eatlyover from Minnesota Public Radio News, a live call-in program created by anchor Kerri Miller and her producers, returns to explore issues of identity in politics during the 2020 election.
The new season, which will begin airing weekly in January, will focus on the Midwestern counties that switched from blue to red in 2016.
“We're going into this year with an emphasis on the upset counties and what they're telling us,” Miller said. Half of the 100 counties that made the biggest political changes during the last presidential election are in the Midwest, clustered in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
“We're in the middle of this transformation that's happening in American political culture,” Miller said. “We have to answer and Flyover he's ready to do that.”
Flyover is about identity in America — how listeners' life experiences and values shape their views. The show features guests not often heard in coastal hubs and callers from parts of the country outside the media spotlight.
The inaugural show, which debuted in September 2017, was about “The Real America.” “You can expect cogent and insightful analysis from our guests,” Miller said, opening that show, “but the most important voices on this show will be yours.” One guest was a professor and author who wrote about rural areas of the country, and another was an author and advocate for low-income children and families.
In her speech, Miller asked the audience, “What do you hear in the context of these words 'real America'? How does it fit with how you see yourself and your community? What do you think he's saying? you?”
One of the first to call them was a Mexican-American in St. Paul, who described the dissonance he felt when he heard that phrase.
“I live the American experience, I pay my taxes, I take care of work, I go about my daily life, at the same time I'm excluded,” he said. The thought gave him chills, he added, and began to cry. “What it really means is white Americans, and it doesn't include me, so it hurts.” In that first episode, listeners also heard from callers in Idaho, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
As the series continued through the fall of 2017 and occasional appearances, Miller and her team have heard from a wide range of people — in terms of education, geography, age and political diversity, said Marcheta Fornoff, producer.
“A big part of that is inviting people in — and creating a space where people understand that they can share their opinions and be respected,” Fornoff said. The Flyover The team aims to achieve this by being very deliberate in the ways they generate questions for callers. Instead of asking listeners to share their opinions, he said, they ask how a topic affects their lives. “They share their opinions and explain why.”
“Having that ethos of seeking understanding is attractive to our listeners and makes them more willing to share their own experiences,” Fornoff said. “For many people, politics is very personal. We ask them to share their experience and sometimes they reveal things that you might not tell a stranger.”
“For people to share this on the air is really valuable — I think it really shows that we're touching a nerve,” Fornoff said.
“Lightning in a Bottle”
The MPR team began developing this approach in January 2017, when Miller became one of four rotating hosts for Indivisible – a series created and distributed by WNYC in New York during the first 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency. With live evening broadcasts, the show attempted to bridge partisan and ideological divides by providing a forum for listeners to hear different reactions to political issues of the day.
Miller was the only host to host her show outside of New York. Thirty minutes into her first Indivisible
show, she knew her focus on identity resonated with listeners, she said.
“People were willing to frame their political thinking in a broader sense and bring their own experience,” Miller said. A man from Gary, India, called out from the factory floor and connected the dots, saying, “This is where I work, this is who I am, this is the city I live in, and that's why I believe what I believe.” He put it all together.”
“Trump has addressed issues of identity across the country — and in this part of the country in particular. It's worth talking about — why do people respond to these issues?'
Jeff Jones, MPR assistant PD;
The plant worker's comments were “lightning in a bottle,” Miller said. “That's where we believe true listening and generous understanding comes in.”
After Indivisible finished its 14-week run, Miller and Jeff Jones, MPR's assistant PD, decided to continue the discussion in the form of Flyover. The show will be produced for limited seasons and will respond to the pressing issues of the moment. American Public Media, the distribution arm of MPR, offered the show for broadcast by its affiliates.
Since the first season, which ran from September to November 2017,
Flyover has tackled many key policy issues — including immigration, jobs, health care and economic inequality, Jones said. The discussions in each program are rooted in how these issues are experienced in people's lives.
Flyover it also provides an alternative model to election coverage, which often focuses on national politics and candidate races, Jones said. With this approach, people in local communities are limited in their demographic profiles and likelihood to vote. “It brings people together in a way that can be compared and analyzed as data,” Jones said. “That's valuable of all things, but it doesn't help the average person understand what's going on.”
“We need to listen to each other and hear stories,” he said. “We're allowing the public to hear from someone they're less likely to hear about from their own social media feeds and community bubbles.”
“You can call too”
Public radio has generally moved away from live call-in formats, particularly for more serious topics, Jones said. But the advantage of the format is that it provides an opportunity to encourage authentic listening and real conversations, he said.
“What we can do by opening the phones is allow you to hear someone else's story in the moment in real time,” Jones said. “If you relate to this story, you can also call. A conversation that you're not going to have suddenly unfolded.”
Wisconsin Public Radio is one of the stations that broadcast past seasons of it Flyover. Mike Arnold, director of content, said the series' goals of fostering diverse conversations with different viewpoints are difficult to achieve in an era of polarization.
“It puts a lot of onus on a program producer to attract people,” Arnold said. “If anyone can do it, it should be public radio, but it's a challenge. It's easy to fall back on assumptions about people with certain views, and it's never been easier for people to find media that aligns with their views.”
“Flyover is one example, but I think, in general, the more we can use public radio to help people understand the complexity and diversity of the country, the better off we'll be,” Arnold said. He praised WPR's newsroom for producing more “bottom-up” journalism, trying to understand the issues that affect people's lives.
“Whoever we're talking about, we should assume they're part of the public and not a population we're trying to understand,” Arnold said. “The more we do this, the better our election coverage will be and the more people will be willing to share their views.”
His next season Flyover will run until the 2020 election as a regular part of Miller's weekday morning talk show.
“We will have the same focus on issues of American identity,” Jones said. “Trump has addressed issues of identity across the country — and in this part of the country in particular. It's worth talking about — why do people respond to these issues?'
Producers will continue to rely on special guests and guests to talk about their personal experiences, but they also plan to insert reports and commentary from people on the ground in the five Midwestern states where voters went red for Trump. These contributors will talk about what they're seeing as the 2020 election approaches. A show on immigration, for example, might draw on in-depth reporting from reporters across the region — combining interviews with reporters from Kansas City to Detroit.
“I hope it can help lift up voices from places that we don't necessarily hear from on a regular basis in the national media,” Fornoff said. “If more of these were accessible on a larger scale, the results of the 2016 election would not have been so surprising.”
