This week in Manhattan, at the inaugural AISH Talks, I stepped onstage and shared something I have never shared publicly before—not just what I do in the world of journalism, but why I do it. The room was full, completely sold out, and the night featured actor Michael Rapaport, Grammy-nominated musician Peter Himmelman and cosmologist Brian Keating. It looked and felt like a TED Talk, yet through a Jewish lens rooted in wisdom, responsibility and action.

My role that night was to tell the story behind the question I get asked more than any other: Why is the media failing us? But as I’ve grown in this field, I’ve realized that may not be the right question.

I didn’t come into journalism through the typical path. One night, I saw an article on AOL News about becoming a broadcast journalist. I called my mother, and I said, “Mom, I’m going to be a journalist.” And she said, “Ariella, and I’m going to be president of the United States.” It was her humor and her disbelief because we didn’t know anyone who did this.

But a few weeks later, I stood in line with 600 people — all fighting for 12 unpaid internships. I got one, not in the newsroom but at “Live! With Regis and Kelly.” It didn’t matter. I was in the building. On day two, I walked into the newsroom myself and knocked on the director’s door. I asked, “Why didn’t you hire me?” That one moment led to the person who later got me my first real jobs, at ABC News’ “20/20” and on the show “What Would You Do?” From the beginning, journalism was about walking into rooms and refusing to wait to be chosen.

And then came the second moment that shaped my worldview. A woman overheard that I was leaving early for Yom Kippur, and she hovered over my head. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “How do you hide your horns so well?” She truly believed Jews had horns. She wasn’t hateful. She was uninformed.

That moment taught me something that would become a foundational principle in my work: Ignorance is not always born in hate; sometimes it’s born in absence. Years later, when I moved into Jewish communal work at the Jewish federation, people came up to me and asked, “Why is the media ignoring us?” I asked them, “Did you actually tell them the story?” And the answer was almost always, “No. We don’t know how.” That’s when the question began to shift for me because if the media doesn’t know our context, how can they tell our story accurately?

Then came Oct. 7. And every relationship I had in journalism, every producer, every editor, suddenly mattered. My first call was with a man named Yoni Asher, whose wife and two daughters were taken hostage. He didn’t know if they were alive. He just needed someone who could make sure the world didn’t forget them. The next night, he was on ABC News. And that night, I made a photo collage and in the top corner, I typed a tiny credit line: “Photo Credit: via Ariella Noveck.” It wasn’t branding; it was a breadcrumb, so if another family needed help, they could find me. That little credit line became a lifeline. Over the next months, that tiny line allowed hostage families, Nova music festival survivors and Jewish students to get into mainstream media because it became a trust signal inside newsrooms: The story was real, the source was reachable, the image was verified. Access changed the outcome.

Weeks later, coordinating interviews at the largest pro-Israel rally in U.S. history, I watched how media coverage itself helped sustain hope for hostages underground. At that moment, I realized that the media not only shapes how the world understands what is happening, but it can literally help keep someone alive. Then came the calls from students. Jewish college students whispering from locked school libraries, “They’re coming for us.” We trained them to know what “on the record” means, how to speak clearly and how to tell their truth, and they started appearing on major networks.

Later, I flew to Israel, to Shuva Junction, and when a soldier tried to hand me his own vest, I realized the weight he was carrying. I told him, “You keep it. I have emunah (‘faith’).” I went to Kfar Aza and began bringing American journalists there, too, because you cannot fully report something you have only scrolled. Presence creates accuracy.

Today, our team is building systems to empower journalists before a headline hardens. We are training students. We are equipping reporters. And, yes, we are building AI that can confirm news wires in real time. In one newsroom we worked with, a writer who normally published three articles a week, after using our tool, published eight in a single week. Accuracy didn’t slow her down. Accuracy doubled her output.

So now we return to the question people love to ask: “Why is the media failing us?” But failure means you tried everything, and it didn’t work. And I am here to say, we haven’t tried everything. Yes, bias exists. Yes, agendas exist. Yes, blind spots exist. But more often, what I see is a lack of access to understanding. If the media is missing something, then part of the solution lives with us.

We can give context. We can give access. We can give information. We can bring journalists to see the truth with their own eyes. This matters because the media shapes opinion. Opinion shapes policy. Policy shapes Jewish safety. Just because our TVs turn on and off doesn’t mean truth gets to turn on and off. This is tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” and sometimes repairing the world begins with something as small and as powerful as repairing a headline.

To those who say, “the media has failed us,” the media isn’t failing us. We are just getting started in helping it succeed.

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