Letter from the Director
We are official! On November 7th, we held our inaugural summit and launch event at BU–Communicating Climate. Over 275 people registered to attend, and we spent all day, from 9-6, in conversation about the role of communication in the climate crisis, and how we can effectively harness technology, story, and collaboration for better outcomes.
I arrived at BU in January of this year with an extraordinary challenge and opportunity—to start a center within the College of Communication that might help make sense of, and imagine solutions to our democratic trust crisis. A recent Gallup poll reported that only 28% of Americans trust the media. That’s down from 72% in 1976. Among Republicans, current trust in the media is 8%. In an April 2025 poll, the Partnership for Public Service reported that only 33% of Americans trusted the federal government. And a Pew poll last spring found that our trust in each other, in neighbors and acquaintances, has declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2024.
We have arrived at an historic low point in our trust in the media, the government, and each other. This problem has multiple causes—from political corruption and corporate aggregation, to our insatiable dependence on screens, algorithms that keep us consuming them at alarming rates, the ease of media manipulation with AI, and the increasing ability to deny facts and evidence with cynical claims of manipulation. Our trust crisis is also a communication crisis. How narratives are formed and distributed influences who trusts institutions and why. If you don’t trust the government, you’re not going to trust its messaging. If you don’t trust the message, you’re not going to trust the institution behind it. It’s a vicious cycle. We need to figure out how to develop shared narratives. That’s the only way to achieve the shared histories and purpose that will hold us together.
For this reason, MISI takes a scholarly and practical approach. We will create knowledge about our communication ecosystem, and work alongside those here in New England who are affected by the negative consequences of misinformation and distrust to consider how we communicate with each other, and deliver facts in ways that reach people.
We’ve been hard at work in building our foundation, which we see as a three legged stool: Research, Fellowship, and Practice (RFP).
Our research is focused on how people come to trust information, and the role that technologies, institutions, community connections, and physical geographies play in forming that trust. We ground our work in the New England area, which allows us to do research in collaboration with institutions and organizations who are working each day to find solutions to their communication challenges. We’ll be announcing specific research efforts very soon.
MISI is committed to building fellowship at BU and beyond. With generous support from the Mellon Foundation, we have invited 15 people from across the university and the region to explore novel means of communicating about climate or environmental justice. Half of them are faculty at BU from a range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines; the rest come from outside the university, with a range of experience in activism and journalism. We are eager to build partnerships across BU, across the city and region, and across disciplines. Our hope for the fellowship is to figure out the right questions to ask, so that we might strive to understand how innovations in media can lead to social impact.
Supporting practice means providing resources to artists, storytellers, and practitioners who are inventing or adopting novel means of communicating in order to build trust within and across communities. We will work alongside activists and policy makers to build new tech tools, reimagine how to use existing tools, and to explore new ways of telling stories.
At bottom, whether it’s reaching across the aisle or the Thanksgiving table, we need to figure out how to talk to each other in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re talking at each other or down to those who disagree with us or lack the facts. The philosopher Martin Buber, from whom I take significant inspiration, said that the “chief presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is.” So much political speech, in its memes and attention seeking jabs, has abandoned dialogue as a frame of reference.
MISI is committed to dialogue—to exploring communication tools and strategies that acknowledge both the speaker and the listener. I invite you to join us as we build knowledge of how this works, and support the community and practice necessary for a communication ecosystem that supports a thriving democracy.
