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Public defenders: Is the PBS, NPR model better than commercial media amid polarization?

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 21:08:50 +0000

Public defenders: Is the PBS, NPR model better than commercial media amid polarization? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/22/2024 - 15:08

By Joe Arney

If you get your headlines from NewsHour or stream Fresh Air on your ride to work, you have a little-known Colorado experiment to thank.

In the 1930s, the Rocky Mountain Radio Council wanted to reach every student working in mountain mines, to ensure they received the same public education opportunities as in Denver. The group hit on program transcriptions that could be relayed over the air—basically, pressing shellac records—so that a student working in remote Golconda Mine, in Hinsdale County, benefited from the same curriculum as his peers in Denver.

That local consortium eventually became the Public Broadcasting Service. And the focus on public education that gave it its start continues to differentiate the mission of public news networks.

“It was just by chance that I moved out here, and so I loved finding out that the inception moment for all noncommercial media was actually the mining communities,” said Josh Shepperd, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

Last year, Shepperd published Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting. It’s notable as the first academic attempt to present communication studies and public broadcasting as historically connected enterprises, and it comes at a time when criticism of the media—especially related to politics—is running especially hot. Shadow has since won the Book Award from the Broadcast Education Association and has been a finalist or runner up for prizes from four other organizations, including the American Journalism Historians Association and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Not necessarily better—but different

“This book isn’t about saying one mode of media is automatically better, or that public media is perfect or a corrective to commercial media,” he said. “But I do think public media is different because of its mission to provide a forum for every kind of voice.”

“Everyone keeps saying public media is too state based, but commercial media seems to be much more of a mouthpiece for politicians right now.”
Josh Shepperd, associate professor, media studies

That’s different from most commercial media, “where the ethics are really tertiary to how the industry works. If there’s an audience for it, it’s good,” he said. “The idea that there is a necessity for every voice to be placed equally within a community is very important, even if I’m not sure that public media is always successful.”

In some countries, “public media” raises the specter of propaganda, like TASS or Xinhua. In the United States, PBS is insulated from such a threat, since affiliate stations don’t receive direct funding from the government.

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t political, because they are,” Shepperd said. But, he said, an endless news cycle revolving around politics and partisanship has warped the relationship between government and independent media: “Everyone keeps saying public media is too state based, but commercial media seems to be much more of a mouthpiece for politicians right now.”

Spend a few minutes watching Fox News or MSNBC and you won’t disagree. For Shepperd, it’s another effect of a polarized media market “where people think through the abstractions of their gatekeepers’ framing, instead of just looking at what’s in front of them in their own lives,” he said. “We allow issues of public interest to become obscured by demographic affiliations as we increasingly become categories and brands instead of people.”

How we got to that point is part of Shepperd’s next project, which will examine the history of decision-making at media industries to better understand the mechanisms radio, television and digital players use to make tough calls about programming and advertising.

It’s a different thrust, but one that still hearkens back to his interest in uncovering and preserving the history of communication studies, which Shepperd called the only discipline that hasn’t completely traced its own history.

An accidental pathway

“You can’t have a discipline that doesn’t know why it exists,” he said. “Understanding that history gives us a sense of why we ask and answer the questions the way that we do, and helps us answer questions about the ethics of the discipline.”

Shepperd got into this work almost by accident. He was studying theories around public life and civil society when a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he earned his PhD, inspired him to pursue his nascent interest in public broadcasting.

“She told me it was good to think about these ideas, but that you could actually have evidence, too,” he said. “In other words, the idea that how it works is just as fair of a question as how it should work.”

He was able to put Wisconsin’s extensive archives to work for his thesis, which paved the way for the book project. Shepperd is now co-writing the official history of NPR and PBS for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

It’s fitting work, as before Shepperd dove into this subject in earnest, “no one in the history of film and media studies or communication studies had ever asked where public media came from in scholarship,” he said. Commercial media, by contrast, has been widely examined by experts and thought leaders, “and the idea that we wouldn't apply the same kind of investigation to the public system, I think, is an ideological issue that we need to face within communications research.”

A CMCI thought leader has documented the history of public media—an important lesson in understanding how broadcasting works and could be improved amid partisanship.

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If it ain’t ‘woke,’ does it need fixing?

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:15:54 +0000

If it ain’t ‘woke,’ does it need fixing? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2024 - 09:15

By Joe Arney

Does “woke” make you broke? A new book from Tim Kuhn serves as a reminder that, while we might think of corporations as single-minded entities, they are in fact messy and complex—and that messiness often is where innovation takes place.

“Corporations often deploy purpose to create order, to fight complexity, because we typically think of a good organization as being orderly,” said Kuhn, a professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

“Purpose tends to be seen as this device that produces similarity, produces unity, produces a setting or a culture where everybody is on the same page. And that is a fantasy.”

