MPR News Presents

Former Obama White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett spoke at the 2023 MLK Breakfast. The annual event is presented by UNCF and General Mills. Jarrett talked about the inspiration she takes from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., when she first met Michelle and Barack Obama and what to expect from the new Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side.

At this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Kitty Boone, vice president of public programs at the Aspen Institute, asked three national media leaders why trust in the news has eroded — and what media organizations can do to win it back.

Local journalism is dying, and national media organizations are making radical changes to fight public mistrust and stay afloat. Local and national media leaders came together at the 2021 Aspen Ideas Festival to discuss the problems plaguing journalism and how to solve them.

Hyper-partisanship and gridlock, massive populist protest movements, low public satisfaction with government performance — something seems to be broken in American democracy. Here are two ideas for fixing our political system from the 2021 Aspen Ideas Festival.

This year’s Aspen Ideas Festival featured a conversation with the Minneapolis North Community High School’s football coach and one of his former players.

This year’s Aspen Ideas Festival featured several discussions related to the pandemic.

For Labor Day, we broadcast an episode of the MinneCulture podcast about restaurateur, labor organizer, and civil rights pioneer Anthony Brutus Cassius. The program is hosted by Minnesota chef and food writer Mecca Bos.

During a year already vexed by a global pandemic, residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, suffered two hurricanes, an ice storm, and a devastating flood — a level of catastrophe that portends our nation’s disastrous climate future and reveals the insufficient safety nets available to the most vulnerable. This documentary chronicles the effects of these disasters over the course of a year, starting with Hurricane Laura in August, 2020.

Even before the pandemic, campus counselling services were reporting a marked uptick in the number of students with anxiety, clinical depression and other serious psychiatric problems. College administrators are feeling pressure to do more to retain students whose mental health issues might otherwise lead them to drop out – and to ensure that students don’t harm themselves or others.