News Media, Facts, and the State of Democracy

Mira Sotirovic, Karin and Folke Dovring Scholar in Propaganda in the University of Illinois Department of Journalism, surveyed partisan news consumption, Pew findings on Americans' difficulty distinguishing fact from opinion, Lippmann and Merz's 1920 "A Test of the News," the 1923 canons of journalism, and three structural tensions in the profession, arguing that personalization of coverage harms truth more than factual error does. A Q&A followed. Held on Zoom, in the fall 2020 series on the state of democracy.