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Instructors: Torsten Kathke
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.313
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: AS 313
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
In addition to the required papers, this class will make use of exercises designed to understand the news media, such as writing exercises, source analysis, and exercises in media criticism. A reader of texts will be provided as per instructions in the syllabus when class starts.
Contents:
"Fake News" has been the rallying cry both of legitimate protest against factual inaccuracies, and the complaint of those who simply do not like the news because it goes against their preferences. Although it has a decidedly twenty-first century ring by now, both the phrase and its meaning are much older.
This seminar will look at the development of the news in American history, emphasizing the changes that affected the newspapering business from the nation's foundation onward through the "long nineteenth century." We always also ask the question: what is new in current debates, and what is old? What role does the change from one type of media to another play throughout history, who profits, and who doesn't? How "objective" is news, now, and historically, and what does this mean to its production?
From colonial "shipping news" to the New York Times online edition, from the partisan papers of the early 1800s to Twitter bots and Facebook bubbles, our most important task will be to understand how news media works, and how its nineteenth-century history can help us make sense of the present day.
Recommended reading list:
Michael Schudson. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson, eds. Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Gerald J. Baldasty. The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Hazel Dicken Garcia. Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Alexis Easley and Andrew King, John Morton, eds. Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies. London: Routledge, 2017.
Jane Chapman. Comparative Media History: An Introduction. 1789 to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.
Mitchell Stephens. Beyond News: The Future of Journalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
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