My Country Talks
Pairing people from opposite viewpoints to have a one-on-one conversation helps reduce polarization. But is it a job for news outlets?
In the United States, a host of projects, initiatives and nonprofit groups have taken on the mantle of helping overcome social division by fostering dialogue. Media outlets have helped by promoting and covering such events — but that’s not the same thing as initiating and leading them.
In Germany, a dialogue model that has since been replicated across the globe was born in the newsroom of Zeit Online in 2017. The idea is simple: Take two people with opposing perspectives, and connect them for an in-person conversation about the issues.
Journalist Hanna Israel said at the 4th Global Constructive Journalism Conference that the Zeit Online newsroom had underestimated the rise of right-wing populism at home and abroad. The United States had just elected Donald Trump president, and Britain had voted to leave the European Union.
“We as a big newsroom had to self-critically ask ourselves how we could not foresee this,” she said. “A big part of the population was not being heard in these polls. We thought: ‘How can we reconnect society?’”
The news organization developed Germany Talks, inviting people to answer a series of controversial questions and be matched with a stranger nearby who had an opposite point of view.
“This was a really simple experiment with no budget whatsoever,” Editor Jochen Wegner said in a 2019 TED Talk.
The team expected about 100 people to register and planned to match people by hand from a spreadsheet of responses. They were surprised when 12,000 people signed up.
They built an algorithm to do the matching and introduced people by email. It was like a dating app — for political opposites.
“As you may imagine, we had many concerns,” Wegner said. “Maybe no one would show up in real life. Maybe all the discussions in real life would be awful. Or maybe we had an axe murderer in our database.
“But then on a Sunday in June, 2017, something beautiful happened. Thousands of Germans met in pairs and talked about politics, peacefully.”
My Country Talks
In 2019, Zeit Online worked with 15 international media partners to replicate the model, this time with more than 17,000 Europeans from 33 countries took. Since then, the model has been replicated in more than 100 countries, with more than 200,000 people taking part in events through what is now My Country Talks.
Where’s the journalism?
Israel said that, in addition to providing the platform for these connections, the newsroom looked for matches that could be particularly interesting. They asked to sit in on those meetings, to take photos and write a story.
“There was a doctor and a cashier during the Covid crisis,” she said. “They had very different perspectives, but at some point, they could kind of relate to each other.”
In a 2018 study of the Germany Talks model, behavioral economist Armin Falk documented the change people experienced:
"Even just a two-hour conversation between people with completely different political views is enough to weaken polarization. The meetings helped dismantle prejudices against those who think differently and, after the conversations, participants considered people with other views on average to be less incompetent, less malicious and less poorly informed."
Likewise, a study by economists Adrian Blattner (Stanford University) and Martin Koenen (Harvard University) found that the interactions didn’t change people’s beliefs — but did change how they felt about people who held opposite views. It didn’t change their minds; it made them more tolerant.
For more:
Hanna Israel speaks on a panel about journalism’s role in reducing polarization at the Constructive Institute’s 2022 conference.
Armin Falk describes polarization in Germany and the effects of one-on-one dialogue for Zeit Online.
Zeit Online Editor Jochen Wegner explains how the newsroom developed the idea for Europe Talks out of an experiment.
