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While covering the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics for NBC, H’15 reporter Bob Costas H’15 documented a tragic anniversary: During the 1972 Munich Olympics, a Palestinian militant group killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has rejected a request to observe a moment of silence during the 2012 Games in honor of the late Israeli. As the athletes entered the field, Costas told the audience that earlier this week, IOC President Jacques Rogge observed a moment of silence in front of about 100 spectators at the athletes’ village.
“For many, though, with the world watching tonight, this is a real time and place to remember those who were lost and how and why they died,” Costas said. After a brief pause, NBC Switch to Ads.
Talev (left), director of the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship, helped moderate and participated in a panel discussion, “The Intersection of Entertainment and Democracy: Are We the Problem or the Solution?”
Costas shared the anecdote during a recent panel discussion at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California, celebrating the launch of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship. Costas, who attended SI Newhouse’s School of Public Communication before embarking on his storied career, where he received an honors degree in 2015, was one of the featured guests participating in a discussion entitled “The Intersection of Entertainment and Democracy: Are we the problem or the solution?”
Held in the Los Angeles area, the university has a thriving alumni population and academic programs, including Los Angeles NewhouseAlthough it will be based some 2,700 miles away in Washington, D.C., the institute will address pressing nationally relevant issues, such as threats to the media and democracy, and the fight against disinformation. announced In the summer of 2022, it’s a partnership new house and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
“With the opening of the new college and the combined strengths of Maxwell and Newhouse, the University will play a vital role in bringing conversations that bring people together to help bridge the disparities and divides that our nation sees and experiences today , ” Dean Newhouse Mark J. commended Tell the group audience to be primarily alumni and friends of the university. “While the institute will be based in Washington, D.C., I hope you can see that its work and impact will have broad implications across the country, involving faculty and students and research and teaching, with conferences like this one and experiential learning Chance.”
In addition to Costas, the panel included another alumnus — Danielle Nottingham ’99, co-anchor of NBC’s “California Live”; CNN reporter David Culver; and Lodato from the university, Margarita Tarev and David Van Slyck. Talev is the institute’s recently appointed Kramer director, while Van Slyke is dean of the Maxwell School.
Left to right: Lodato, Talev, Costas, Nottingham, Culver, Jones and Van Slyke
Author, attorney and CNN host Van Jones provides an opening that focuses on the virtues of listening, engaging with those with different perspectives and finding common ground.
The talk explored the topics that drive the Institute’s needs — political polarization, distrust of institutions, including the media, and the role of entertainment news, disinformation and higher education.
CostasA winner of 28 Emmy Awards, 12 Olympic Games and coverage of multiple World Series games, Super Bowls and the NBA Finals, he explores the intersection of sports reporting and current events. In addition to his time at the 2012 Olympics, he shared a recent time spent on sports broadcasts discussing current events and what some might find difficult issues.
For example, during a playoff game last fall, he spent nearly a minute talking about why the Cleveland Guards changed their name. And, during Sunday Night Football, Costas spoke about the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among athletes.
Of the latter, he said: “When I spend those two minutes talking about football being as directly linked to traumatic brain injury as smoking is directly linked to lung cancer, it puts me on the wrong side of a lot of people. People: NFL , my own network and people who don’t want to listen because they love football, you know?
Costas said that while people turn to sports for entertainment — “to escape” — it can also be “the best way to show a good point to as many viewers as possible if you do it succinctly at the right time. Great place.”
Jones (left) and Costas
Talev, a veteran journalist who was political editor-in-chief at Axios and was a political analyst for CNN before joining college last summer, spoke of declining trust in institutions like the military, the Supreme Court and higher education. Among other things, she said, “technology gives us more opportunities to choose our own adventures and block out what you don’t want to hear.”
She asked Van Slyke to reflect on how this affects teaching at the university.
Van Slyke describes a game he plays with students at the start of the semester: He begins by asking them what they read in the morning—a question that often elicits a “frown” because most are looking at their phones. Then he asked innocuous questions like how many were first-generation students, how many came from military families, how many were Yankee fans.
“When you go through the process a little bit, you suddenly start seeing people looking at each other because you’re taking away party identities,” he said. If not, it is easier to find common ground and discuss it.
Van Slyke shared that he and colleagues are challenged by the concept of evidence, given the current polarized climate, where people cite the same sources as they believe, often at the expense of factual, credible information.
“We’ve lost confidence in what the evidence actually says,” he said, adding that he asks students to consider questions like: “What are the facts? How do you collect the facts? Where do the facts come from? What does the data look like?”
During the hour-long conversation, the panelists also talked about how to reach Gen Z — those born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s. Nottingham shared how she was forced to join social media channels like Instagram to better connect with the crowd, something she didn’t feel comfortable with at first.
“I think when we talk about the conversation and how we move forward and all those things, we have to focus on the younger generation,” School of Visual and Performing Arts“They don’t see the world the way we do.”
Van Slyck later told Nottingham that while she might have had some trepidation when she joined, “the good news is that other people will find you, and they’ll mark it with some legitimacy.”
He added that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ’80 — a Maxwell alumnus — recently shared a $1 billion plan to overhaul the state’s mental health care continuum. He said he was pleased to see students take up the issue on Instagram, with some sharing stories from 40 years ago about the network of institutions that housed and often mistreated the mentally ill.
He added that their “processes for obtaining information are very different”.
As the event drew to a close, Costas noted how NBC was supporting Syracuse alumnus Mike Tirico ’88 to cover the 2022 Olympics, a decade after him. A graduate of the Maxwell School and the College of Arts and Sciences and Newhouse College, Tirico’s report incorporates well-researched context and guest experts who speak to the intense global scrutiny of host countries, primarily targeting minority abuses.
“You know, they’ve laid it out. … They’ve done something convincing,” he said. “They did that at the beginning. Then they stepped out of the way most of the time and let the game end. They did a very journalistic thing.”
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