Communications

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said verbal slips are not enough to conclude that a presidential candidate is unqualified for the job. “If you can’t focus, that’s a problem. If you can’t provide a coherent answer, that’s a problem. (But) sometimes what you’re seeing, it may be annoying, but it doesn’t speak to a person’s capacity to govern,” she said.

Jami Fisher of the School of Arts & Sciences weighed in on how face masks can make communication difficult for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. “ASL (and other sign languages) rely on facial cues and other non-manual features to convey grammatical information as well as emotive expression,” she said. “With much of the face covered, this information is lost, as is a lot of the meaning.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center spoke about media coverage of the federal crackdown in Portland, Oregon. “The framing of this is dramatically different news channel to news channel, and this is an instance in which the visuals are difficult to understand because you’re seeing people in what look to be a kind of military uniform, and it’s unfolding at night,” she said.

Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School for Communication commented on efforts by hedge funds to acquire struggling newspapers. “This is bad for journalists, bad for media diversity and bad for communities at a time when we desperately need more local journalism, not less,” he said.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center says the meaning of “antifa" is being constructed in real time via public discourse. “When you use the word antifa, you’re creating the sense that it actually does exist, normalizing the language of ‘antifa,’ without knowing what the reference is,” she said. “It is becoming a ‘devil term’ on the right—a term that is used to encapsulate everything you’re afraid of.”

Alison Buttenheim of the School of Nursing spoke about the spread of misinformation online. "In our hyper-polarized and politicized climate, many folks just inherently mistrust advice or evidence that comes from an opposing political party," she said.

A study co-led by Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that Americans who relied on conservative news sources were more likely to believe conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors about the coronavirus than those who consumed more mainstream media.

Sarah Jackson of the Annenberg School for Communication said it’s important to focus on where bots exist within social networks as well as with whom they actually interact. “Even if there are a lot of bots in a network, it is misleading to suggest they are leading the conversation or influencing real people who are tweeting in those same networks,” she said.