Episode 307: Defunding Public Media: Threats, Stakes, and the Future of Democracy
A special thanks to our guest:Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. Pickard’s research focuses on media history, journalism studies, and the normative foundations of media policy. He has published more than 150 articles, book chapters, and essays, and he often writes for popular venues such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Jacobin, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and The Nation. He has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning monographs America’s Battle for Media Democracy and Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. Currently he is working on a book that historicizes how capitalist logics structure information and communication systems in ways that harm democracy.
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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Episode 306: The Internet Got Ensh**ified: Monopoly Power and the Fight for Digital Democracy
A special thanks to our guest:Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently “Picks and Shovels” and “The Lost Cause,” a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction books include “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual, and “Chokepoint Capitalism,” about monopoly platforms and creative labor markets. He coined the term “ensh**tification,” to describe the decay of online platforms. The word was named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, the Macquarrie Dictionary and the New Scientist. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and serves as a MIT Media Lab research affiliate, a visiting professor of computer science at Open University, a visiting professor of practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, and he co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.”(https://craphound.com/)Episode art licensed by Creative Commons 3.0 by Jonathan Worth.
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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Episode 305: The New Mainstream Media: How Lifestyle Podcasts are Becoming the Go-To Information Source for American Men
A special thanks to our guests:Davey Alba is a technology reporter for Bloomberg, based in New York City, covering Big Tech and its influence. Previously, Alba reported for The New York Times on online disinformation and worked at BuzzFeed News and WIRED, covering AI and technology’s societal impact. She has received multiple journalism awards, including the 2019 Livingston Award for international reporting and a Mirror Award for journalism in peril. Her work has also been recognized by the SABEW Awards, the Online Journalism Awards, and the Deadline Club Awards. Alba has spoken at institutions such as Oxford University and the University of Florida. Originally from Manila, Philippines, she studied science writing at Columbia University and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.Leon Yin is an award-winning journalist at Bloomberg News. He builds datasets and develops research methods to investigate technology's impact on society. He writes Inspect Element, a practical guide to data-driven investigations. His work quantifying Google and Amazon's self-preferencing has been cited numerously by legislators, the academy and popular media. In 2023, the series "Still Loading" received a Philip Meyer Award recognizing the best uses of social science methods in journalism. The piece was also cited by the city council of Los Angeles to outlaw digital discrimination. Leon got his start in news at The Markup, and his start in research writing Fortran scripts at NASA.
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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Episode 304: Call me Daddy: The Danger of Strongman Framing
A special thanks to our guest:Gil Duran is a journalist and political strategist who has worked as a spokesman for Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris. He later served as California opinion editor at The Sacramento Bee and editorial page editor at The San Francisco Examiner. His work has appeared in The New Republic, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times. He publishes two newsletters: The Nerd Reich, on tech authoritarianism, and FrameLab, on political language and framing.
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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Episode 303: Changing the Spread: What Legalized Betting Means for Sports Reporting
A special thanks to our guest:Bill King is a senior writer for Sports Business Journal. He’s the publication’s lead contributor to In-Depth stories, Special Report coverage and profiles and has won numerous national and regional writing awards since joining SBJ in 1998.
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
If you find yourself avoiding the news, you’re not alone. But what’s turning you off is likely not the news itself—it’s the noise surrounding it. News Over Noise explores the challenge of separating spin and click-bait from good journalism and why it matters. This podcast empowers our citizenry by giving listeners the tools they need to balance staying informed while protecting their well-being and the public good.
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