Monday! Kennedy Library Forum: Reality and Truth in Contemporary Journalism
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JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Columbia Point, Boston, MA 02125 - (617) 514-1600
Reality and Truth in Contemporary Journalism
December 11, 2017 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM Dan Balz, Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania professor of communication, and Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, discuss reality and truth in contemporary media with Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College professor of history.
Dan Balz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Balz
Daniel Balz is an American journalist at The Washington Post, where he has been a political correspondent since 1978. Balz has served as National Editor, Political Editor, White House correspondent and as the Washington Post's Texas-based Southwest correspondent. Balz sometimes appears on the news show Meet the Press and frequently appears on the PBS program Washington Week. In April 2011 the White House Correspondents' Association honored Balz with the prestigious Merriman Smith Award for excellence in presidential coverage under deadline pressure.
Dan Balz Chief correspondent — Washington, D.C.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/dan-balz/?utm_term=.6af83168ea86
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/kathleen-hall-jamieson-phd
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the Walter and Leonore Director of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands.
Five of the 15 books that Jamieson has authored or co-authored have received a total of eight political science or communication book awards (Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism, Presidents Creating the Presidency, and The Obama Victory.) She recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication and The Oxford Handbook on Political Communication.
Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught and has delivered the American Political Science Association’s Ithiel de Sola Poole Lecture, the National Communication Association’s Arnold Lecture, and the NASEM Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education Henry and Bryna David Lecture. Her paper “Implications of the Demise of ‘Fact’ in Political Discourse” received the American Philosophical Society’s 2016 Henry Allen Moe Prize.
Jamieson’s work has been funded by the FDA and the MacArthur, Ford, Carnegie, Pew, Robert Wood Johnson, Packard, and Annenberg Foundations. She is the co-founder of FactCheck.org and its subsidiary site, SciCheck, and director of The Sunnylands Constitution Project, which has produced more than 30 award-winning films on the Constitution for high school students.
Jamieson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association, and a past president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/polisci/people/secondary-appointments/kathleen-hall-jamieson
Tom Nichols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nichols_(academic)
https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-M.-Nichols/e/B001HCWR8I
Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School, as well as a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City and a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University. Previously he was a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
Before coming to the War College, he taught international relations and Russian affairs for many years at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University. In Washington, he was personal staff for defense and security affairs in the United States Senate to the late Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania.
He received his PhD from Georgetown, an MA from Columbia University, and the Certificate of the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union (today just called "the Harriman Institute") at Columbia.
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Expertise-Campaign-Established-Knowledge/dp/0190469412/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and
diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement.
Nichols has deeper concerns than the current rejection of expertise and learning, noting that when ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy-or in the worst case, a combination of both. The Death of Expertise is not only an exploration of a dangerous phenomenon but also a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age.
Heather Cox Richardson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Cox_Richardson
Department
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/history/people/faculty-directory/heather-cox-richardson.html
Professor Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. Her history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014) examines the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the Northwest Ordinance to the present. She is currently working on an intellectual history of American politics and a graphic treatment of the Reconstruction Era.
‘To Make Men Free,’ by Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/books/review/to-make-men-free-by-heather-cox-richardson.html