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Articles by Michael Schudson
The golden age wasn’t so golden
Sept. 14, 2026, 12:31 p.m. “While trust in the media may be unhealthily low today, it was surely unhealthily high in the 1950s and early 1960s.” Last month, Routledge published Mainstream News Media Trust: Antecedents, Consequences, and Remedies, a new book edited by Nayla Fawzi, Jesper Strömbäck, and Yariv Tsfati.
Journalism gets more and more difficult
My only prediction for 2023 is that no one’s predictions (even this one) will be right. The world is too volatile — and I suppose that suggests a prediction — that volatility will not have disappeared by the end of 2023. The world’s nations, well beyond the U.S., are politically volatile. The global economy is volatile in its ever greater integration that makes us dependent on supply chains that sometimes collapse.
Journalism and Truth in an Age of Social Media
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Find in Worldcat James E. Katz and Kate K. Mays Abstract This edited volume examines how the growth of social media and ancillary computer systems is affecting the relationship between journalism and the pursuit of truth. Experts explore how news is perceived and identified, presented to the public, and how the public responds to news.
Beyond the L-word: Lessons from four years of covering Trumpian defiance of fact
Criticism By Michael Schudson and Jueni Duyen Tran April 29, 2021 As we have entered the post-Trump era, marked by the forty-fifth president’s absence from the White House, from Twitter, and from most press coverage, we are still left with the repercussions of a presidency that has deeply fractured the nation, both politically and epistemically.
Reflecting on Forty Years of Sociology, Media Studies, and Journalism: An Interview with Todd Gitlin and Michael Schudson
Authors Jiang Chang Shenzhen University http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8992-5410 Jiang Chang, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Shenzhen University, China. He's currently working on the politics of digital countercultures in contemporary China, and the theorization of digital journalism.
Book Reviews
“Why Journalism Still Matters” By Michael Schudson Polity Press 224 pages “The only security of all is in a free press.” So goes a quote in a full page ad in the Green Valley News. Recently, a marshall in Patagonia threatened a young reporter with arrest for putting his image on the internet. He allegedly said, “I don’t want to hear about any of that freedom of the press stuff.” His concern may have been for her safety or his own; he has since apologized to her.
Book Reviews
“Why Journalism Still Matters” By Michael Schudson Polity Press 224 pages “The only security of all is in a free press.” So goes a quote in a full page ad in the Green Valley News. Recently, a marshall in Patagonia threatened a young reporter with arrest for putting his image on the internet. He allegedly said, “I don’t want to hear about any of that freedom of the press stuff.” His concern may have been for her safety or his own; he has since apologized to her.
The Fall, Rise, and Fall of Media Trust
Is too much made of the mistrust of journalists? It is the alarm of our moment, and one gets the sense that the pitch of anti-press sentiment is now the most fevered itâs been since the founding of the republic. In fact, presidents from George Washington on, including Thomas Jefferson (whose statue stands outside the Columbia Journalism School, where I work), judged newspapers to be full of lies. Editors didnât have much regard for their own kind, sometimes challenging one another to duels.
Changing Concepts of Democracy
[The text below is a complete transcript of Schudson's talk at the Democracy and Digital MediaConference held at MIT on May 8-9, 1998.] I want you to look at the l996 California voter's information guide, the reductio ad absurdum of the ideal of the informed citizen in a mass democracy. In the next half hour, I want to think seriously about this artifact of contemporary democracy.
The objectivity norm in American journalism*
Why did the occupational norm of ‘objectivity’ arise in American journalism? This question has attracted the interest of many journalism historians but it has not previously been examined as an instance of a more general social phenomenon, the emergence of new cultural norms and ideals.
The objectivity norm in American journalism*
Why did the occupational norm of ‘objectivity’ arise in American journalism? This question has attracted the interest of many journalism historians but it has not previously been examined as an instance of a more general social phenomenon, the emergence of new cultural norms and ideals.
