Since the launch of Deseret Magazine nearly five years ago, McKay Coppins has worked behind the scenes as a consultant and vital sounding board — helping shape our tone, our ambitions and our sense of what stories matter most to readers who care about faith, family and the forces reshaping American life.
Now, with the launch of “Deseret Voices,” McKay takes on a more public role. As a contributing editor and co-host of a new podcast, he’s helping expand Deseret Magazine’s mission beyond print, bringing thoughtful conversations about culture, religion and public life to a broader audience. Each week, McKay and his co-host, the award-winning journalist Jane Clayson Johnson, will sit down with thinkers, political figures and newsmakers for in-depth conversations that reflect the same spirit of curiosity and moral clarity that animates this magazine.
Starting this month, we’ll feature one of those podcast episodes in every issue of Deseret Magazine, publishing a full transcript of a conversation that we think deserves a permanent place in print. Think of it as a bridge between mediums — a way to let these ideas live both in your earbuds and on your coffee table.
McKay needs little introduction to most of our readers. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Romney: A Reckoning,” the bestselling biography of Sen. Mitt Romney that we excerpted in 2024. His reporting and essays — sharp, empathetic and deeply reported — have made him one of the most prominent political journalists in America.
Jane also needs little introduction. Like McKay and me, she graduated from BYU then began her journalism career at Salt Lake City’s KSL-TV (which broadcasts a few floors down from the magazine’s offices), before rising through the ranks of network news. She reported for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “World News Tonight” with Peter Jennings, and “Nightline” with Ted Koppel — covering everything from the O.J. Simpson civil trial to NATO’s airstrikes in Kosovo. She co-anchored “The Early Show” on CBS alongside Bryant Gumbel, reporting live from Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11, and later became a respected voice on public radio, hosting NPR’s “Here & Now” and WBUR’s “On Point.” Along the way, she’s interviewed presidents, first ladies, world leaders and cultural icons, earning Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards for her work.
Together, Jane and McKay bring a blend of depth, empathy and experience uniquely suited to the Deseret mission. In our conversation below we talk about why this moment calls for a new kind of dialogue, and what they hope “Deseret Voices” will bring to the national conversation. —Jesse Hyde
We desperately need spaces where people can listen and learn and maybe leave with more understanding than when they arrived. People want to be uplifted, to feel hope and joy.
Jane, you’ve done so many things in media, from “Good Morning America” to “The Early Show” to “NPR,” but what is it, for you, that speaks to you about this particular project?
Jane Clayson Johnson: Well, I do think there’s a lot of noise right now. There’s a lot of cynicism, and I think we desperately need spaces where people can listen and learn and maybe leave with more understanding than when they arrived. People want to be uplifted, to feel hope and joy. That should
be a big part of this project.
I hope it will be.
McKay, you and I have talked off and on about the podcast, but what’s the current vision?
McKay Coppins: Similar to Jane, when I think about this political moment that we’re in, I think we’re dealing with two separate but interconnected problems. One of them is division, and the other is disengagement. Everybody can feel how divided we are, and people who are following the news really closely seem to be increasingly polarized. Something about our information landscape seems to make people angrier and angrier at each other all the time. If this show could provide a space where people could talk about difficult, contentious, important issues, but without turning them against each other, that would be a huge success.
And then the other problem is disengagement. A lot of people are exhausted by the news at this point, and they’re exhausted by politics, they’re exhausted by the culture war, and they just don’t want to like, deal. So much of media now makes you feel like you’re going crazy. It’s designed to make you angry and outraged, and that is exhausting for a lot of people. I hope that what Jane and I can do is edify and enlighten and inform and also just not exhaust people (laughs).
Jane, you have a lofty goal, and it’s one the magazine shares, and I believe that people do want something different, but I’m curious how you both think about how you get people to actually tune in. Because I think it’s fair to say you’re sort of going against the grain.
JCJ: Back to what McKay was saying, it just feels like the public square, wherever it is, wherever we are, it feels like a battlefield. It’s not a gathering place. It’s not a place where we have respectful exchange of ideas. And you know, my friends, the people I interact with, they do want something different. They do want substance. They don’t want shouting matches. And I still believe that conversation still has the power to heal and to inform, even in the moment that we’re in culturally. And so if this project can bring different voices together from across the political spectrum, voices that people are interested in on both sides of the aisle, civic leaders and writers and thinkers and faith leaders, and everyday folks who can help us better understand each other, to think more deeply about what unites us rather than what divides us, I do still think there’s an appetite for that, even during this time of deep division. The proof is in the pudding, though. The conversations that we have, the quality of the product will speak for itself, and people will choose.
I still believe that conversation still has the power to heal and to inform, even in the moment that we’re in culturally.
MC: I say this as someone who covers politics, but I think too much of the media over the last 10 years has become fixated almost exclusively on politics, and it’s led to a kind of apocalyptic feeling in the media and in the country, where people feel like we’re being torn apart, and we might be at the end of the American experiment.
