This seminar will explore the challenges and opportunities that today's rapidly evolving media landscape presents to freedom of the press, and to the democracy that the media serve. Discussion will focus on where news comes from and how citizens can best assess the credibility of individual news reports. Students will evaluate how successful traditional mass-media outlets and emerging digital media have been at accomplishing the lofty goals embodied in the First Amendment. They will craft strategies for determining their own personal media diet and work to develop new models for serious, sustainable news ventures.

The rise of authoritarianism around the world makes the subject of this seminar both relevant and urgent: how to gather reliable information in countries that restrict freedom of the press or where reporting can put a journalist's life in danger. The course will explore how governments exert control over media and how journalists avoid being waylaid by disinformation and propaganda. Students will learn foundational reporting skills for international journalists as well as more sophisticated techniques for prying into closed societies -- skills made necessary as technology upgrades the tools of repression.

This seminar will critically examine coverage of the tumultuous 2020 election and look ahead to the pivotal 2022 midterms, while exploring how journalists try to hold the powerful to account across government, business and entertainment. The course will also examine Americans' media diets and the crises presently confronting news organizations. Students will conduct original reporting and analysis that address the challenges newsrooms face when reporting on Covid-19, race, gender, climate change and other topics, with an aim to better understand the journalist's role in a time of public distrust, disinformation and threats to democracy.

The single biggest news event of the turn of this century -- 9/11 -- caused a paradigm shift in global affairs that we all still live with two decades on. Its ramifications changed the world and altered the shape of journalism. This seminar will examine how various perspectives, prejudices and pitfalls in international reporting continue to inform and challenge the fourth estate and how it operates. Students will learn about reporting in the field, being responsible to sources, acquiring new sensibilities, scrutinizing citizen journalism, and accounting for many different views from many different grounds.

American law protects racist hate speech, pornography, and (much) lying. Other countries permit more restrictions on harmful speech, should we? Or will that undermine truth-seeking, political competition, and other values? Should speech be regulated instead by social norms, social media companies, and universities? Is "cancel culture" a problem? And what should we - as political communities and universities - honor and memorialize? How should we balance recognition of heritage and inclusion of people from diverse cultures and historically marginalized groups? Seminars will include debates. Active weekly participation required of all.