Fall 2020: Democracy in Crisis! Week 6

Week 6 15th October  

THE VITAL ROLE OF THE MEDIA: DEMOCRACY & THE FOURTH ESTATE

Focus talk: Dorianne Low —

Click here to play (30 m).

Main lecture and discussion:

— Lylah Alphonse:

Lylah Alphonse is a former Managing Editor at U.S. News & World Report, where she revamped their Special Reports section, coordinated news coverage of national issues ranging from politics and policy to higher education and health care, and led a diverse team of journalists in measuring government performance at the international, national, state and community levels.

Before joining U.S. News, she worked as a senior editor and writer at ‪Yahoo.com‬, where she wrote about politics, health, career, and parenting trends, created and curated the “Women in Politics” section of Yahoo News. While there, she covered the First Lady's office, interviewing First Lady Michelle Obama, Dr. Jill Biden, Dr. Tina Chen, Valerie Jarrett, and other administration leaders multiple times.

Before joining Yahoo!, Lylah spent 16 years as an editor and writer at The Boston Globe, editing in the National News, Living/Arts and Sunday Magazine departments and writing book reviews, news features, and other content, including a parenting column for ‪Boston.com‬. Next week, she returns to The Boston Globe as the editor of their Rhode Island initiative, expanding the Globe's top-notch coverage into other parts of New England.

She wrote a twice-weekly column about work-life balance for Workitmom.com from 2007 to 2011, and is the author of “Triumph Over Discrimination: The Life Story of Dr. Farhang Mehr” (2000), a biography of the first non-Muslim deputy prime minister of Iran. She is a frequent guest on GBH-TV’s “Beat the Press” and "Greater Boston," has taught at Northeastern University, and speaks at conferences and in classrooms around the country. She earned her Bachelors of Science in Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and was inducted into their alumni hall of fame in 2000. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and teenage children.

Click here to play main lecture and discussion (1 hr 30 m).

Lylah's slides  Try looking at the slides as the audio plays.

Links from Lylah:

http://www.LylahMAlphonse.com

• ●  For fact checking:

  • ○  Snopes.com

  • ○  Propublica.org

  • ○  Factcheck.org

  • ○  poynter.org/news/fact-checking/

  • ○  politifact.com

• ●  Media Bias Chart:

○ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

● Wesley Lowery’s article on newsroom bias:
○ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/opinion/objectivity-black-journalists-coronavirus.html