My guest this hour, David Bornstein, has, full disclosure, become one of my closest friends in recent years.

He is also one of the people whose perspective I have turned to with urgency and gratitude again and again,

as I've made sense of the very story of our time.

And how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through

media and journalism, the field in which both David and I were formed.

The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, as David says, is that

shining a light on what is going wrong, what is dangerous and dysfunctional,

catastrophic or corrupt will mobilize and lead us to correct it.

But in a 24-7 news cycle and a fractured society, this emphasis on the terrible and the frightening

from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit has fueled a paralyzing, dehumanizing, fearfulness, and the collapse of trust in institutions and in each other.

Many of us are turning away from the news altogether.

Is that the answer?

How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency?

And what are we not seeing and hearing that we could orient towards?

There is no one wiser on these questions than David, and I trust that you will find

this conversation to be distinctively helpful and calming. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

David Bornstein is co-founder and CEO of the globally esteemed Solutions Journalism Network.

I spoke with him before a small group of citizens in Minneapolis.

David, I might just start with asking you, you know, the why, why of you entering journalism,

what that word meant to you, what you wanted it to mean, you know, the reference for the field

you entered, because you are a mission saturated person. And you and I've spoken about this, as much as we can point to what

distresses us about the field and its effect on society, we know that most people who go into

...