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Studies completed after the 2016 election show that media coverage of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was overwhelmingly negative, extremely light on policy, and disproportionately focused on sideshows. What’s more, all of the major prediction models that use polls to game out election outcome probabilities predicted a Clinton victory. Could these entities, which are...
Featured Ideas Festival Scholar includes Liz Plank. A robust fourth estate is central to the education of an engaged citizenry and healthy democracy. It informs us, shapes our thinking, and holds our leaders and institutions accountable. But if Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on one thing this election season, it’s that political media is malfunctioning. On televisio...
As of this writing, 28 journalists have been killed in 2018, 262 were imprisoned in 2017, and 58 are currently marked as missing. Every day in countries across the globe, journalists put their lives at risk to expose the truth: truth about human rights, political corruption, drug trafficking, environmental crime. What can journalists (and the rest of us) do to secure their...
Far too many students in the United States and around the world face challenges when seeking a quality education; this untapped potential is a waste of societal and economic resources. In this session, education and civil society leaders will talk about their efforts to engage underserved and refugee youth, and their successes and failures in helping those youth overcome b...
Ever wonder what decisions go into the making of a political ad? We’ll talk about the things you see, hear, and read in campaign commercials and think about the way all the elements come together to nudge viewers toward inferences that help—or hurt—candidates. Do political ads really work? Which ones are working in 2016, and why?
Marty Baron has a larger-than-life reputation among journalists, who revere him one of the best editors in a generation. Multiple Pulitzer Prizes — and Oscar-winning narratives — only punctuate his passion for excellence in reporting. Since joining The Washington Post as executive editor in 2013, Baron has pursued the kind of investigative journalism for which the paper is...
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, coauthors of the 2014 best-seller The Second Machine Age, will preview their new book at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Machine, Platform, Crowd brings together economics, computer science, and several other fields to present a practical, action-oriented guide to the changes and disruptions brought by the amazing technological progress of to...
Vladimir Putin offered Donald Trump a swap at the now infamous Helsinki summit: I’ll let you interview the twelve Russian agents accused of hacking DNC emails, if you give my team access to Bill Browder. Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and author of the 2015 New York Times best-seller Red Notice, which recounts his experience as the largest f...
If you’re in journalism, the content business, or are associated with a nonprofit or dot-org, “How’s your podcast going?” is the question of the day. How did these obscure broadcasts that languished from their debut in 2004 suddenly turn into must-have, mainstream shows? (According to Libsyn, 2.6 billion podcasts were downloaded in 2014 alone.) Why is it that everybody see...
Robert Mueller made clear the bottom line of his investigation: Russia attacked our democracy — and, as he said, every American should focus on that. Instead, recent news reports reveal that the Department of Homeland Security wasn't even allowed to bring up the threat of election attacks with President Trump. As candidates hit the 2020 campaign trail, what should the Unit...
The 2016 presidential campaign broke down previously established rules and distinctions between insiders and outsiders and various types of media — all accelerated by the Internet. The velocity of information and viral communication can create dysfunction in campaigns and within democracy. And for a relatively small investment in resources, a country's media can be infiltr...
Trust is fundamental to almost every action, relationship, and transaction in society, but we live in an era when technology is rapidly changing who and how we trust. The trust we used to place in traditional institutions such as governments, banks, media, and charities has hit an all-time low, and trust now flows horizontally through systems and networks that are as likel...
A large, unsettling question looming among Washington regulators, lawmakers, and now state Attorney’s General across the US is whether the time has come to break up the big five: Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple. Have these powerful tech companies, once the darlings of the start-up community not twenty years past, become so dominant that they are stifling competiti...