In the wake of Jan. 6, 2021, when right-wing extremists stormed the US Capitol, Twitter took tweeting privileges away from former President Trump. One company had the power to silence the president’s direct line of communication to his most loyal digital constituents, raising all sorts of concerns about the power of big tech to influence politics and free speech. Regardless of how extreme or mundane the tweet, the national news media was compelled to cover the president. The national news media, demeaned as “coastal elites” and “fake news,” now have a return to normalcy with a president who is unlikely to disregard mainstream media’s institutional importance. Still, objectivity is not neutrality, as this talk will explain, and covering Biden presents more new challenges than might be immediately evident. The national news media remains vulnerable to the same blind spots as it did four years ago, with an obsession with inside baseball politics and “palace intrigue,” with limited connection to places like Champaign-Urbana and other “fly over” regions. Come for a talk on the messiness of Washington journalism in an era of platforms and partisanship, and leave with some new ideas about how to make sense of it all.
Nikki Usher is an associate professor at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the College of Media's Journalism Department (with affiliate appointments in the Communication and Political Science). Her research focuses on news production in the changing digital environment, blending insights from media sociology and political communication. From 2019-2020, she was a fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and as of Summer 2020, is a fellow with the Open Markets Institute's Center for Journalism and Liberty. She is the author of three books: (1) Making News at the New York Times, (2) Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code, and (3) News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism, due out in June. Prior to moving to Champaign-Urbana, Usher spent eight years in Washington as a professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.
