Episode 310: News for Hire: How Billionaires Are Rewriting the Narrative
Special thanks to our guest:Eoin Higgins is a writer based in New England whose work has appeared in progressive and mainstream outlets across the country. His new book on tech billionaires, the media, and the right is now available for preorder.
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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Episode 309: When Facts Aren’t Enough: Rethinking the Role of Fact-Checking
Special thanks to our guest:Dr. Michelle A. Amazeen is Associate Dean of Research, Associate Professor of Mass Communication, and Director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University’s College of Communication. Her research explores persuasion and misinformation, including how people recognize and resist misleading media. A contributor to The Debunking Handbook 2020 and ranked among the top 2% of highly cited scholars globally, her work has informed policy worldwide and been presented to organizations such as the FTC, EPA, and FDA. She currently co-leads BU’s Climate Disinformation Initiative and is the author of the forthcoming book Content Confusion (MIT Press, 2025).
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine?
A special thanks to our guest:Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. His latest book is Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press).
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
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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.
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.
Ireland