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 are (in alphabetical order): Olunfunmilayo Arewa, a George Mason law professor whose research includes technology, the creative industries, and business law; Dean Baquet, former editor-in-chief of the New York Times and keynote speaker for the conference; Paul Dourish, head of UCI’s Center for Responsible, Ethical and Accessible Technology; Sheera Frenkel, winner of the Mirror Award for her New York Times reporting on misinformation; Kaya Genç, an acclaimed Turkish novelist and translator, as well as Istanbul correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books; Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists; Rick Hasen, head of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project; Lucy Hornby, an expert and journalist on the Chinese state; Polina Ivanova, a Financial Times’ foreign correspondent who covers Russia and Ukraine; David Kaye, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion; Doug Kysar, a Yale law professor whose research include torts, animal law, environmental law, and climate change; Nina Lakhani, the Guardian’s senior environmental justice reporter; Elizabeth Loftus, a professor whose award-winning research focuses on the malleability of human memory; Widlore Mérancourt, an award-winning journalist who is the editor-in-chief of Ayibopost and frequent Washington Post contributor who reports in Haiti on politics and the rise of the gangs there; Jeffrey Ngo, a historian, writer, and pro-democracy Hong Kong activist based out of Washington, DC; Ivan Ogilvie, freelance videographer and photojournalist who will share his work from Burma; Allison Perlman, a professor whose research includes the history of broadcasting, American social movements, media law and policy, and popular memory; Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Guardian US; Angilee Shah, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the nonprofit news organization Charlottesville Tomorrow; Cascade Sorte, a biologist at UCI who focuses on the relationship between species distribution and climate change; Katie Stallard, Senior Editor, China and Global Affairs at The New Statesman; novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hector Tobar; Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, an influential book on climate in the global future; and Alex Wang, a UCLA law professor whose research focuses on Chinese environmental governance.
More information, including detailed schedule and registration, can be found at https://sites.uci.edu/factsunderfire/.