Communications

Jessa Lingel of the Annenberg School for Communication spoke about how online gatherings can be protected from disruptions by trolls. “Just like people should be updating their Facebook settings, just like people should be thinking about location data that they put on Twitter or Instagram, we should also be thinking about the settings of a platform like Zoom,” she said.

Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School for Communication spoke about the shift in advertising since the pandemic began. “Americans think fun is being with people,” he said. “Those commercials now reflect a world that passed so fast. Hugging looks so strange now.”

A study about online misinformation and public health authored by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and postdoc Yotam Ophir of the Annenberg Public Policy Center was cited. “It seems like the coronavirus is consistently being framed as a political issue,” Ophir said. "The virus doesn’t work this way. You get it whether you’re a liberal or a conservative.”

A new book by Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School for Communication was cited. In it, Pickard argues that the government should fund a public media system to the tune of $30 billion, which “may seem large, but relative to the scale and type of problem—a first-order need on par with public health, a standing military, and other non-negotiable expenses, it is actually a modest proposal,” he writes.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center spoke about the use of jargon in public health communications. “They are incomprehensible to many in the public,” she said. “Public health officials need to translate their technical language into intelligible language.”

Jacques deLisle of the Law School and School of Arts and Sciences said propaganda coming from China regarding the coronavirus is “designed to take some of the heat off Xi Jinping at home, so he can say look at us as compared to the feckless Americans.”