USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy and the USC Unruh Institute of Politics, invite students, faculty and friends to watch the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Following the ceremony, there will be a discussion on the inaugural speech and the future of Obama's presidency. Guests TBA. Refreshments will be served.
8:00 a.m. USC Ground Zero Coffee House, 615 Childs Way.
January 2009 Archives
New media thinker Jay Rosen has been using the work of press scholar Daniel C. Hallin to explain how the Internet has eroded journalists' traditional power to define what issues are legitimate for proper debate. Hallin wrote that journalists tend to place public issues into three categories: a sphere of consensus, a sphere of legitimate controversy and a sphere of deviance. In a post on his blog, Press Think, Rosen argued that the press has done a lousy, unthinking job of deciding what goes into each category, and that through the Internet American citizens might assume this role for themselves.
But an interesting thing happened. Hallin wrote a long response for the blog, and made it clear he wasn't exactly on the same page as Rosen. He said there's plenty of reason to be skeptical that the Internet "is closer to 'real public opinion' than what is in the mainstream media." Further, he said journalists play an "important role as an independent source of information, and in many ways I'd like to see them playing a stronger role, not a weaker one."
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