So, when you see companies posting about pride or gun control, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly been taken over by “woke” warriors. Rather, it’s evidence of different perspectives and new avenues of thought being pursued within a larger organization. Those can produce more humane workplaces and foster innovation—which, together, can be healthy for the bottom line, Kuhn said in the book, What Do Corporations Want?: Communicative Capitalism, Corporate Purpose and a New Theory of the Firm.

Corporate purpose, Kuhn said, has often been framed as either producing profits or following principles. “Some versions of purpose can be a claim for morality, for your business to stand for more than shareholder maximization,” he said.

But believing corporations are only a single thing means “we’re missing an opportunity to understand their complexity and how they effectively serve a wide variety of purposes,” he said. “Saying that corporations just want profits, full stop, is perhaps way too simple, and does an injustice to both businesses and the good people who work in them.”

‘Dysfunction’ as a business driver

For businesses to pursue both purpose and profit—to walk and chew gum at once—is a good thing, because being open to multiple outcomes can help companies develop new lines of business. Chasing the idea that an organization must choose a single form of value often creates the dysfunctions managers think they need to neutralize.

“Purpose tends to be seen as this device that produces similarity, produces unity, produces a setting or a culture where everybody is on the same page. And that is a fantasy.”
Tim Kuhn, professor, communication

By way of example, Kuhn’s book mentions Coinbase, which operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. In 2020, as social tensions heated up from the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and a charged pre-election climate, CEO Brian Armstrong said there would be no political conversations permitted on workplace channels.

“And, as you can imagine, employees revolted,” Kuhn said. “Employees said, ‘This company is about shaking up the way the world works. Politics is core to who we are.’”

Coinbase offered severance to employees who left over the policy, and while the business was private at the time, making it hard to evaluate impact, Kuhn said this was an opportunity lost.

“What if you thought of strategy not as an attempt to create unity and a simple trajectory for your firm?” he said. “What if you thought of strategy as developing from the many possibilities for our future—the many voices that made up the organization? What new practices, what appeals to new audiences, might have emerged from that?”

Leaders, Kuhn said, “should be less fearful of conversations that stray from our predetermined purpose or strategy, and instead foster conversations that develop emergent, perhaps unanticipated, practices that could be considered part of our complex organization.”

Exit strategies

That sort of adaptability is crucial for corporations charged with innovating amid change and competition. Unfortunately, they don’t always get there. As part of his research, Kuhn observed a high-tech incubator in action. While the entrepreneurs housed there had big ideas about disruption, the accelerator’s model was laser-focused on exit strategies for the startups, as that’s where their money came from.

“That makes sense, in that we often think that’s the only way corporations think about value,” Kuhn said. “But as I spoke with many of these startups, they were interested in a variety of other forms of value. Many wanted to fight the corporate machine, were really interested in civic values or just wanted to do something technologically cool, whether it paid off or not.”

Instead, he said, they were pushed to sell out in ways that didn’t always make sense for the long-term viability of their companies, “and it was telling for me that there was a corporation—the accelerator— that was doing the pushing—a form of communicative capitalism that was making these nascent firms into something they didn’t want or need to be.”

The book is a collection of theoretical deep dives into how communication, purpose and authority intersect, but there are plenty of practical takeaways for leaders looking for an edge in innovation.

“Organizations are these conglomerations of humans, practices, places, things, passions, times, histories and so on,” Kuhn said. “If managers think their proclamations will directly produce the outcomes they want, they are probably not long for their positions. Because nothing is that simple.”

New research suggests communications outside of a business’ core purpose can stimulate innovation and new lines of activity.

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Make it STOP: Does replying to spam texts from politicians really block them?

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:21:47 +0000

Make it STOP: Does replying to spam texts from politicians really block them? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/26/2024 - 14:21

By Joe Arney
Illustration by Dana Heimes

Think your phone’s blowing up with spam text messages from candidates and campaigns?

Buckle up—you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Federal Election Commission’s final pre-election filing deadline for campaigns is Oct. 24. Expect a ton of texts as that date approaches, said Bridget Barrett, an assistant professor of advertising at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

What can you do to dodge the digital deluge? Not much, she said.

“This has been an extremely contentious election season,” said Barrett, who studies digital marketing and political communication. “Campaigns are chasing every advantage right now, and as long as texting continues to work, they’ll keep doing it.”

There’s no single way most people wind up on a list to receive campaign texts. Usually, she said, you gave money at some point, or you signed up for something without realizing that you were giving your number to a political organization. It might also be through a merchandise sale, or if you fill out an online poll.

