I remember thinking it was a good idea at the time.
This was pretty early Youth Speaks. Early enough that spoken word was just starting to become the tool that young people turned it in to. In fact, we were still explaining it to funders and partners. It was also early enough that young people’s voices were still treated as either a novelty or a risk. This story happened during the George W. Bush administration around 2004, though the precise year matters less than the conditions of the moment. Spoken word was beginning to circulate beyond classrooms and community centers. Institutions were starting to notice its reach, and with that attention came a desire to harness it.
That was how The Partnership for a Drug Free America came to us.
They were building a national PSA campaign and wanted to work with young people using poetry to address substance abuse. The premise was sound. Put out a national call. Invite young people to speak honestly about what they were seeing and living. Let the work come from them.
So I sent out the call.
About sixty five young people responded from across the country. Different cities, different families, different relationships to harm and survival. I remember reading the poems late one night, ten to fifteen of which stood out immediately. Not because they were tidy or inspirational, but because they were specific. The kind of specificity that comes from proximity and consequence.
The poems covered a wide range of experience. Cocaine. Alcohol. The early days of deep opioid abuse, before the common language and awareness existed to describe how deeply it cut across entire communities. These were not abstract warnings or morality tales. They were accounts of parents and siblings, of daily routines shaped around addiction, of bodies that disappeared gradually and then suddenly. The poems did not ask to be approved. They described reality.
I sent those poems in.
The response came back quickly, and it changed the terms of the project.
They had decided they wanted to focus exclusively on marijuana.
Not because that was where the writing was strongest. Not because it reflected the most urgent harm in what the kids submitted. But because it fit an existing campaign framework. Marijuana was familiar. It was easier to explain internally. It carried less institutional risk and fewer unanswered questions.
I had to go back to the poets and explain that the truth they had offered was no longer what was being requested. That they would need to revise, redirect, and narrow their experience to fit a predetermined message.
Most of them declined.
A few stayed and tried to make it work. The resulting poems were not terrible, but they were thinner. You could feel the distance between lived experience and assignment. We flew three kids to LA and recorded their work. They aired on MTV and a few other outlets. From the outside, it looked like a successful campaign.
It was acceptable.
But it was not accurate.
It did not reflect what young people were actually grappling with in their lives and communities. It replaced specificity with safety. It substituted honesty with manageability. Something essential had been lost, and everyone involved could feel it.
That experience clarified something for me that has stayed relevant ever since. Authenticity is not bullshit. It is not a branding choice or a stylistic affectation. Authentic responses require authentic calls. You cannot invite people to speak honestly and then punish them for where their honesty lands. You cannot claim to listen while quietly narrowing the range of acceptable answers.
This dynamic extends far beyond a single PSA campaign or youth engagement strategies. It shows up across politics, philanthropy, and media. Institutions regularly ask for participation without being prepared for what participation actually produces. We confuse control with clarity. We mistake polish for trust. We treat unpredictability as a liability rather than as evidence that something real is happening.
When people sense that a call is constrained, they disengage. Or they adapt their language to survive the process. Or they look elsewhere for someone who sounds less managed and more willing to say what they actually think.
This is part of why Donald Trump generates such intense response. Not because he is truthful. He is not. But because he sounds unfiltered. He speaks in ways that feel unscripted, unconcerned with institutional approval, and unconstrained by the norms that govern most public language. In a landscape dominated by careful phrasing, strategic ambiguity, and risk avoidance, that perceived authenticity becomes its own form of power. People respond authentically to him because he appears to be making an authentic call, even when the content of that call is destructive, misleading, or cruel.
This is not an argument in Trump’s favor. It is an indictment of the systems that made his style so potent.
For decades, political communication and mainstream media trained themselves to sound reasonable, disciplined, and safe. In the process, they hollowed out large portions of public language. When institutions consistently refuse to name what people are actually experiencing, they create a vacuum. Trump filled that vacuum not with truth, but with the feeling of honesty. And in moments of deep distrust, feeling can outweigh fact.
The lesson here is not that truth does not matter. It is that honesty is structural. It lives in how questions are asked, in what institutions are prepared to hear, and in what they are willing to let change as a result.
This is where public and independent media matter profoundly.
At their best, we are among the few places designed to hold complexity without immediately resolving it into slogan or outrage. They can create space for voices that do not arrive pre-aligned with institutional comfort, for conversations that unfold rather than conclude. They can stay with contradiction long enough for understanding to deepen.
But that only works if the invitation itself is real. If participation is not contingent on confirming a predetermined narrative. If listening is not merely a prelude to editing.
Honesty in media is not about neutrality or volume. It is about making room for reality as it is experienced, not as it is easiest to distribute. It requires trusting audiences with complexity and trusting communities with authorship, even when the results are uncomfortable or inconvenient.
The young poets did their part. They responded to the call they were given with clarity and courage. The failure was not theirs. It was institutional. We were not yet prepared to stand behind what we had asked for.
I am still trying to build media systems that learn from that moment. Public systems. Independent systems. Systems where the call is clear, the listening is genuine, and the response is not reshaped to avoid discomfort or controversy.
Public trust does not come from perfect messaging or disciplined narratives. It comes from being willing to hear what is actually being said and to respond honestly in return.
If public and independent media are to matter now, we must become places where honest calls are made and honest conversations are allowed to run their course. Not because it is safe, but because it is necessary. Anything less leaves the field open to those who are willing to sound authentic without ever being accountable to the truth.
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This piece was brought to you by KALW Speaks, a monthly series of essays from KALW staff and contributors, exploring the ideas that drive our work. Each of these essays reflect our commitment to innovation and invites you into a deeper conversation about the future of public media.
Learn more: From A Whisper To A Roar.
