Monday (Mar 24) – Agenda-Setting, Framing & Filters
- Reading: Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria and Rebecca Crosby, “America’s Zombie “Crime Wave’,” Popular Information, 17 Oct 2023.
- Reading: TBD on US news coverage of Gaza, from Drop Site and Intercept
- Lecture Notes: The Politics of News
- In class: Watch Noam Chomsky discuss the “propaganda model,” from the documentary Manufacturing Consent.
Wednesday (Mar 26) – Objecting to Objectivity
- Reading: Kim Kelly, “The Politics of Criticism,” Columbia Journalism Review, 8 Aug 2019.
- Reading: Jack Holmes, “Mehdi Hasan Thinks There’s One Thing Journalists Should Be Biased About,” Esquire, 9 Mar 2021.
- In-class: Class discussion about what it means to be ‘biased’ vs. ‘objective’
- Due today: Online Assignment #3 – Engaging News.
KEY TERMS FOR THIS WEEK: objectivity, agenda-setting, framing, false equivalence, fake news, misinformation, disinformation
For further reading & research:
- Bauer, A.J., Anthony Nadler, and Jacob L. Nelson. “What Is Fox News? Partisan Journalism, Misinformation, and the Problem of Classification.” Electronic News, (December 2021).
- David Lauter, “Killings in the U.S. are dropping at a historic rate. Will anyone notice?,” Los Angeles Times, 20 Oct 2023.
- Mohammed El-Kurd, “Let’s Talk About How the Media Covers Gaza,” The Nation, 29 Dec 2021.
- Judd Legum, “A Tale of Two Thefts,” Popular Information, 29 Nov 2021.
- Noam Chomsky – The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine,” Al-Jazeera, 2 Mar 2017.
- Andreas Jungherr, “Foundational questions for the regulation of digital disinformation,” Journal of Media Law, 16(1), 8–17.
- Ivor Shapiro, “Skepticism, Not Objectivity, is What Makes Journalism Matter,” The Conversation, 18 Apr 2021.
- Will Sommer, Maxwell Tani and Andrew Kirell, “Fox News Internal Document Bashes Pro-Trump Fox Regulars for Spreading ‘Disinformation’,” Daily Beast, 6 Feb 2020.
- Michael Schudson, “Here’s What Non-Fake News Looks Like,” Columbia Journalism Review, 23 Feb 2017.
- After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News.
- Jonathan Chait, “The News Media Isn’t Biased Against Trump. It’s Biased For Him,” New York Magazine, 16 Oct 2020.
- Murtaza Hussain, “Muslims Accused of Plotting Violence Get Seven Times More Media Attention and Four Times Longer Sentences, The Intercept, 5 Apr 2018.