“There are different national rules and state laws around list swapping among different companies and fundraising organizations, and many different data privacy laws at different levels—but once you’re on a list, you’re likely to get texts from people you did not directly opt in with,” she said. “It’s hard because there are so many ways for your data to be collected and then shared.”

“Campaigns are chasing every advantage right now, and as long as texting continues to work, they’ll keep doing it.”
Bridget Barrett, assistant professor, advertising

There are a few steps consumers can take to silence the annoying alerts. Replying STOP every time you get one of these messages will, eventually, cut down on the number of texts you get, “though it probably won’t stop them altogether,” she said.

Another step is to be discerning about giving out your information. “Consider using services where you can create burner email addresses, and think twice before handing over your phone number,” she said.

Barrett also advised consumers to register their phones through the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call registry, though candidates and campaigns are exempt from the protections it offers. Voters can also update their registrations to remove their phone numbers; however, she said, that is unlikely to be a source for texts like these.

Longer term, Barrett is watching the arms race between phones and campaigns—especially how political camps will respond as mobile service providers and handset manufacturers introduce better spam filters to protect user data.

She’s also interested to see whether campaigns start limiting this kind of outreach, especially if they see it’s turning people off.

“No one is concerned about that right now, because they’re still seeing a return on their investment,” she said. “There might be a postmortem in the future to look at whether this is sustainable—on the right, we did see some burnout and a decrease in donations after the 2016 election—but right now, the only concern is getting people elected.”

A CMCI expert offers advice on taking back your phone this election season.

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We’re not going to agree. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:22:24 +0000

We’re not going to agree. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/19/2024 - 09:22

By Joe Arney

How do you get that neighbor, relative or coworker to change their mind about abortion, gun control or immigration?

You won’t. And Matthew Koschmann wishes you’d stop trying.

The associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information said our personal experiences should have taught us by now that those who don’t agree with us won’t be swayed by us correcting the information that’s led them to their beliefs.

“If anything, it’s the opposite,” Koschmann said. “We live in a very information rich—if not gluttonous—environment, and more information does not necessarily make us change our minds. … Most of us don’t say, ‘Oh, thank you for correcting me on my assumptions about the world.’”

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk to each other, a theme Koschmann returned to during Monday’s Difficult Dialogues series hosted by the university’s Center for Humanities & the Arts. He was part of a panel examining political polarization and how to stay good neighbors at a time of deep division in the United States.

“If you can’t talk about something, you can’t fix it,” said Jennifer Ho, director of the center, in opening the discussion. “So, how do we find a way forward—how do we stay good neighbors, no matter what results happen in November or in January?”

Polarization and the press

“If we bring it back to experience, it can be a moment of sharing, rather than a moment of debating positions of things that are very personal to us—which is very difficult.”
Angie Chuang, associate professor, journalism

The panel also featured Angie Chuang, an associate professor of journalism at CMCI and a former journalist whose research looks at race and identity, especially as presented by the media.

“The news media is part of the problem,” she said. “It informs people, and creates this rich source of information, but it oftentimes polarizes people.”

It’s a problem that’s arguably gotten worse in the digital age, as the number of publications and platforms has mushroomed. Instead of the mid-19th century penny presses, clickbait proliferates through alternative news sites.

“The news media is not there to improve our national dialog or improve our nuanced understanding,” Chuang said. “There are individual journalists who are trying really hard, and there are organizations trying to fight this—but as a marketplace, it is trying to get advertising money. Understand that, and you become a savvier media consumer.”

Chuang and Koschmann were joined on the panel by Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, as well as moderator Michaele Ferguson, an associate professor in the university’s department of political science.

If you’ve tried to have conversations with people who don’t share your views, you know how difficult the proposition can be. Chuang said our social identities—race, gender, sexuality, religion and others—are seen as essential to who we are, so when that becomes the topic, discussion quickly veers off course.

“If I were to say, ‘Michelle, your views on the economy and foreign trade are just totally ignorant, and I can’t even understand why you think the way you do,’” Chuang said to Ferguson, “it comes off differently than if I say, ‘Michelle your views on race are completely ignorant.’

“If I say, tell me your experience based on your identities, that is a different conversation than, ‘Why is your position on policing or affirmative action the way it is?’ If we bring it back to experience, it can be a moment of sharing, rather than a moment of debating positions of things that are very personal to us—which is very difficult.”

Defusing disagreements

As the mayor of a city with a well-publicized progressive bent, you might expect Brockett’s days are spent on friendly territory, but spoke about the difficult conversations he’s had with residents on any number of issues. He defuses such situations by offering to learn about how the other person formed their viewpoint, and sharing materials that demonstrate where he’s coming from.

