Join Sarah Jaffe and Victor Pickard for a conversation about Victor's latest book, Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society

As local media institutions collapse and news deserts sprout up across the country, the US is facing a profound journalism crisis. Meanwhile, continuous revelations about the role that major media outlets -- from Facebook to Fox News -- play in the spread of misinformation have exposed deep pathologies in American communication systems. Despite these threats to democracy, policy responses have been woefully inadequate.

In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we're overlooking the core roots of the crisis. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. The problem isn't just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. The rise of a "misinformation society" is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism's public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. Journalism has always been in crisis. The market never supported the levels of journalism--especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting--that a healthy democracy requires. Today these long-term defects have metastasized.

Democracy Without Journalism? envisions what a new kind of journalism might look like, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system.

Victor Pickard is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. He is the author of America's Battle for Media Democracy and co-author of After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age.

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt and the forthcoming Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many others. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at the New Republic and New Labor Forum.  She lives in Philadelphia.

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In Conversation: Sarah Jaffe and Victor Pickard