

And it's why I believe in local.

- Is it curiosity?

Is it empathy?

Is it both?

- It's empathy and it's sitting still to actually understand where another person comes from and then finding, oh, there's something I identify with for myself in that.

- Yeah, your background, your experience, you taught social work at the graduate level.

- Yes.

- Did that prepare you for that kind of project?

- To some extent it did, but I have, you know, I Forrest Gumped my way through a career, (panel laughs) but one of the threads- - We're gonna steal that one.

- One of the threads through that is tons of professional facilitation at lots and lots of levels.

I've done that in lots of ways, lots of levels through management consulting and lots of other things over the years.

So I had a lot of experience in that space.

- It's a really interesting television and folks can still find that on PBS and online and they absolutely should.

I also went back and I read something that you had written back in 2016, and I wanna quote it here.

You wrote, "At home, we are approaching a moment of racial crisis, one in which race and poverty are inextricably linked.

We aren't ready.

We don't know how to talk about race, and we lack a common understanding of what's causing the inequality."

That was in 2016.

Four years before George Floyd, four years before that reckoning, have we made progress in those eight years, in the four years since 2020?

How do you think we're doing today?

- Well, we have in that we are capable of acknowledging the problems.

We've also, in therapy, and I'm not a licensed therapist, but in therapy, you'll often hear people doing therapy say, you know, "You'll take two steps forward, and it's very natural to see then a step back."

And I think in post-George Floyd time, we've seen a retrenchment or a retraction that is painful.

But we've at least begun to have a conversation about our long-term systemic racism built into our economic structures, our educational structures, et cetera.

Where we still need to develop a lot of strength is white people aren't good at talking about race.

And I don't know how much better we've gotten at that, but at least we know that race is a thing to talk about now.

- So the same question about another issue you've been long involved in, and that's generational poverty.

Have we seen progress there?

And what does the future hold or what should the future hold?

- Yeah, we've seen negative progress- - Negative.

- ... in generational poverty.

I mean, the future holds great potential, it always can.

There are resources.

We have resources and so we can always improve.

Somebody said to me once, "Okay, maybe you believe that the poor will always be with us, but that doesn't mean the same people should always be poor."

And if we could even just grab a hold of that one and go after it, we'd make a lot of progress.

- We've got about a minute left here.

You once advocated for a love approach to philanthropy and policy.

Is there a love-based approach to broadcasting?

- There is a love-based approach to everything.

- What's it look like in broadcasting?

- In broadcasting, it's a fundamental commitment not only to telling the truth, but to doing that not with cynicism, but with a curiosity and an empathy that drives us to terrific storytelling and to a passion for understanding rather than grilling.

- [G. Wayne] Isn't listening a part of that too?

- Thank you.

Yes, it is.

And I really am glad that you said that, because it's not just the people who are consuming the end product, who should listen, it's the people producing it as well.

I love it that you said that.

- Well, Tiziana Dearing, your work is remarkable.

We're so grateful to you for spending some time with us today, but that is all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square".

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