It doesn’t always work, he said. Once, he sent a peer-reviewed paper to a resident to shine light on an issue, which she countered by sending a thesis proposal from a master’s student that she found online.

“On almost any topic, you can find something to support a position, any position, somewhere on the internet,” Brockett said. Online, he said, “many of us are accustomed to getting feedback loop, hearing the same viewpoints over and over again—and then it becomes inconceivable to you how other people might think something different.”

The panelists agreed that those difficult conversations are worth having because when you find a moment of connection, it’s authentic and validating. Just don’t go in expecting to bring people around to your ideological corner.

“If you are interested in being influential and persuasive in implementing change in your community, the most effective thing you can do is not explicitly try to change people’s minds,” Koschmann said. “Try to live a beautiful life of human flourishing, that is attractive and winsome, that draws people to you—and then people say, ‘What’s going on, tell me more about your interests and why you’re happy.’”

Two CMCI professors took part in a community roundtable to explore how we can stay good neighbors amid intense polarization.

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Data dump: Meta killed CrowdTangle. What does it mean for researchers, reporters?

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 17:54:54 +0000

Data dump: Meta killed CrowdTangle. What does it mean for researchers, reporters? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/23/2024 - 11:54

By Joe Arney

In Brian C. Keegan’s telling, the loss of tools like CrowdTangle and Pushshift—which allow researchers to study user behavior and how information is shared on social media—is like particle physicists one day waking up to find out they can no longer access the Large Hadron Collider.

“I have grad students interested in how online extremism works, the consequences of political polarization, whether content moderation is actually effective at stopping hate speech,” said Keegan, an assistant professor of information science at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. “To be able to understand questions like these requires access to data from these platforms—and restricting it imperils our ability to be impactful in our work.”

Earlier this month, Meta announced it was shutting down CrowdTangle, one of the most effective tools for understanding how Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms work and how disinformation is created and spread on the company’s platforms.

That’s a blow to researchers, watchdogs and journalists who will be less able to track how disinformation, hate speech and other poisons pollute the social media atmosphere—but in the context of business decisions, there are strong financial and reputational benefits to obfuscating its operations. Not only is the platform sitting on mountains of data that can be licensed to companies building models to train generative artificial intelligence, Keegan said, “it’s easy to imagine a world where Meta doesn’t want its name attached to a paper about how neo-Nazis are using Facebook groups to organize themselves.”

The economic case for ‘privacy washing’

“The loss of these data tools imperils our ability to do that kind of scholarship and is ultimately a detriment to democracy and civic institutions.”
Brian C. Keegan, assistant professor, information science

It’s becoming a more common story, as platforms that once made their data public are increasingly erecting paywalls, blocking APIs or cutting deals with A.I. companies. Often, those platforms mask their motivations behind what Keegan calls “privacy washing,” citing concerns about safeguarding user data in justifying the removal of key features for research labs, newsrooms and the public.

This particular example comes at an inauspicious time, with digital disinformation ratcheting up ahead of Election Day and more Americans than ever getting their news from social media.

“To address the challenges we’re up against, that are happening in real time, that we see journalists trying to grapple with, requires different models of publicly engaged scholarship, beyond just academic papers that take a year or two to publish,” Keegan said. “The loss of these data tools imperils our ability to do that kind of scholarship and is ultimately a detriment to democracy and civic institutions.”

It’s not just the media or public at large that are affected. When these tools are taken offline, it hurts the quality of the online communities, as well. Keegan has volunteered as a moderator on Reddit, and said PushShift—which Reddit limited access to beginning last summer—was vital to forming context about user behavior that could determine whether someone was having a bad day, or whether that person was truly a bad actor.

Classroom impact

That’s a challenge as a moderator, but it’s having a bigger impact on his professional life, both as a researcher and teacher. He can use case studies from the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle to show how fake news circulated, and the role of actors like Cambridge Analytica, “but that data and those strategies are now eight years old, and those contexts no longer exist—we’re in a different world now,” Keegan said. “Can we prepare our students to be better engineers, managers, artists and citizens with such old case studies?”

Meta purchased Crowdtangle in 2016, and Keegan acknowledged that the tech platform isn’t required to make its data publicly available. “But researchers have built our careers, infrastructure and programs on assumptions that we’d have access to these tools, so to have that rug pulled from under us has been profoundly disruptive to our ability to provide transparency, engage and ask critical questions,” he said.

Keegan hopes to learn more through a grant he’s pursuing from the National Science Foundation. If awarded, he hopes to study the consequences of actions like Meta’s in the scientific research community.

“When that data disappears, how does that impact scholarship?” he asked. “Can we measure how research methods changing, the way we collaborate, the strategies we’ll need to develop to make sure we’re able to ask critical questions?”

