Assigned Readings

1. Izzy Snow, Susan Rahman, C. Ayala, S. Conaway, P. Kindel, O. Page, J. Palacios, Leslie Rivera, E. Valencia and S. Werba. 2020. Junk food news. Pp 151-72  in Huff and Roth (eds) State of the Free Press, 2021. NY: Seven Stories Press. In Canvas. Scan this one to get a feel for what ‘junk food’ news and news ‘abuse’ are. I think we all know intuitively that a lot of clickbait in our ‘news’ feeds lacks nutritive value.
2. Alison Rose Levy. 2019. The incredible belief that corporate ownership does not influence media content. Sept 17, CommonDreams. 
3. William Turvill. 2020. The News 50: Tech giants dwarf Rupert Murdoch to become the biggest news media companies in the English-speaking world. Dec 3, Press Gazette. At least until the next round of corporate concentration. Big Tech didn’t used to be so newsy.
4. Elizabeth Kolbert. 2019. Why facts don’t change our minds. Feb 27, New Yorker Magazine. Lots of humans like facts that confirm their biases. This reading is also assigned for the small groups, yes, it’s the same one (but my online classes don’t have small groups)

Optional:

• Eli Pariser. 2012. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is changing what we read and what we think. NY: Penguin (‘The race for relevance’). In Canvas.

Online lecture pages

• Outline 
• Are news media biased?  (left vs right stereotypes: comparisons)
• Individual vs structural explanations of bias
• How is news ‘filtered?’
• Some news sources
• Social problem here?

Videos 

(these are embedded in the outline page, except for the first two, which are video lectures)

• From a previous 205 (you might find these useful: bias; filtering)
• From Manufacturing Consent (Noam Chomsky on ownership filtering)
• From the documentary The Corporation (‘unsettling accounts‘–excellent example of advertising and ownership filters)
• Source filtering and the ‘General’s revolt‘ (using ‘message force multipliers’ and source filtering). There is a treasure trove of ‘fake news videos’ that don’t play, but here’s one on Youtube for allergy sufferers. ‘Video News Releases‘ (VNRs) are common as well–commercials disguised as local news stories.
• Flak filter (these commercials (second) commissioned by the Competitive Enterprise Institute aired immediately after the release of Al Gore’s film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ on behalf of some of their corporate sponsors, who seem to grasp the value of framing issues that benefit their industries);
• From the documentary Manufacturing Consent (example of anti-communist filter)