Overturning much of the conventional wisdom, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? demonstrate that the strong effects of media exposure found in past research are simply not applicable in today’s more saturated media landscape.
Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.
But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.
Candy Crowley is CNN’s award-winning chief political correspondent and anchor of State of the Union with Candy Crowley, a political hour of newsmaker interviews and analysis of the week’s most important issues that airs on Sundays at 9:00 a.m. ET and PT. Crowley joined CNN in 1987 and took the reigns as anchor of State of the Union in February 2010. In her role as chief political correspondent, Crowley covers a broad range of stories, including presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections and major legislative developments on Capitol Hill.
In her keynote address, Crowley spoke about the impact of social media and a fast-paced news cycle on the accuracy and truthfulness of journalism.
The Chicago Tribune’s investigative series revealed how a deceptive campaign by the chemical and tobacco industries brought toxic flame retardants into people’s homes and bodies, despite the fact that the dangerous chemicals don’t work as promised. As a result of the investigation, the U.S. Senate revived toxic chemical reform legislation and California moved to revamp the rules responsible for the presence of dangerous chemicals in furniture sold nationwide.
Jonathan Ladd argues that in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, competition in American party politics and the media industry reached historic lows. When competition later intensified in both of these realms, the public’s distrust of the institutional media grew, leading the public to resist the mainstream press’s information about policy outcomes and turn toward alternative partisan media outlets. As a result, public beliefs and voting behavior are now increasingly shaped by partisan predispositions.
In Consent of the Networked, journalist and Internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it is time to fight for our rights before they are sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. Every day, the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace make decisions that affect our physical freedom—but without our consent. Yet the traditional solution to unaccountable corporate behavior—government regulation—cannot stop the abuse of digital power on its own, and sometimes even contributes to it.
Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, graduated from Harvard, studied law at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then studied Arabic in Cairo. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and speaks various languages.
In addition to winning the 2013 Goldsmith Career Award, Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the genocide in Darfur, along with many humanitarian awards such as the Anne Frank Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
In his keynote address, Kristof called for more risk taking in media as well as increased engagement with a global world. The press must experiment with new platforms and find new business models, he said, and journalism must confront the growing mistrust the public feels toward it. “At its best, this can still really play such an important role in any society,” he told the audience.
The New York Police Department, in close collaboration with the CIA and with nearly no outside oversight, developed clandestine spying programs that monitored and catalogued daily life in Muslim communities, from where people ate and shopped to where they worked and prayed. AP’s reporting led three dozen lawmakers in Washington to call for House Judiciary Committee and Justice Department investigations.
Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder — not easier — to promote democracy.
In Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age, Jeffrey E. Cohen argues that presidents have adapted their going-public activities to reflect the current realities of polarized parties and fragmented media.