Transcript: Amanda Ripley
My interview with the American journalist, author and co-founder of Good Conflict
If you follow the news in this country, you know that Canada is currently grappling with a number of crises, from housing to mental health. And yet much of our attention is focused on the United States and on Donald Trump. My guest on the podcast this week has just published an essay about this. She argues that, much like in a dysfunctional family, the media’s fixation on Trump is a distraction from looking at deeper issues.
Amanda Ripley is an American journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. She is the co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict. (You can watch Good Conflict’s latest story here).
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s great to have you on the show. For listeners, we’ve known each other for some years now, since my time at the CBC. You’ve been on this show; you’ve been in the newsletter. I always say this: Your approach, your book High Conflict, your article for the Solutions Journalism, “Complicating the Narratives” — these have all been huge influences on the kind of journalism that I’m trying to do here.
AR: I’m so glad to hear that, thank you.
TH: Since we last spoke, you have founded an organization, Good Conflict, that I have found really interesting. To start today, tell us about the genesis of that and what Good Conflict is aiming to do.
AR: Good Conflict started a few years ago when a journalist colleague and friend of mine, Hélène Biandudi Hofer, reached out to me. She had been teaching the ideas from that essay you mentioned, “Complicating the Narratives.” She had been teaching that, for the Solutions Journalism network, to over a thousand journalists around the world and was doing just incredible work. She said, “I feel like there’s more here. Yes, we want to train journalists, and there seems like there’s more.” Because she had people showing up in those workshops who were not journalists — just had found it and wanted to be part of it. Meanwhile, I was getting a lot of inbound requests from non-journalists as well, who were saying, “Look, we read your book High Conflict. It’s nice. Thanks for the stories, but how do we put this into action in our organization or our school district?”
We started the company with the idea of doing two different things, which is training people to be more conflict-fluent so they’re more comfortable with conflict. So it’s more normal, healthier, and they’re less vulnerable to exploitation by conflict entrepreneurs, that kind of thing. But also, to create original content to cover controversy and conflict differently, and experiment and see if we could prove that you can make healthy coverage as compelling as unhealthy coverage of controversy. We did a lot of the training work the last few years and now we’re trying to shift to do more of the original content creation, which is where we’re going to definitely need your help and input.
TH: I’ve been watching it with a lot of interest, and I will watch with interest going forward. For people who don’t know, what is a conflict entrepreneur?
AR: A conflict entrepreneur is a person or a platform that exploits and inflames conflict for their own reasons. Sometimes it’s for profit, but often it’s just for attention or power or a sense that they matter. And unfortunately, we’ve created a bunch of institutions now to celebrate and reward conflict entrepreneurs, from social media to our own profession and to politics. That’s not good, that needs to change. But if you are a conflict entrepreneur, there is no better time to be alive than right now. I don’t think it’ll always be that way, but that is what it is right now.
TH: [Laughs] Isn’t that the truth? I wanted to bring you on today to mull over a difficult question, and this is the question of Trump and how we think and talk about him. This is something I am continually grappling with. The thesis of my next book, which is out later this year, is that us journalists overreacted to Trump — that we threw out our standards and practices, damaging our credibility and trust. That doesn’t mean I’m not troubled by Trump, by the things that Trump does. I just think it doesn’t give us licence to throw out our governing principles. You gave me a fresh way to think about this question that I’m grappling with. This last week, you published an essay on Trump looking at it from the lens of a dysfunctional family, which I think is a great way to look at it. Can you briefly sketch out for us your argument on the “identified patient”?
AR: The idea is that in any dysfunctional family, or country, there’s usually one person who creates a lot of the drama. Family therapists call this the identified patient. You may have heard the phrase “problem child.” Sometimes it is a child, a raging teenager, or it could be a mother who drinks too much. It could be anyone. The point is that that identified patient gets all the attention, understandably. But their antics tend to distract everyone else, including the therapist, from other problems in the family. So, all of those things fade and get washed away by the behaviour of the identified patient.
TH: You say in your essay that this is a hard time. You’re not suggesting it can be anything else. But, you write, “I want to consider — just consider — what happens when we let the identified patient become the sun.” Then you note that in the last six months, The New York Times has mentioned Trump in headlines some 4,520 times. That’s 25 Trump headlines a day. This does exceed Biden when he was president. It’s hard, when you look at that stat, to avoid the conclusion that we are fixated on him. And you write, “Imagine if your aging father had, for the past decade, created regular chaos in your family. What would it mean if you texted your adult siblings about him 25 times a day?” I loved that. Can you unpack that for us?
AR: Yeah. And it is really tricky. Because, of course, Trump deserves a lot of this attention. He’s doing things that have not been done before, that jeopardize a lot of people and really have huge implications, not just in the States but around the world. This is why it’s so tricky. Which is why I’m so excited to read your new book. Because we’ve got to come at this from every direction we can to figure out a better way to cover Trump without making him the sun and everything else revolves around him.
Because what happens is — in addition to leading a lot of people to tune out of the news, or become dangerously depressed, which I think is definitely happening — in addition to that, you miss really important things and you take your eye off the ball. The reason why we are living in alternate realities in the United States, the reason why there is so much distrust, the reason why a conflict entrepreneur is able to exploit our divisions and turn us against each other so effortlessly — those are the problems that we need to fix. Because eventually, one way or another, Trump is going to be gone, but those problems will remain.
The same is true with identified patients in families. What you often see in family therapy is that something happens — hopefully the child gets treatment, or the father stops drinking or whatever it is, maybe somebody dies — and then, all of a sudden, all the existing other problems of the dynamics in the family are exposed. They have gone unnoticed for many years. And the same is true with countries. We’ve seen this in other countries and we can talk about that. But it is a known pattern, where you get so fixated on the identified patient that you miss important other stories.
TH: It’s interesting because in Canada our identified patient is also Donald Trump.
AR: Yes. I’ve noticed this when I’m visiting Canada and I talk to friends and family. They know as much about the latest news on Trump as I do. Which — again, I get it — but it is wild. It is wild.
TH: I get it, too. But digging into this other way of looking at it, I want to read you a tweet from the Canadian journalist Tristin Hopper. He’s also been on this podcast. This week, he said, “Very few Canadians like Trump right now, but most of us have better things to do than stew over the actions of a foreign head of state. Meanwhile, it is literally a full-time job for far more Canadians than I care to imagine.” So, as you know, our last election swung on the issue of Trump. He does take up a lot of oxygen here, especially in the news cycle. My feeling — as much as I am concerned about Trump — is that we’re neglecting things like the housing crisis, which is foundational to our whole society right now. You write, “The fixation on the identified patient means we have precious little time, energy or desire left to do the most important work to repair our relationships, build stronger, better institutions, fight corruption and plan for a very different future so that our children do not inherit the same tragedy.” Talk about how we identify this pattern and how we start to move beyond it.
