Our weekly roundup of news found at the intersection of media, politics, policy and technology, from the Shorenstein Center and from around the web. Sign up to receive Media and Politics Must Reads in your inbox each week. Also connect with us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.
This Week at the Shorenstein Center
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer: The Politics of Racism in Trump’s America. Adam Serwer, senior editor at The Atlantic, discussed the role of race and class in U.S. politics, and its media coverage.
Transparency: What’s Gone Wrong with Social Media and What Can We Do About It? A new paper by Wael Ghonim, fall 2017 fellow and author of Revolution 2.0, traces what went wrong with social media and proposes a way to reverse course and put platforms on track to being a productive, responsible, and ethical force.
Local news hurt by broadcast media conglomerate, from Journalist’s Resource.
Six Lessons about Email and Audience Growth for Nonprofit News. Practical tips from our Single Subject News Project.
News from Faculty, Fellows, and Students
Beware of A.I. in Social Media Advertising. Dipayan Ghosh, Joan Shorenstein Fellow, writes, “As Facebook, Google, Twitter and like companies now contritely cover their tracks and comply with the government’s requests, they simultaneously remain quiet about a critical trend that promises to subvert the nation’s political integrity yet again if left unaddressed: the systemic integration of artificial intelligence into the same digital marketing technologies that were exploited by both Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency.”
The march of the hope-mongers. E.J. Dionne, Jr., former visiting faculty member, writes, “There are tough-minded reasons to believe that the cynics are wrong, even if the fight ahead will be as hard as they say. To begin with, Saturday’s marches achieved something that had never been accomplished before. Guns have long been a voting issue for those who insist that any and every restriction on firearms is a danger to freedom. These marches finally established guns as a voting issue for those who (as the signs carried by demonstrators declared in various ways) place the desire to save innocent lives ahead of preserving unlimited access to weapons.”
Ranking the Gatekeepers. Daniel Alphonsus, HKS student and Shorenstein Center research assistant, asks “If companies can have credit ratings, why can’t newspapers have accuracy ratings?”
Future of Policy. The Kennedy School Review, an HKS student publication, focuses on emerging policy challenges such as algorithms and machine learning, the future of work, transparency, and privacy in a new series.
Lawrence K. Grossman, Head of PBS and Then NBC News, Dies at 86. The Shorenstein Center remembers Lawrence K. Grossman, a former Visiting Stanton Professor.
March for Our Lives
- March for Our Lives awakens the spirit of student and media activism of the 1960s, from The Conversation.
- The sliming of Parkland students shows the spreading stain of media polarization, from The Washington Post.
- Parkland Student David Hogg Says Black Classmates Weren’t Given a Voice By Media, from Newsweek.
Data and Privacy
- This Is So Much Bigger Than Facebook, from The Atlantic.
- It’s not just Facebook. Thousands of companies are spying on you, from CNN.
- Will news organizations face Facebook-fueled blowback for using third-party tracking on their own sites? From Nieman Lab.
- Facebook to stop allowing data brokers such as Experian to target users, from The Guardian.
- Grassley, FTC, states turn screws on Facebook amid data flap, from Politico.
Media Diversity
- The death of Unity: Why a collaboration between journalists of color collapsed, from Columbia Journalism Review.
- Until Journalism Is a Real Meritocracy, J-School Is a Necessary Evil for Minorities, from Slate.
The 24/7 News Cycle
- The news cycle biases, by the numbers, from The Monday Note.
- The key role slow journalism plays in the 24/7 digital news cycle, from Journalism.co.uk