Without access to social media data, disinformation and hate speech may get easier to spread—and harder to detect.

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Class acts: CMCI’s new faculty bring new ideas on A.I., identity, culture to Boulder

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 20:16:32 +0000

Class acts: CMCI’s new faculty bring new ideas on A.I., identity, culture to Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/22/2024 - 14:16

By Joe Arney
Photo by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm'18)

When asked why they choose the University of Colorado Boulder, students and faculty alike tend to cite its location, along with academic prestige, research successes and access to opportunity.

That was a big draw for Joe Izaguirre III, as well. But it wasn’t the mountains he had in mind when he signed on as an assistant professor of communication at the College of Media, Communication and Information.

Izaguirre studies how political power influences Latin identities from the lens of public rhetoric and rhetorical histories. Plenty of the source material for his book includes texts produced by activists who lived in the Colorado area.

“I hadn’t thought of this, but I’ll be able to hand-deliver the book to families who participated, instead of just dropping it in the mail,” he said. “It feels like an opportunity to have a more personal connection to the things I’ve been studying.”

Izaguirre is among the seven new tenure-track faculty joining CMCI this fall. The college also is welcoming seven nontenure-track faculty, including new appointments for professors who previously held different roles.

“I’m so excited to welcome our new faculty to CMCI,” said Lori Bergen, founding dean of the college. “As the media, communication, design and information landscape continues to dramatically change, the new perspectives these professors bring will ensure our students get a cutting-edge, immediately applicable education.”

“It was a great experience, as an instructor, to be able to work with students who were that interested in learning and participating.”
Dinfin K. Mulupi, assistant professor, journalism

Design thinking

For the first time, this year’s incoming cohort includes faculty from the environmental design program, which formally integrated with CMCI over the summer. Though there are no changes for current students, faculty in the program are enthusiastic about the chance to collaborate with colleagues eager to explore new applications for their work.

Martín Paddack, a teaching associate professor who joins CMCI and ENVD following seven years at Howard University, has a wealth of interests around architecture and sustainability, including participatory design—“understanding how we identify where there is need and trying to create connections with community for design.”

“I always try to inculcate into students that it’s not about coming up with an idea and saying, here’s the answer,” said Paddack, who also is founder and principal of the Washington, D.C.-based DesignMAP firm. “It comes down to communication—asking the right questions and really listening so you can identify where the needs are. If you are prescriptive, and don’t listen to your community, that’s when design starts to fail.”

Paddack brings a diverse set of interests—architecture, sustainability, social responsibility, writing, painting, woodworking—to the classroom, as well as a global perspective: He was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Peru and Uruguay before moving to D.C. as a boy. He also taught in South America and completed a painting residency in Barcelona. He helped set up a fabrication lab at Howard to ensure students developed both practical architecture experience.

“That’s something I really like about environmental design at ��Ƶ—the focus on how we can apply sustainable principles across four different areas, and an emphasis on doing hands-on fabrication so that students learn the theory, but also how to apply it,” he said.

‘Great experience’ connecting with students

Most new faculty who join CMCI say they feel an instant rapport with professors in their departments, which makes the college feel like home well before they start. That was true for Dinfin K. Mulupi, as well, but she felt an equally strong connection to the journalism students she taught as part of the interview process.

“I was fascinated by their interest in learning the research behind journalism practices,” said Mulupi, a native of Kenya who came to CMCI via the PhD program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

A discussion she led critiquing news coverage of immigration, Mulupi said, sparked so much insightful discussion that she felt bad moving on to the next topic.

“It was a great experience, as an instructor, to be able to work with students who were that interested in learning and participating,” she said. “When you’re a professor, you are creating knowledge with your students, and they were so attentive and involved that I know it will be a privilege to teach them.”

Mulupi’s research looks at sexism and sexual harassment in newsrooms, and came from working on her thesis as the #MeToo movement gained momentum. She was among the first scholars to explore the topic in Kenyan newsrooms; her work has since expanded to more than 20 countries.

It’s an important topic at a time when the news industry is contracting, as “when you have a newsroom culture with sexism, harassment, racism and bigotry, you lose talented journalists who don’t feel safe and included,” she said. “I am also focusing on solutions, especially exploring how we can build safer, more inclusive newsrooms that produce news content that serves the diverse needs and interests of a wider audience.”

Pooja Iyer, who joined CMCI from the University of Texas Austin, where she completed her doctoral work in the spring. She’s also doing timely work, researching the ethics around how advertising firms collect and use data in the course of connecting to consumers.

“In my industry days, I realized my own cognitive dissonance—asking how granular we could get on a target audience while having ad blockers on my computer,” said Iyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design. “I believe the advertising world can play a more ethical role in how and why they’re using data, and how they’re protecting customers—because there isn’t enough literacy around this.”

