In Reality
“In Reality” debunks fake news and elevates the innovative researchers, entrepreneurs, journalists and policymakers who are fighting back against toxic misinformation. Co-hosts Joan Donovan, research director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media and Public Policy, and Eric Schurenberg, an award-winning journalist and former CEO of Fast Company, engage guests in enlightening conversations about solutions to this scourge and the path back to a shared reality.
In Reality
Is The Rise of MAGA a Failure of Journalism? The University of Texas at Austin's Tom Johnson
People have a lot of complaints about media in these polarized times. Take your pick: The mainstream press is biased, elitist, sensationalistic, hyper-partisan. If you’re on the right, you may believe that it deliberately enables falsehood.
Today’s guest is very much NOT on the right, but he agrees. Tom Johnson is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and his book The Press and Democratic Backsliding makes the claim that media have failed democracy by losing control of the information landscape and allowing anti-democratic voices to thrive. In his view, the strength of the MAGA movement is not merely a cultural or political phenomenon. It’s a failure of journalism.
Those are fightin’ words. Tom and I talk about the role of the press in spinelessly empowering authoritarianism, about the media’s lopsided obsession with then-candidate Joe Biden’s age, its bias towards conflict and negativity, and, finally, lest you entirely despair, what to do about it all. So there’s hope.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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