How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

It was a story told in photographs, but what we saw wasn’t what happened. It was worse.

The author would like to extend deep thanks to Thomas Grace, Alan Canfora, and Dean Kahler; and to NYU history Professor Robert Cohen for his clarifying remarks. Fifty years is a big part of a human life. How unsettling that the meticulously planned 50th commemoration of the tragic May 4th, 1970 killings at ...
Read More
How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

Probing for Meaning in the Media

Gaslighting, data overload, and “Propaganda 2.0”

“We are in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media On a recent Wednesday evening in a Political Media seminar I was talking about the well-known Herman and Chomsky propaganda model -- media ownership, advertising dependence, reliance ...
Read More
Probing for Meaning in the Media

Memory and Kent State

The Past is Always Present on May 4

I fell into the field of communications by default because I took a debate class at Miami from a professor who turned out to be chair of the department. I was an English major looking for an easy minor. No one could have been more surprised than I that the ...
Read More
Placeholder