We’ve talked about this ad nauseam: How did our once-upon-a-time era of “Walter Cronkite credibility” give way to current polarization perpetuated by rancorous social media? And where is our government in overseeing mass and social media? Why isn’t it fixing this? What ever happened to the Fairness Doctrine? Couldn’t that be our guide in dealing…
A few days ago I shared an op-ed on my personal Facebook page by a doctor in Los Angeles who wrote that she was running out of compassion for the people unwilling to get the COVID vaccine. “Last year, a case like this would have flattened me,” the doctor wrote of a man who had…
Every year since I became a journalism professor, I’m asked to do this strange academic ritual called an “annual report.” In that report, I’m required to document every course I teach, every article I’ve written, every meeting of substance, every project. It’s a basic accounting of my time that the college can then use to…
The Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol raised a host of questions about free expression where the law of the First Amendment is widely misunderstood. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who went to Stanford, graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, claimed Simon & Schuster assaulted the First Amendment by…
By BEN LYONS / Social media have helped us cocoon ourselves into comfortable ignorance of “the other side” — so goes the prevailing notion of the last few years, since Facebook has been king. A team of researchers at Facebook published an article Thursday that claimed to detail how much the site contributes to political echo chambers or filter-bubbles. Published in the journal Science, their report claimed Facebook’s blackbox newsfeed algorithm weeded out some disagreeable content from readers’ feeds, but not as much as did their personal behavior. A flurry of criticism came from other social scientists, with one, University of Michigan’s Christian Sandvig, calling it Facebook’s “it’s not our fault” study.