In CA Assembly, Asma Khalid Explores Courageous Conflict Engagement from a Political Journalist’s Perspective
When NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid spoke at Concord Academy on December 4, 2024, she first posed some questions to gauge her audience. She began by asking how members of the CA community get their news: from newspapers, podcasts, or social media. The clear majority in a raised-hands poll surprised her. “I don’t meet that many teens who get their news from a newspaper,” she said, before inquiring why.
Students provided some of the reasons she was there to discuss: reputable professional sources, quality of reporting, editorial standards and the journalistic code of ethics, and long-form articles that consider and present a fuller context. But judging by general news engagement habits today, Khalid made clear, most Americans don’t value the same things.
She said that at a high school where she recently spoke, nearly all the students reported getting news exclusively from TikTok and Instagram. And it’s not just young people who are relying on social media, she added; older demographics show a similar abandonment of traditional news outlets. And in the most recent presidential election cycle, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris turned to podcast appearances, bypassing traditional journalists—and questioning of their belief systems—to speak at length, directly to specific subsets of voters.
When a country becomes so divided, Khalid said, people on both the right and the left “don’t believe the same facts,” consume news through “bifurcated mechanisms,” and say they don’t trust the media. “In many cases, it’s made our work more dangerous, and I also think it’s made our work more important,” she said.
Khalid has covered every national election since 2014. She began her journalism career in her home state of Indiana, then fell in love with the intimacy of radio reporting while interning at the BBC Newshour in London. Before joining NPR’s political team, as a reporter at Boston’s NPR station WBUR, one of her first assignments was covering the Boston Marathon bombing. Now she’s a familiar voice nationwide as co-host of The NPR Politics Podcast.
At CA, she discussed other related media trends and shifts within the electorate that researchers have been tracking—and which she has observed herself over 10 years on the campaign trail. First, in a distinct change within her lifetime, the clearest marker of affiliation with the Democratic party has become a college degree.
Second, outrage over how the news is covered—even in reaction to simple factual statements—is erupting on both ends of the political spectrum. “The news is supposed to inform, not to influence,” Khalid said, but people have increasingly been demonstrating that they’re willing to overlook concerns about politicians on “their” side while pouncing on the other.
“A lot of what I hear from listeners is that what they want isn’t necessarily to be informed always, it’s that they want a sense of confirmation bias,” she said. “They want affirmation, not information.”
For Khalid, that’s highly concerning. “It’s not why I went into this job of journalism,” she said. What interested her was “being curious about the world, learning about different kinds of people, and getting exposed to ideas or things or policies that I wasn’t particularly familiar with”—all of which, she added, is “important to making a democracy work.”
Third, the number of congressionally competitive districts has dwindled precipitously as Americans have increasingly preferred to live around like-minded people—in effect, self-segregating along political lines. While this isn’t a new phenomenon, Khalid said, it too poses a challenge to the health of a democracy. “If you don’t have people around you who are different than you, who fundamentally think differently than you, who might have different political opinions than you, it’s really, really hard to then understand how this person is your fellow American and how we’re all part of the same team,” she said.
Having been invited to address the theme of courageous conflict engagement and resolution at CA, Khalid also invited some inquiry along more personal lines. She asked students to examine what keeps them engaged in relationships with people whose political views on an issue differ starkly from their own—and what benefits they find in continuing to talk, and listen, to them.
She also shared an NPR clip, a story about identity politics she reported in 2018 from the Mahoning Valley in Northeast Ohio. In it, a local woman she’d been talking with amiably suddenly questioned Khalid’s identity and voiced anti-Muslim sentiments. Khalid said she had to hold firm to persuade an editor to air the interview. “I think it is extremely important to hear viewpoints that might, frankly, offend some people,” she said.
Khalid challenged the traditional media’s dominant caution toward broadcasting statements that might make people uncomfortable: “My takeaway instead is that you air them, you contextualize them, and you believe that your listeners are smart enough that you engage with a wide variety of opinions—that that helps inform how people think.”
One counterfactual statement the woman she interviewed made—that white Americans “were here first”—stuck with Khalid long after that interview. Eventually the desire to address that historical misinformation led her to participate in the PBS documentary series American Muslims: A History Revealed.
If society is fracturing in part because of how people are getting information, Khalid asked, what can we do as individuals to stay informed in a less biased way? Her advice to CA students was to “be really conscious about how you get your news;” to try, as much as possible, to hear not only isolated and decontextualized clips but to listen to full recordings of events and other “raw data”; and to seek out reporting from organizations with professional editorial guidelines.
In personal interactions, she advocated engaging with curiosity about why people believe what they do—and letting go of an agenda. “Engaging in conflict, in my view, is not always to persuade,” she said. “I think it’s about informing. The idea is if you inform people over time, people will come to their own best conclusions.”
