Now you’re at the other end of the telescope Seven billion stars in her eyes So many stars So many ways of seeing Hey this is no time not to be alive To get to commencement weekend, we had to walk through a bit of fire. I don’t want to…

Classes started this week at Lehigh. Every year I teach at least one section of our introductory course, COMM 001 Media And Society. I still think of it as some of my most urgent work. It exists to help students understand the business of media, how it’s structured, and its…

As a tenured professor, I submit a triennial portfolio to monitor my progress. These are usually fairly antiseptic pieces, which cite metrics and data and are full of boasting about how we are without being too over-the-top. I wrote something like that when I went up for tenure, but now…

I wanted to expand on this point from Dave Wasserman: What he noted here is pretty consistent with what I teach in my media intro course here at Lehigh: stories, to some extent, are artificial constructs. …

The Washington Post published a story this morning about a preliminary study of 96,000 patients that showed that using hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug promoted by President Trump (and against the advice of the CDC) as a possible treatment for COVID-19, is linked to higher death rates in coronavirus patients. If…

“The models were all wrong and can’t be trusted!” I have been seeing this argument a lot online, sometimes on Twitter but more often on Facebook, as a claim meant to support the idea we shouldn’t be sheltering in place at the expense of the economy. This is dangerous and…

The people protesting closures are hacking the journalistic news value of covering what is novel or contrary over what is normalized/accepted. The effect is amplifying a view the vast majority of Americans oppose. Which is fine; airing another view has its place. But here’s the thing. The protests have to…

Since we’ve started sheltering in place, I’ve been spending time thinking about a two-tiered problem we are facing right now with coronavirus coverage. First: Second: Let’s start with the second tweet, which has Tapper sketching out the ongoing feud between the White House and the national press corps…

This post is not going to be long, or super detailed. You’ve got 1, 2, maybe 3 days of notice to convert your in-person college class to an online format thanks to COVID-19. …