Brian Friedberg

Brian Friedberg is a Senior Researcher at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. His research on American news media and political commentary draws on ethnographic, historical, and social semiotic approaches to examine the production, circulation, and reception of political media. For nearly a decade, he has studied partisan news, independent broadcasting, factional audiences, and methods for documenting breaking news events. In his public opinion research at the Shorenstein Center, he works with the 2026 Voting Information Trends project team, pairing survey and behavioral data with media analysis. He also uses historical and survey methods to examine how people use audience measurement and social listening data to inform decisions. His ethnographic work examines populist political commentary in text and practice, and platformized creator-audience relations. Drawing on this fieldwork, he is developing a book project on political commentary and the 2028 US presidential election.

At Data & Society, he worked as a media ethnographer of online political communities. He later contributed to the Shorenstein Center’s Media Manipulation Casebook and published a research methodology for documenting disinformation campaigns. He is coauthor of Meme Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022) and a project advisor to The Revival Lab. His research and writing have appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and ABC News. He holds a BA in Sociology from Trinity College and an MA in Cultural Production from Brandeis University, and is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University.