It’s something her student will need to consider as they graduate, she said.

“Whether you’re in creative, account management, media planning, it doesn’t matter—you will be working with data,” Iyer said. “So, how can we best empower you to be ethical about the use of that data? As educators, that really needs to be front and center for our students.”

Incoming professors bring an interest in cutting-edge topics at a time when the media landscape is undergoing dramatic change.

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Influential media conference becoming a CMCI showcase

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:11:04 +0000

Influential media conference becoming a CMCI showcase Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/14/2024 - 10:11

By Iris Serrano

Empowered by social media and generative artificial intelligence, fake news is spreading faster than ever online—and it’s becoming harder to avoid, let alone identify.

Muhammad Ali hopes his research helps users battle back against malicious misinformation.

Ali, a PhD student studying journalism in the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder, analyzed how extremist organizations use stories and messaging on social media platforms to enforce their ideologies to individuals and networks.

“Platforms like Facebook and X are increasingly recognized as hotbeds for extremist narratives,” Ali said. “There is still a big gap in understanding the personal and psychological aspects of online radicalization, but the findings of this research show us how we can protect ourselves from propaganda.”

“The college does a great job promoting a diversity of viewpoints, research interests and intercollegiate venues.”
Kyle Harris

Ali was among the CMCI students and faculty recognized with best paper awards at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which took place Aug. 8 to 11 in Philadelphia. All told, CMCI won five awards and presented 47 peer-reviewed papers at AEJMC.

“Our college was created to catalyze and nurture research like Muhammad’s, which doesn’t fall into any single category,” said Patrick Ferrucci, chair of the journalism department at CMCI. “The cross-disciplinary approach to our doctoral programs means our students are challenged to bring an unconventional approach to research and problem-solving. It was incredible to see that recognized over and over at this year’s conference.”

Another CMCI best paper publication also turned on social media trends. Kyle Harris, a PhD student in the advertising, public relations and media design department, co-wrote a paper on disability influencers and self-representation on Instagram with his mentor, Erin Willis, an associate professor. Their research, which conducted a visual and textual analysis of the narrative discourse of 14 influencers to see how they represent invisible and visible illness—won second-place honors.

“I owe a lot to the APRD department and CMCI for believing in me and my research and valuing my contributions, and providing the resources and support to shepherd the work of Dr. Willis and myself to the conference,” Harris said. “The college does a great job promoting a diversity of viewpoints, research interests and intercollegiate venues.”

A full list of CMCI presentations at AEJMC follows. Names in bold are CMCI faculty and students. In addition, many CMCI faculty and students in journalism, APRD and media studies moderated or served on panels, or led workshops, in addition to serving as heads of different divisions.

With multiple best paper awards, CMCI is building an impressive reputation at the annual AEJMC conference.

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In ‘other’ news: Can coverage be balanced when it comes to race, gender?

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 15:32:00 +0000

In ‘other’ news: Can coverage be balanced when it comes to race, gender? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/06/2024 - 09:32

By Joe Arney

When early reports of Donald Trump’s behavior at the National Association of Black Journalists convention started to trickle in, Angie Chuang’s first thoughts were not as much about the candidate as they were about the men and women in attendance at the conference.

As a reporter, Chuang—now an associate professor of journalism at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder—was a member of the Asian American Journalists Association who attended many conferences like last week’s NABJ event.

“Going to conferences like that as a young reporter was so important to my career development, my morale and my mental health,” Chuang said. “They became moments for me to say I existed in this white world, but I can be with a group that relates to this and can get help with things I may not be able to ask about in the newsroom. They were times of revitalization for me.”

That sense of community and support was especially important to Chuang as the first reporter tasked with covering race and ethnicity for The Oregonian. At the time, in the early 2000s, newsrooms were beginning to come to grips with the need to diversify both their coverage and their correspondents.

The economic maelstrom devastating media companies has arrested efforts to bring more voices of color to newsrooms, she said, with less Black representation in the industry today than a decade ago.

“I expect a lot of journalists who did go to the NABJ event had to pay for their expenses, or take vacation days to attend,” Chuang said. “What’s lost in this discussion is the entire event shifted to this focus on Trump and the internal conflict in the organization, and I’m certain that as a result, journalists and students who went lost out on some of that solidarity.”

When low key goes high profile

NABJ and news organizations like it have welcomed presidential candidates to speak for decades—Chuang recalls seeing contenders like Bill Bradley and George W. Bush accept invitations—and those talks never generate much in the way of headlines. As Trump spoke—casting doubt on Vice President Kamala Harris’ Black heritage and belittling the female journalists hosting the panel—news organizations began immediately reporting his invective.

