MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Jens Pohlmann, “Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere: Comparing the Discourse in Germany and the United States”
2022-03-31 17:00 - 18:30 (America/New_York) | MA
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

In this talk, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States in different media environments (IT-blogs, newspapers, social media).

Ultimately, he considers the extent to which cultural, historical, and political differences between these two liberal democracies inform the present transatlantic debate about the restriction of content online and the regulation of social media platforms, as well as potential impacts on the evolving digital public sphere.

Jens Pohlmann is a Research Associate at the Centre for Media, Communication & Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2017 and focuses his research on the internet policy discourse in Germany and the United States. His first book, The Creation of an Avant-Garde Brand: Heiner Müller’s Self-Presentation in the German Public Sphere is to be published this fall.

Oscar Winberg, “Archie Bunker Goes to Washington: How Television in the 1970s Remade Politics into Entertainment”
2022-04-07 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

This talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s, fictive characters, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of All in the Family but also Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) of MAS*H and Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, became political icons. Produced by Norman Lear, All in the Family is recognized as a watershed moment in television history. And yet, Oscar Winberg argues, the show did not just change television, it transformed American politics. Recognizing the popularity of television, politicians learned how to use (and abuse) television entertainment to win votes, to fundraise, to promote their agenda, and to push for legislation. Television entertainment in the 1970s thereby remade political life in its image, paving the way for our current moment of mediated showbiz politics.

Oscar Winberg holds a Ph.D. in History from Åbo Akademi University. He is working on a political history of television entertainment in the 1970s United States. His work focuses on mass media in modern political history and has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, European Journal of American Studies, and Finsk Tidskrift. He is a columnist for Hufvudstadsbladet and has written for venues such as Made by History at the Washington Post, Vasabladet, and the public broadcasting corporation in Finland.

“Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech,” a Conversation with Martha Minow and Heather Hendershot
2022-04-14 17:00 - 18:30 | MA
This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

In her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.”

Martha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School, where she also served as Dean, since 1981. In addition to Saving the News, she is author of When Should Law Forgive? (2019), In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Constitutional Landmark (2010), among many other books and articles. She is an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes and teaches about digital communications, democracy, privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict.

Heather Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and studies TV news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. She is author of the forthcoming book When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, which follows her 2016 title Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, Princeton, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Stanford, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative, political, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen.

Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, “Seeing Silicon Valley”
2022-05-05 17:00 - 18:30 | Zoom, and (for MIT only) E15-318 Common Area, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States
In-person attendance: limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass.

Streaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded.

Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, a collaborative exploration of the culture of Silicon Valley — not the culture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that we see in the press, but the lives of the men and women who inhabit the Valley and make it work. If Silicon Valley is building the world’s future, Meehan and Turner argue, then we must learn to see through the tech industry’s marketing campaigns. We need to see the kind of society the tech industry is actually creating, in its own back yard.

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

Mary Beth Meehan is an independent photographer, writer, and educator, who has spent more than twenty years embedding herself in communities across the United States. Beginning in her native New England, and continuing in the Midwest, the American South and in Silicon Valley, her work, which combines image, text, and large-scale public installation, stems from her belief in a collaborative process that should function in and for the communities it reflects. Co-opting the scale of celebrity and advertising, Meehan’s portrait banners activate public spaces and spark conversations among and about the people who inhabit them.
