Kennedy Library Forums Late Fall 2017
All forums are free and open to the public. Reservations for forums are strongly recommended. They guarantee a seat in the building but not the main hall. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors to the main hall open approximately one hour before the program begins.
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM Columbia Point, Boston, MA 02125 - (617) 514-1600
Reality and Truth in Contemporary Journalism
Monday, December 11 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
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
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/dan-balz/?utm_term=.b6f9972a68f1
Dan Balz is Chief Correspondent at The Washington Post. He joined the Post in 1978 and has been involved in the political coverage as a reporter or editor throughout his career. He is author of four books, including two New York Times bestsellers: Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America and, with co-author Haynes Johnson, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. His awards include the Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the White House Correspondents Association’s Merriman Smith award for deadline writing, the Gerald R. Ford Award for coverage of the presidency (shared), and the American Political Science Association’s Carey McWilliams Award. He is a regular panelist on PBS’s “Washington Week” and is a frequent guest on the Sunday morning talk shows and other public affairs programs.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Ph.D.
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/kathleen-hall-jamieson-phd
Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication
Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center
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.
Tom Nichols (academic)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nichols_(academic)
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26720949-the-death-of-expertise
The rise of the internet and other technology has made information more easily-accessible than ever before. While this has had the positive effect of equalizing access to knowledge, it also has lowered the bar on what depth of knowledge is required to consider oneself an "expert." A cult of anti-expertise sentiment has coincided with anti-intellectualism, resulting in massively viral yet poorly informed debates ranging from the anti-vaccination movement to attacks on GMOs. This surge in intellectual egalitarianism has altered the landscape of debates-all voices are equal, and "fact" is a subjective term. Browsing WebMD puts one on equal footing with doctors, and Wikipedia allows all to be foreign policy experts, scientists, and more.
As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, there are a number of reasons why this has occurred-ranging from easy access to Internet search engines to a customer satisfaction model within higher education. The product of these interrelated trends, Nichols argues, is a pervasive distrust of expertise among the public coinciding with an unfounded belief among non-experts that their opinions should have equal standing with those of the experts. The experts are not always right, of course, and Nichols discusses expert failure. The crucial point is that bad decisions by experts can and have been effectively challenged by other well-informed experts. The issue now is that the democratization of information dissemination has created an army of ill-informed citizens who denounce expertise.
When challenged, non-experts resort to the false argument that the experts are often wrong. Though it may be true, but the solution is not to jettison expertise as an ideal; it is to improve our expertise. Nichols is certainly not opposed to information democratization, but rather the enlightenment people believe they achieve after superficial internet research. He shows in vivid detail the ways in which this impulse is coursing through our culture and body politic, but the larger goal is to explain the benefits that expertise and rigorous learning regimes bestow upon all societies.
Heather Cox Richardson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Cox_Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and Plains Indians. She previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts.
Richardson has authored five books and is currently working on several projects, including a graphic history of Reconstruction and a new book on the American West. She is also a founder and editor at Werehistory.org, which presents professional history to a public audience through short articles.
‘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