“I can’t blame the reporters who feel these moments are worth covering, because I feel as conflicted as they do.”
Angie Chuang, associate professor, journalism

Ironically—or perhaps not—Chuang said an issue worth discussing in a conference like this one is how to cover a candidate with a long history of making coded remarks that are racist or misogynistic. She said there’s a clear generational divide separating older journalists—who see their role as objectively reporting what newsmakers say—and younger ones who want to challenge lies and hate speech.

It is refreshing, she said, to see journalists thinking more critically about their place in writing that first draft of history, and while Trump is causing a lot of professional soul searching, much of that dates back to the 1990s and the establishment of the 24-hour news cycle. Suddenly, the ho-hum became headline news as broadcasters raced to fill airtime.

“The mainstream media lost context as the loudest, most outrageous personalities were able to insert themselves into the discourse around the most important issues,” she said.

Chuang said she’s grateful to not be in a position to decide what’s news and what’s not when it comes to Trump—the mainstream media has been excoriated for the bothsidesism it employed in covering the 2016 presidential campaign—but she is the author of a forthcoming book, American Otherness in Journalism: News Media Constructions of Identity and Belonging, that she’s had to extensively recast to consider the profound changes in how journalists think about and do their work in the Trump age. The book is due out next fall.

“It’s about how the mainstream news media has constructed American identity—and how it is conditional and different when people are either people of color or immigrants, or perceived as other in some way,” she said. “Trump has dramatically shifted the narrative with his coded speech about race—and talent for inserting himself into stories about race to ensure all the attention goes to him.”

Was the insatiable coverage of Trump’s remarks an example of important coverage of a newsmaker, or just amplifying red meat for his base? Even as a scholar whose expertise is the role of culture in constructing identities, and a reporter who covered such topics, Chuang admitted she isn’t always sure.

“It is impossible to ignore these things, because they are racist and misogynistic, and they are emblematic of who he is,” she said. “And yet, it has this way of sucking the life out of all political discussion, crowding out more important issues and stories.

“We really need to train reporters to give more context, to take a breath and not just focus on being first out there. And I know that’s really hard, because the rewards for being first and getting those clicks ahead of the crowd are well established at this point. So I can’t blame the reporters who feel these moments are worth covering, because I feel as conflicted as they do.”

Photo by Charles Rex Arbogast of The Associated Press.

When Donald Trump got the headlines from last week’s NABJ conference, it obscured the lost opportunity for reporters of color to share ideas on how to cover controversial newsmakers.

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Seeing what develops from an instantly iconic photo

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 23:54:08 +0000

Seeing what develops from an instantly iconic photo Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/15/2024 - 17:54

By Joe Arney

The facial expression Donald Trump is making. The positions of the Secret Service agents trying to shield him. The angle of the American flag and the unbroken shade of blue sky in the backdrop.

Ross Taylor has total recall of what he called “the perfect news photo,” taken in the moments after Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania.

“The composition truly helps this photo stand out,” said Taylor, an assistant professor of journalism at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder and an award-winning photojournalist. He described what he called “a perfect circle of entry” beginning with the agents, moving to Trump’s bloodied face and raised fist, and a clean background that helps the viewer understand what’s happening.

“It’s emblematic of the journalists who put themselves out there—when others are running away from violence, they respond so we can have a better understanding of what happened.”
Ross Taylor, assistant professor, journalism

“But what really makes it iconic is the flag,” he said. He first saw it while scrolling through X (formerly Twitter), and “while I saw other versions of this scene, without the flag, they don’t hold the same aesthetic strength as this one.”

The photo was taken by Evan Vucci, a longtime photographer with The Associated Press who Taylor counts as a friend. He was unsurprised by reports that Vucci raced forward to get the photo as others fled for safety.

“Evan and others in that sphere are fearless,” Taylor said. “Evan has said he’s more of an operator than a photographer—that he knows how to maneuver through these kinds of situations. A lot of people can compose an image, but can you operate under such duress and stress in an unbelievable short amount of time?

“It’s emblematic of the journalists who put themselves out there—when others are running away from violence, they respond so we can have a better understanding of what happened and what it means.”

For Taylor, the image will join the likes of the firefighters raising the flag over the fallen World Trade Center or the execution of a Vietcong fighter—the kind of image that explains an event and shapes our collective reaction to it. That will be the case however the 2024 presidential election is decided; Taylor said its influence on the election was one of the first things he thought about upon first seeing the photo.

“There’s no way around it—it will have an influence, perhaps already has had an influence,” he said. “If he wins, we’ll remember this as being emblematic of his rise toward his second term as president. I’m not sure how he and others will use it to advance an agenda, but we’ll soon see for ourselves.

