Idea Lab

Bloggers Demonstrate the Difference Diversity Makes

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Two days after the election both UNITY and the National Association of Black Journalists sent out open letters urging the media to redouble their efforts to diversify staffs in the aftermath of the historic election of Barack Obama. At the same time, others privately wondered if there are some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity. It is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, were not numerous enough to...

• November 13, 2008
• 1 comment

Framing the Candidates: The Vice Presidential Videos

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last time, I discussed, for example, how the McCain video uses images of his mother, even the phrase "mother's boy," to soften his tough, military-based persona, and how he was able to use images of personal suffering to express both vulnerability and toughness. We see many more such contradictions -- or appeals across party -- when we look at the videos for the Vice Presidential candidates.

• September 26, 2008
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Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

During the 2004 presidential election season, I ran a column in Technology Review Online which described the way that average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. These images often got passed along via e-mail or posted on blogs as a way of enlivening political debates. Like classic editorial cartoons, they paint in broad strokes, trying to forge powerful images or complex sets of associations that encapsulate more complex ideas. In many cases, they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape. Many of them explore the borderlands between popular culture and American politics.

• September 10, 2008
• 9 comments

Our Hidden Biases Reflected in Our Work

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a recent post Lauren Williams editor of the black interest blog Stereohyped, wrote about the case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer in New Hampshire. In defense of the accused, Mahzarin Banaji, the creator of Implicit Association Test, a web-based test that measures an individual's inherent biases, testified that it would be virtually impossible for a black defendant to get a fair trail by an all white jury. The movie Race to Execution makes a similar argument, noting that once the jury composition tips in favor of white men, the chances it will deliver...

• April 19, 2008
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