Here’s what non-fake news looks like
Analysis By Michael Schudson February 23, 2017 Journalists literally “make” news. They do not find it. They do not publish transcripts of reality. Even in their best efforts, they would not provide a copy of reality, but reality in a frame, reality enhanced, reality reconfigured by being heightened on a page or a screen, reality retouched by the magic of publication itself.
The news media and the election | OUPblog
How does an avowedly nonpartisan news organization like the New York Times cover an outrageous but media-savvy and factuality-challenged candidate like Donald Trump? In a recent interview, Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet explained that the press was at first flustered by Trump, that “everybody went in a little bit shell-shocked in the beginning, about how you cover a guy who makes news constantly.
Who Hates the Press?
A new study traces more than thirty years of changing public attitudes toward the news media, and unhappily finds that to know journalism is to disdain it. Timothy E.
Why predict? " Nieman Journalism Lab
Everything we predict comes true. Only sooner than we thought. With consequences worse than we feared and better than we hoped — both at once. We grow more polarized and more centered on common concerns. More individualistic and also more social. More private and much more public. More mobile and more stationary. And I think not only more shallow but more deep.
The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency ...
books.google.com - Modern transparency dates to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—well before the Internet. Michael Schudson shows how the “right to know” has defined a new era for democracy—less focus on parties and elections, more pluralism and more players, year-round monitoring of government, and a blurring line... The Rise of the Right to Know
Where the right to know comes from
In 2003, Dean Baquet, then managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, along with then-Editor John S. Carroll, considered–and ultimately rejected–delaying publication of a damaging story on gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just five days before the October 7 special election, the paper ran the story, which detailed multiple allegations of sexual harassment. The timing did not give the Schwarzenegger camp much chance to respond and regroup.
When the media had enough: Watergate, Vietnam and the birth of the adversarial press
“The media”: these two words, yoked together, name something new in the world. They turn the many organizations that constitute what was once more commonly called “the press” into a single looming, forbidding entity, implicitly offering it criticism, even disdain. The press had long offended, of course. But something about the media got worse in the 1970s, even in the eyes of journalists.
The Reconstruction of American Journalism
By Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson November / December 2009 312 words For reactions to this report, click here. American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed.
The Right to Know versus the Need for Secrecy: The American Experience
Making government more accessible to the public is vital to improving the quality of democracy, yet this does not make transparency an ultimate good that should be honoured under all circumstances. Credit: shutterstock Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "information is the currency of democracy," or so it is easy to learn online. Fortunately, it is just as easy to learn that he wrote no such thing.
Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers
books.google.com - This instructive and entertaining social history of American newspapers shows that the very idea of impartial, objective “news” was the social product of the democratization of political, economic, and social life in the nineteenth century. Professor Schudson analyzes the shifts in reportorial style...
Columbia Journalism Review
How satire will make American politics relevant again In spring 1998, as a senior political science major at the University of New Hampshire, I took a transformative course on media and politics. The main text, W. Lance Bennett’s News: The Politics of Illusion, became my bible.
What sorts of things are thingy? And what sorts of thinginess are there? Notes on stuff and social construction
Actor-network theory may help sociological studies of communication to see some things that would have been harder to see without it. It is useful and important in calling attention to the ways that “things” and not only persons can be actors (or “actants”) in the human social world. Still, it may be the peculiar hubris of the scientific laboratory that led to the presumption that things do not act in human affairs. In social criticism and in common sense, we have long known that they do.
How the Media Undermine American Democracy: James Fallows: 9780679758563: Amazon.com: Books
Few authors are as capable of approaching the unenviable task of explaining the otherwise baffling devolution in both the content and context of the mass media's coverage of the news as brilliantly as is noted journalist James Fallows in this literate, scathing, and thought-provoking broadside against his fellow journalists and the organizations they work for.
A spotlight, not a truth machine
Of the ten biggest news stories of 2014, seven will be broken by newspapers or wire services with editorial staffs of more than 100; one by a smaller “legacy” newspaper; one by a radio or TV news organization; and one by an online-only news operation founded in 2004 or after. In discussions about journalism and its future, that tenth story will be the focal point of discussion and most of the nine other stories will barely be mentioned.
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