Media and Public Policy

Where to find the readings:

= Click on the link.
= Blackboard course materials or e-reserves
= recommended for purchase.

February 4. Should the law allow media to publish classified documents, hacked emails, or other information that may have been illegally disclosed? And when should journalists publish, or not publish, that information? From the Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks

Randall Bezanson, How Free Can the Press Be? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003),
Ch. 1. Freedom to Publish: Pentagon Papers case, 5-57.
Ch. 4. Protecting Privacy: Bartnicki v. Vopper, 163-208.
(For both cases, come prepared to argue either side.)
Nausicaa Renner, "The symbiotic relationship between WikiLeaks and the press," Columbia Journalism Review, Nov. 18 2016; and Robert Mackey, "Julian Assange's Hatred of Hillary Clinton Was No Secret. His Advice to Donald Trump Was," The Intercept Nov. 15. 2017.
Helen Lewis, "When Is It Ethical to Publish Stolen Data?" Nieman Reports, June 1, 2015.

February 11. What do journalists face today in investigating people with money and power? What if the media themselves are implicated in misconduct and corruption? How journalists broke the Harvey Weinstein story.

Please pick one of the following two books:
Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (New York: Little, Brown, 2019)
OR
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement (New York: Penguin, 2019).

February 18. Should the law make it easier to sue the press for libel and invasions of privacy?

Libel and the media
Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (New York: Vintage, 1992), 1-45, 103-163.
Emily Bazelon, "Billionaires vs. the Press in the Age of Trump," New York Times Magazine, November 22, 2016.
Privacy and the media
James Whitman, "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty," Yale Law Journal 113 (2004), 1151-1171 (first twenty pages only).
Bezanson, How Free Can the Press Be?, 209-29 (Howard v. Des Moines Register & Tribune Co. 283 N.W.2d 289 [1979]).

February 25. Have the tech giants (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) become too powerful in the marketplace and public sphere and, if so, what should be done?

Roger McNamee, "How to Fix Facebook--Before It Fixes Us," Washington Monthly (January-February-March 2018).
Greg Ip, "The Antitrust Case against Facebook, Google, and Amazon," Wall Street Journal January 16, 2018.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), vii, Ch. 3 (63-97).
Dina Srinivasan, How Digital Advertising Markets Really Work," The American Prospect (Summer 2019).

March 3. How has new digital environment affected journalism, and how can the news media adapt? What will survive of local news? How has the new environment affected inequality in news and knowledge between communities and individuals?

Elizabeth Grieco, "9 Charts about America's Newsrooms," Pew Research Center, November 26, 2019.
Special Report: The New Digital Divides," Axios.
Paul Starr, "Fall from Grace," New York Review of Books, March 21, 2019.
Penelope Muse Abernathy, "The Loss of Local News: What It Means for Communities, Part I of The Expanding News Desert (Chapel Hill, NC: Center for Innovation and Sustainability of Local Media, University of North Carolina, 2018).
Sara Fischer, "Congress Comes Together to Save Local News," Axios, January 13, 2020.

March 10. Popular culture, politics, and the business of news: Has the culture of entertainment compromised the news media, or can entertainment do the work of news?

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Viking, 1985), vii-viii, 99-113.
James Hamilton, All the News That's Fit to Sell(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-36.
Matthew A. Baum and Angela S. Jamison, "The Oprah Effect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently," Journal of Politics (2006), 68: 946-959.
Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj. The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3-12.

Second Half: Online Classes

March 24. Media, political communication, and the covid-19 epidemic: Are we also facing an info-demic?

Impact of communication and politics on epidemic disease
Matt Baum, "Red State, Blue State, Flu State: Media Self-Selection and Partisan Gaps in Swine Flu Vaccinations," Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (December 2011).
"Diseases like covid-19 are deadlier in non-democracies," The Economist, February 18, 2020.
David Leonhardt, "A Complete List of Trump's Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus," New York Times, March 15, 2020.
McKay Coppins, "Trump's Dangerously Effective Coronavirus Propaganda," The Atlantic March 11, 2020.
Dana Milbank, "Trump's Late Conversion to Reality Leaves out His Supporters," Washington Post, March 17, 2020.
Zeynap Tufekci, "Why Telling People They Don't Need Masks Backfired," New York Times, March 17, 2020.

Social media and the coronavirus epidemic
Mark Scott, "Social media giants are fighting coronavirus fake news. It's still spreading like wildfire," Politico, March 12, 2020.
Ben Smith, "When Facebook Is More Trustworthy Than the President," New York Times, March 15, 2020.
Jay Peters, "Facebook is marking legitimate news articles about the coronavirus as spam because of a bug," The Verge, March 17, 2020.

Generational Divide
Bojan Pancevski et al, "A Generational Divide is Brewing Over Coronavirus: Scientists Say Lack of Alarm among Young People Could Hinder the Fight Against the Virus and Endanger Elders," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2020.
Psul Starr, "The Coming Division of Societies into Stay-at-Home and Safe-to-Work Populations," The American Prospect, March 18, 2020.

March 31. How did the freedoms of communication (free speech, a free press, freedom of information) develop in the United States? What does the guarantee of those freedoms require of a democratic government? What have been the limits of our constitutional guarantees?

Assignment: read the U.S. Constitution and make a list of the clauses that involve communication.
Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 1-19, 71-94, 267-294. [69 pages]
Michael Schudson, "Origins of the Freedom of Information Act," in The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2015), 28-36.
Bezanson,How Free Can the Press Be? "Freedom to Decide What to Publish," 58-82 (Miami Herald v. Tornillo[1971]).
Kent Middleton et al.,"Regulation of Public Issue Programming: The Fairness Doctrine," in The Law of Public Communication (Boston: Pearson, 2012),323-326.

April 7. How have the media changed the presidency, and how have presidents changed the media?

David Greenberg, Republic of Spin (New York: W.W Norton, 2016), Introduction (1-10), Ch. 1 (13-23), Ch 7 (67-77), Chs 20-21 (189-205), Ch. 39 (340-46), Ch. 43 (374-383), Ch. 46 (408-415).
Jane Mayer, "The Making of the Fox News White House," The New Yorker, March 11, 2019.
Jeffrey Gottfried et al.,"Trusting the News Media in the Trump Era," Pew Research Center, December 12, 2019.

April 14. Are online and social media more susceptible to lies and extremism than traditional media?

Sinan Aral, "How Lies Spread Online," New York Times, March 8, 2018.
Dale Beran, "4Chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump," Medium, February 14, 2017.
Andrew Marantz, "Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet," The New Yorker, March 19, 2018.
Zeynep Tufekci, "YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,," New York Times, March 10, 2018.

April 21. The international crisis in journalism: Why is freedom of the press and online under siege in so many parts of the world?

Joel Simon, The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2014), Introduction, Chs. 1, 2, 8.
Anya Schiffrin, "Government and Corporations Hinder Journalists with 'Media Capture,'" Columbia Journalism Review August 29, 2017.
Adrian Shahbaz and Allie Funk, "Freedom on the Net 2019: The Crisis of Social Media," (Freedom House).

April 28. Paper presentations