Zach Nelson
(308) 865.4272
“The President and the Media” is the focus of a panel discussion Tuesday, Oct. 12, at 7 p.m. in Copeland Hall Room 142 at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Sponsored by the UNK Campus Democrats, the event will feature a panel discussion on how the president uses the media to communicate to the public, and how the public takes cues from the media when making judgments about the president and his policies. A question and answer session will follow the panel discussion.
Panelists will include: Dr.Joan Blauwkamp and Dr. Diane Duffin, both political science faculty members, and Dr. Carol Lomicky, a faculty member in the Department of Communication. Dr. Blauwkamp will discuss the role of the media in voter decision-making, and will be talking about the current coverage and its problems, in the context of voting behavior scholarship.
Dr. Duffin will talk on what White House Press Secretaries call “feeding the beast,” examining how the modern presidency shapes the news media’s agenda to obtain favorable coverage of the president and his policies. Dr. Lomicky will be discussing the role and responsibility of the press in communicating political messages (including the president’s) to the public.
After the panel discussion, there will be a showing of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a documentary that examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, are running a “race to the bottom” in television news and how large corporations are diminishing the public’s right to know.
The discussion and documentary are free and open to the public.
