A National Policy Blueprint To End White Supremacist Violence

White supremacist violence is not new, but in recent years, it has become a primary national security threat in the United States. Notions of racial superiority, hostility toward immigrants and minorities, and the myth of an embattled white majority defending its power have increasingly infiltrated mainstream American political and cultural discourse. In October 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published its annual threat assessment, identifying racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly white supremacist extremists, as “the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.” READ MORE>

NewsLens 2020: How Americans Process the News

A shift toward online news consumption, combined with greater political polarization, has altered the media landscape. As part of its Trust, Media and Democracy initiative, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation partnered with Gallup to create NewsLens — an experimental platform and news aggregator first developed in 2017 to facilitate novel research on how people interact with the news online in a manner that offers insights to academics, technology policymakers and journalists. In this report, Gallup examines data gathered through NewsLens during the 2020 presidential campaign to asses how much partisanship influences the way people engage with news content and whether common ground still exists over which stories are considered good journalism. READ MORE>

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity

Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties, and argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly "social" type of polarization in American politics and will add much to our understanding of contemporary politics. READ MORE>

A Funder's Guide to Combatting Disinformation

This rapid issue brief, based on DFN's research and conversations with experts, practitioners, and experienced funders, will help donors get oriented to the current state of the field and explore frameworks for using their resources to combat disinformation. The report includes detail on strategies to combat disinformation by increasing accountability for creators and purveyors of disinformation, building healthier media ecosystems, and increasing public resilience to disinformation. READ MORE>

When it Comes to Voting Rights, Philanthropy Needs to Act Like Every Day Is Election Day

More than 158 million Americans voted in the 2020 election — a record number despite the challenges posed by a global pandemic. But rather than celebrating this development as a victory for democracy, many government leaders apparently see it as a cause for concern and have responded with a stunning slew of proposals aimed at making it harder to vote. READ MORE>

Healthy Local News & Information Ecosystems: A Diagnostic Framework Report, Playbook, and Toolkit

The Knight Foundation’s new report “Healthy Local News & Information Ecosystems: A Diagnostic Framework,” presents an approach to assessing the health of local news ecosystems tested and refined across nine U.S. communities of various sizes. Accompanying the report is a playbook and toolkit designed to help funders and other community organizations evaluate strengths and opportunities in their locale. READ MORE>

The Primary Problem

Unite America’s report The Primary Problem explores the many problems with our partisan primary system and explains why nonpartisan primaries give every voter an equal voice, have higher voter participation rates, produce more representative outcomes, and improve governing incentives by ensuring elected leaders are accountable to a broader swath of the electorate. READ MORE>

The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election.

The Election Integrity Project’s final comprehensive report on voting-related mis- and disinformation in the 2020 election includes insights on significant narratives that shaped 2020; how misinformation progressed from incidents, to narratives, sometimes to conspiracies; how the social media ecosystem was leveraged; tactics and patterns; “repeat spreaders”; and how policy shapes propagation. READ MORE>