“No doubt, this photograph documented a key moment in our history—and that’s the power of photojournalism.”

Photo by Evan Vucci of The Associated Press.

A CMCI expert and photojournalist explains what makes the AP photo of Trump being shot so iconic.

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Crushing creativity? That’s one way to think different

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:27:15 +0000

Crushing creativity? That’s one way to think different Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/21/2024 - 10:27

By Joe Arney

As a college student 20 years ago, Steven Frost had a poster of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign hanging in their Alfred University dorm room.

That campaign touted the company’s quest to be something other than a tech titan. It was about supporting creatives like Frost, who saw computers as tools to unleash their artistic potential. Advertising to support the campaign highlighted icons like Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso and Amelia Earhart to celebrate the “crazy ones” whose vision and determination set them apart from the rest.

For Frost, one of Apple’s latest ads is threatening to undo a lot of the goodwill the “Think Different” campaign created in the artistic community.

The “Crush!” ad is 68 seconds of watching symbols of humanity’s creative achievements—sculpture, paint, music, film, video games, novels, photography—destroyed in an industrial compactor, which then opens to reveal the company’s shiny new iPad Pro.

“I can see the logic behind the ad,” said Frost, assistant professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. It looked to them like an attempt to play off the viral videos showing everyday objects crushed under car tires—“but in the current climate, this was a bad idea, and super tone deaf.”

“Everything exists in a context, and in the context of a place where A.I. is literally replacing creatives, this was not the moment for this ad.”
Steven Frost, assistant professor, media studies

The current climate, of course, is one where artists are forced to ponder a future where generative artificial intelligence can create screenplays, images, designs and so on with just a few user prompts. In May, the company took the unusual step of apologizing for the ad and reportedly canceled plans for a national television campaign.

“What’s interesting is, less than two months after the ad comes out, Apple announces they’re integrating ChatGPT into iOS,” Frost said. “Everything exists in a context, and in the context of a place where A.I. is literally replacing creatives, this was not the moment for this ad.”

Seeing the use case for A.I.

Frost is not only an expert in media studies, they also are a creator who works in both digital and physical media. They are an accomplished textile artist who brings a passion for weaving to classes as well as Slay the Runway, an annual fashion creation and exhibition event for Boulder-area LGBTQ+ teens.

But while they’re critical of the Apple ad, Frost is more upbeat on the use of generative A.I. than you might expect. In fact, they worked on a project in 2016 that put a novel twist on speed dating. Called “Screen Dating,” the exhibit featured 12 screens that participants could cycle through, interacting with “celebrities”—actually chatbots trained on the works of Gertrude Stein, RuPaul, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others—to see what it would be like to interact with an algorithm.

Notably, exhibit creators Frost and Joel Swanson—a faculty affiliate at CMCI—fed the chatbots text, rather than engage in the wide-scale scraping OpenAI and others have used to teach their chatbots.

“There are definitely reasons to be suspicious of it,” Frost said. “But while I know it’s a really unpopular opinion, in order to stay relevant, we all need to evolve. Otherwise, what happens to artists when we can just ask a machine to make a postcard, a poster? Those people are going to have to learn new skills, learn how to be part of a collaborative process with those machines.”

Transparency on teaching models

Part of that, of course, involves those technology companies being more honest about the tools they’re creating—their potential to displace creatives, yes, but also how they were trained. Frost envisions A.I. as a collaborative tool in line with The Jetsons or Knight Rider, as opposed to Black Mirror. It’s no surprise, then, that they want companies to be more collaborative, as well.

“What if tech companies were transparent about how and where their chatbot was trained?” they said. “It’s like if I’m buying junk food—if I see sugar free, I know it’s unhealthy, but it makes me consider that it was manufactured, that there was a process. So, for an A.I. model—what’s in it? Is it soy? Where was it grown?”

Collaboration with companies is also important, they said, because relying on regulation is not the only option.

“At this point, it’s more like thinking of different ways of approaching how those models are trained, and making sure that creatives whose works are getting pulled into these learning models get paid for the work they’ve done,” Frost said.

Perhaps that’s what most troubles them about that Apple ad. Because its tone reminded Frost of another commercial that seized the public imagination 40 years ago.

“The ‘1984’ ad was a breakthrough in that it reimagined what computers could be used for, and a literal breakthrough in that there’s violence and destruction at the center of it,” Frost said. “This ad is clearly referencing ‘1984.’ In a sense, they’re showing how far they’ve come and that they do all these things right, but the tone couldn’t be further from the young, upstart artist protagonist in the original ad.”

A creator and scholar says a much-hated Apple ad is standing in for a larger conversation about how tech companies build and deploy A.I.

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