Democratic Media and the Elections of 2024

In 2024, nearly two billion people were eligible to perform their basic democratic right: to cast a vote. In countries including Indonesia, Mexico, the UK, India, and the U.S., media played a key role in framing the issues, candidates, and parties at the heart of these elections. Yet in many cases reporting lacked the independence, objectivity, and accuracy that is essential to a meaningful democratic process. This event, featuring Perry World House Visiting Fellow Des Freedman and journalist and editor Carol Giacomo, will explore the principles that undergird a democratic media and reflect on the media’s performance in the elections of 2024, and point the way to meaningful change and reform.

SPEAKERS

Des Freedman is a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of books including The Politics of Media Policy (2008), The Contradictions of Media Power (2014), Misunderstanding the Internet (2017, with James Curran and Natalie Fenton), and the forthcoming Capitalism and the Media. His edited collections include War and the Media (2003), Media and Terrorism (2012) (both with Data Thussu) and Capitalism’s Conscience: 200 Years of the Guardian (2021). He writes on media for Declassified UK and led the 2016 Inquiry into the Future of Public Service Television chaired by the film producer David Puttnam. He is a founding member of the UK Media Reform Coalition and co-organizer of the annual Media Democracy Festival.

Carol Giacomo is chief editor of Arms Control Today, the Arms Control Association’s flagship publication. Carol was a member of The New York Times editorial board from 2007-2020 writing opinion pieces about all major national security issues including nuclear weapons, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Her work involved regular overseas travel, including trips to North Korea, Iran and Myanmar. She met a half dozen times with President Obama at the White House and interviewed scores of other world leaders.

A former diplomatic correspondent for Reuters in Washington, she covered foreign policy for the international wire service for more than two decades and traveled over 1 million miles to more than 100 countries with eight secretaries of state and other senior U.S. officials.

During the 2020 spring semester, Ms. Giacomo was a Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton University, a position she also held in 2013. In Fall 2020, she was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2019, she held the Poynter Chair at Indiana University’s School of Media Studies, making regular visits to the Bloomington campus to conduct journalism-related classes and workshops for students and faculty.

In 2018, she won an award from The American Academy of Diplomacy, an organization of retired career diplomats, for outstanding diplomatic commentary. In 2009, she won the Georgetown University Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting. She has also won two publisher’s awards from The New York Times.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1999-2000, she was a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, researching U.S. economic and foreign policy decision-making during the Asian financial crisis. Born and raised in Connecticut, she holds a B.A. in English Literature from Regis College, Weston, Mass. She began her professional journalism career at The Lowell Sun and later worked at The Hartford Courant in the city, state and Washington bureau.

Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is also its Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (C3).

Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018), and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2019-2020, she had a regular column on popular feminism in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, as is her scholarly editorial work. She was formerly the editor of the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, as well as co-editor of the International Communication Association journal, Communication, Culture, Critique, and was the founding co-editor of the New York University Press book series, Critical Cultural Communication Studies. Banet-Weiser has been the recipient of international fellowships and visiting professorships at, among others, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris, France; the Gulbenkian Foundation and the University of Portugal in Lisbon, Portugal; Microsoft Research New England (the social media collective); and McGill University in Montreal (Media@McGill Scholar). She is also a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Banet-Weiser is the recipient of scholarly and mentoring awards, including the Constance Rourke Prize for Best Article in American Quarterly, and the Mellon Graduate Student Mentoring Award. She is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California. She was formerly a Professor and Head of Department at the London School of Economics after 19 years in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, where she was Professor, Vice Dean, and the Director of the School of Communication.