18 takes on media and politics
From some of the best and brightest minds (i.e. not mine).
This spring I spent my Friday afternoons teaching a class called “Media and U.S. Politics” to college students at a place called Columbia University.
Maybe you’ve heard of it?
Needless to say, this was one hell of a semester to be teaching what I did where I did, though it’s unclear how much my students even needed the class. One could learn more about media and politics by standing a hundred yards west of the building I teach near the site of the protests than sitting inside my classroom. From a certain angle in the quad at certain times of day you could see more journalists surrounding the site of the protests than you could see actual protestors.
It’s a reminder of a lesson from political science that the protests at Columbia, and protests in general, are a fundamentally mediated phenomenon, even for the people who experience it in “real life”.1 The typical Columbia students on a typical day this semester likely received more notifications of news stories about the protests on their campus than they experienced interactions with the protests, or protestors, themselves. The shadows on Plato’s cave, in this case, are coming from inside the cave.
One might be tempted, then, to claim that U.S. media attention to Columbia University has overtaken attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict itself. This was something of a dangling question we concluded our class with.
It’s difficult to make any conclusions about this from the best available data which only suggests a slight reduction in news stories about the broader conflict after the Columbia University encampments began:
Google search trends suggest different focal points of public attention for Columbia University (after the encampment was announced) versus the Israel-Hamas conflict (after the October 7th attacks), which should not be surprising:
Here, there appear to be contemporaneous upticks in attention to both topics after the start of the encampment, but unlike with the Media Cloud data we cannot determine whether news stories might be double-counted into both categories. These trends also tell us nothing about relative attention between the two nor how they influenced each other.
I’ll say this again because I can’t stress this enough: we can not conclude any causal relationship between attention to these two on-going events (at least not from these two descriptive trends). Overall, we are left with few answers and many questions — neither can we say ‘somewhat unlikely’ nor anything else.
Instead, I’d like to provide a definitive answer to the question ‘what are your students at Columbia like?’ — they’re great.
Put aside stances on campus protests or the conflict in the Middle East, it has been a difficult, exhausting, and outright bizarre time to be a student at Columbia University. Engaging with politics is good, but we have evidence that this intensity of engagement with contentious issues — both online and offline, often forced and unwelcome, at all times of day and night — is not just exhausting, but acutely stressful.2
In spite of all inner and outer turmoil this semester, the students in my class have shown themselves to be exemplar scholars, producing deeply thoughtful and useful responses to the many Big Questions about media. Some of them, in fact, have been quasi-viral makers of media itself. As the saying goes, teaching teaches the teacher and it has certainly taught this one.
More importantly for you, they have all joined me in the Substack game and have each put these thoughts into their own weekly newsletters on media and politics. They are:
I hope you’ll give their insights a read.
If you haven’t already, see Omar Wasow’s (in)famous theory of “agenda seeding” on this very topic or, better yet, this conversation with journalist Derek Thompson on how it can (and can’t) help understand the on-going protests on college campuses.
On a lighter note: there is a bad-ass sounding political communication concept that describes one aspect of this phenomenon called
that I occasionally mention in a voice that sounds like that font looks. My students, to their great credit, have given me a patient, polite chuckle every time.