Book Talk | Democracy without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join for a book talk for Democracy without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society, featuring the author Victor Pickard in conversation with Rodney Benson, Heather Chaplin, and Jay Rosen.
As local media institutions collapse and news deserts sprout up across the country, the U.S. is facing a profound journalism crisis. Meanwhile, continuous revelations about the role that major media outlets — from Facebook to Fox News — play in the spread of misinformation have exposed deep pathologies in American communication systems.
In his new book, Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, Professor Victor Pickard considers the historical precedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the journalism crisis and the spread of misinformation, arguing that the root of both lies in the very structure of our profit-driven media system.
Victor Pickard is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. He is the author of America’s Battle for Media Democracy and co-author of After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age.
Rodney Benson is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison (Cambridge, 2013), winner of the 2014 AEJMC Tankard Book Award and the 2015 International Journal of Press/Politics Best Book of the Decade Award. He is currently working on a new book, How Media Ownership Matters (Oxford, under contract), with Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel.
Heather Chaplin is the founding director of Journalism + Design at The New School, a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review, and co-host of the podcast Tricky. As a reporter, her work has appeared in All Things Considered, The New York Times, Salon, Slate and The Cut, among other places. In 2017, Simon & Shuster published Reckless Years, her second book.
Jay Rosen teaches Journalism at New York University, where has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department. He lives in New York City. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003.