Somebody sent me this C.S. Lewis quote. It was the 1940s, when everyone was afraid of the atomic bomb. And C.S. Lewis said, “If we’re going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting with our friends, not huddled together like frightened sheep, and thinking about bombs.” I’ve been thinking about that because I do feel like, having spent the last 10 years almost exclusively covering politics, politics has become a cultural atomic bomb, where it’s ruining friendships, marriages, even communities. And as important as I think it is that we talk about the issues that underlie politics and that we continue to talk about politics, I also think we need to put politics in its proper context and talk about the wider kind of range of human experience. That’s something we’ll do with our show, too.
To that end, what sort of guests do you hope to have? It sounds like some will talk about politics, but it also sounds like you’re going to have people talk about other things.
MC: I want to talk to people from across the political spectrum, including people who are well to the right or to the left of me. I actually think, especially in this era of extremes in our politics, that it’s important to try to have calm, curiosity-driven conversations about where people are coming from. I want to talk to Ben Shapiro about political violence and the state of political rhetoric in this country that I think people like him have helped create. I want to talk to Ross Douthat about being a conservative religious voice, speaking primarily to the secular liberal audience of The New York Times, and what he’s learned about persuasion and explaining his viewpoint to people who might be naturally hostile to it. I want to talk to Sarah Longwell, the head of The Bulwark, which started as a Never Trump conservative publication, and has now found its own identity. She runs regular focus groups with Trump voters, and all kinds of voters, and I want to talk to her about what she’s learning from those conversations. I want to talk to Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, about the future of the Democratic Party and where he thinks it’s gone astray. The only litmus test I’ll apply to guests is whether I feel like I can have a good faith conversation with them, regardless of their political views. Will they answer my questions candidly? If they will and they’re interesting, I want to book them.
JCJ: I hope to speak with Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Sonia Sotomayor, who are sort of stepping out from behind the bench to model respectful disagreement. They appeared earlier this year before the National Governors Association, and it was so interesting to hear these ideological opposites offer this rare display of disagreement grounded in respect.
I want to talk to people like Princeton professors Robbie George and Cornel West. Again, ideological opposites and best friends. They teach. They co-author essays. They attend church services, public events, side by side. Their conversations are fascinating, and they have a shared commitment to humility and truth and faith, and again, come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. I want to talk to them about how we come together.
Politics has become a cultural atomic bomb, where it’s ruining friendships, marriages, even communities. And as important as I think it is that we talk about the issues that underlie politics, I also think we need to talk about the wider kind of range of human experience.
I want to talk to people like Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She has explored what civility looks like in politics, from the Lincolns to the Roosevelts to other American presidents. I would love to talk to chef José Andrés, whom I’ve interviewed before. He goes to war zones in Ukraine and Haiti and Gaza and shows up where hope is lost and starts cooking for people. I want to hear what he’s learned from those experiences about human dignity, about having compassion and moral courage in the middle of chaos.
I’d love to have a conversation about the new NCAA rules that govern name, image and likeness, and how that’s affecting places like BYU that have a real mission to follow as a faith-based institution, and how they’re balancing mission and money. I think that’s a really interesting conversation about their core values.
I want to end on a moment of hope and inspiration. McKay, you mentioned that we live in a time where we’re kind of increasingly obsessed by and defined by politics, and it wasn’t always that way, and there’s so much more to life. I’d love to hear from you both: talk about why, in spite of these challenges we face, you’re optimistic about the future of America.
MC: We are in a very pessimistic moment in our national life. A lot of people in the national media have made a lot of money by predicting doom for the union and apocalypse for the world. But I find hope in the fact that there is such a strong backlash to this kind of politics of division that we’ve had over really this whole century, but especially the last decade or so. It suggests to me that if we could productively channel that energy, it could pull the country out of the kind of muck of divisive politics and into something better.
On the other hand, the fact that so many people are disengaging is not good. It’s not good for the civic health of our country. But what it means is that the vast majority of Americans do not want to live in a country like this, where everybody is defined by politics, where everybody’s at each other’s throats all the time. Most people don’t want that. The thing that will save American democracy is the only thing that’s ever saved American democracy, and that’s the people. It’s us. The American people are the ones who are going to finally decide that they’ve had enough of this and that we want something better. In a very small way, that is the kind of bet that this show is making, that there are at least some people out there who want something different than what’s being served up.
JCJ: I couldn’t agree more. I have always thought that journalism, as I have experienced it, has tended to lean more pessimistic. I personally am an optimist, and I believe in the American spirit. I believe that people are desperate for civility. They’re desperate for unity and they want to feel inspired, to be connected again. And I can’t think of a better way to be part of that solution than coming together in a project like this, where we can offer that, where we can lift voices and create a platform where people feel that there is something more, something more united and inspiring, and that we can move out of this space of negativity and division.
Deseret Voices will be released on Thursdays on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the Deseret News YouTube channel and at Deseret.com/podcasts. Video clips of interviews will be posted on the Deseret News social media channels including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
This story appears in the December 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.