Fresh Air Radio — on a Saturday

It´s the economy, stupid: Bill said it–did Hillary listen?Sometimes you wish Bill was back, but there´s another story I have in mind right here: Not the story of how Hillary Clinton failed to take Bill Clinton´s most important piece of insight with her into her own presidential bid. Not, the story of how her failing …

Rhetoric and propaganda in journalism

Notes from a lecture: The main change since my first time doing this lecture, is the ways in which these concepts now have become commonplace in journalism critique. They did not use to be. But anyway — what is propaganda? And how does it relate to the study of rhetoric? A group of smart MA students …

Freedom, justice, and the news; the question of Snowden

A conference on democracy and religion, migration, power money A few days back, Edward Snowden joined the 2016 Athens conference on democracy, hosted by the New York Times, in the company of Ken Roth who is the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. The close to one hour long interview was conducted by Steven Erlanger – …

Leaning on a class to make sense

Every fall semester I teach one of my classes in English, with about 20-30 foreign students visiting our university for a semester. We had our first meeting yesterday. And as always I wonder before class starts whether there is enough in the chosen lecture theme to get them out there on the floor, debating. They …

The future and the future of journalism

Understanding the globalization of journalism entails reflection on a wide range of factors – not just factors shaping journalism as such, like the coming of social media and the so-called “sharing economy”, with Google stealing alle the advertising with a smarter scheme. Discussions are found everywhere concerning these aspects of the future of journalism and …

Terrorism, attention and the media

What determines news coverage and how does it apply to terrorism? The idea that terrorism is PR and journalism has a dramaturgical quality is an idea with a long history, but also a history made extraordinarily relevant with the attacks in the US on September 11th 2001, resulting in the epic, metaphorical – and also …

Globalization – a challenge for journalism

  What is the idea of global journalism and the critical discussion all about? Why spend time researching and critiquing something that seems both inevitable and general, vast complex and subject to a myriad of interpretations? Journalism has been going global for centuries – it has been in the DNA since invention: Yet, it seems …

Artificial Intelligence; a journalism issue

  •• MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. “In its quest to maintain a United States military advantage, the Pentagon is aggressively turning to Silicon Valley’s hottest technology — artificial intelligence.” This is how an article in the New York Times begins, on May 13th 2016. And there is a lesson here, for those of us with an interest in …