The Forum for the Academy and the Public’s 2025 annual conference will explore the varied ways that journalism and journalists are under fire in an age when autocratic trends threaten democracy and democratic institutions in the United States and around the world. The event will be co-directed by Amy Wilentz (Professor of Literary Journalism) and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Professor of History), and it will move from newsrooms to battlefields via lively discussions involving experts in many realms. One focus will be on coverage of the two great global problems of our era: the rise of powerful and potentially dangerous technologies; and the looming, immediate threat of climate change. We’ll look at how these topics are reported or not reported, and why. We’ll be thinking too about the various means political actors are using to quash policy debate and put forward false narratives. Our panels will consider the decline of the newspaper and the media in general, as social media takes hold of the public’s mind and as platforms like “X” morph from user-friendly discussion apps into politically charged forums controlled by billionaires and filled with bots and trolls and AI-generated deep fakes. How do we know what is real and what is fabricated in stories about wars and elections? What effect does the blurring of lines between credible and misleading forms of information have on our political discourse, our culture, and the very future of humankind, as we face a variety of unprecedented (and largely underreported) existential threats?
Participants include: Dean Baquet, former editor-in-chief of the New York Times and keynote speaker for the conference; Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Guardian US, who will exchange views on war coverage; Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, an influential book on climate in the global future; novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hector Tobar; Ivan Ogilvie, freelance videographer and photojournalist who will show his work from Burma and Somalia; Polina Ivanova, a Financial Times’ foreign correspondent who covers Russia and Ukraine; Widlore Mérancourt, an award-winning journalist for Ayibopost who reports in Haiti on politics and the rise of the gangs there; Rick Hasan, head of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project; David Kaye, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion; Nina Lakhani, the Guardian’s environmental justice reporter; Sheera Frenkel, Mirror Award winner for her New York Times reporting on misinformation; Paul Dourish, head of UCI’s Center for Responsible, Ethical and Accessible Technology; and Kaya Genç, an acclaimed Turkish novelist and translator who is the Istanbul correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
More details and registration link will be forthcoming.