News Media and Society

Catalog description

In this course, we will explore “news” as a social artifact, and the news media as social institutions from historical and international perspectives. We will study both professional news stories and scholarly research on the news media to understand how the news media defines and molds political and social conversations and trends, and how the make-up of society and the newsroom itself can feed into the process of news production. We will also examine how news production, with ever-progressing media technologies, interacts with other social institutions to maintain or harm the ideal of a democratic society.