The Enablers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be remembered as a pivotal event in American history. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on leadership and followership, this book centers on the first six months of the pandemic and the crises that ran rampant. The chapters focus less on the former president, Donald Trump, than on his followers: on people complicit in his miserable mismanagement of the crisis in public health. Barbara Kellerman provides clear and compelling evidence that Trump was not entirely to blame for everything that went wrong. Many others were responsible including his base, party, administration, inner circle, Republican elites, members of the media, and even medical experts. Far too many surrendered to the president's demands, despite it being obvious his leadership was fatally flawed. The book testifies to the importance of speaking truth to power, and a willingness to take risks properly to serve the public interest.

Author(s):  
Samuel Llano

As is described in this conclusion, more than the media and culture, Madrid’s public space constituted the primary arena where reactions and attitudes toward social conflict and inequalities were negotiated. Social conflict in the public space found expression through musical performance, as well as through the rise of noise that came with the expansion and modernization of the city. Through their impact on public health and morality, noise and unwelcomed musical practices contributed to the refinement of Madrid’s city code and the modernization of society. The interference of vested political interests, however, made the refining of legislation in these areas particularly difficult. Analysis of three musical practices, namely, flamenco, organilleros, and workhouse bands, has shown how difficult it was to adopt consistent policies and approaches to tackling the forms of social conflict that were associated with musical performance.


Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
Peter Cihon ◽  
Jonas Schuett ◽  
Seth D. Baum

Corporations play a major role in artificial intelligence (AI) research, development, and deployment, with profound consequences for society. This paper surveys opportunities to improve how corporations govern their AI activities so as to better advance the public interest. The paper focuses on the roles of and opportunities for a wide range of actors inside the corporation—managers, workers, and investors—and outside the corporation—corporate partners and competitors, industry consortia, nonprofit organizations, the public, the media, and governments. Whereas prior work on multistakeholder AI governance has proposed dedicated institutions to bring together diverse actors and stakeholders, this paper explores the opportunities they have even in the absence of dedicated multistakeholder institutions. The paper illustrates these opportunities with many cases, including the participation of Google in the U.S. Department of Defense Project Maven; the publication of potentially harmful AI research by OpenAI, with input from the Partnership on AI; and the sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement by corporations including Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. These and other cases demonstrate the wide range of mechanisms to advance AI corporate governance in the public interest, especially when diverse actors work together.


Author(s):  
Marta Pietras-Eichberger

The study analyzed selected issues related to the scope of human rights and freedoms during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and Russia. The author wanted to compare the regulations issued by a Member State of the European Union and a country outside the European Union, often using undemocratic methods of exercising power. The work focuses on research problems related to the principles of protection, the confrontation of individual interests with the public interest, and the impact of the regimes introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic on human rights law in both countries. The thesis of the study is that in the event of a threat to public health, analogous restrictions on human rights are introduced both in an undemocratic country and in a country belonging to international structures identifying with democratic values. The state of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, and in some area even contributed to the creation of mechanisms reserved for crisis situations, posing a direct and real threat to public safety and health.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511877601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Ross ◽  
Damian J. Rivers

Twitter is increasingly being used within the sociopolitical domain as a channel through which to circulate information and opinions. Throughout the 2016 US Presidential primaries and general election campaign, a notable feature was the prolific Twitter use of Republican candidate and then nominee, Donald Trump. This use has continued since his election victory and inauguration as President. Trump’s use of Twitter has drawn criticism due to his rhetoric in relation to various issues, including Hillary Clinton, the size of the crowd in attendance at his inauguration, the policies of the former Obama administration, and immigration and foreign policy. One of the most notable features of Trump’s Twitter use has been his repeated ridicule of the mainstream media through pejorative labels such as “fake news” and “fake media.” These labels have been deployed in an attempt to deter the public from trusting media reports, many of which are critical of Trump’s presidency, and to position himself as the only reliable source of truth. However, given the contestable nature of objective truth, it can be argued that Trump himself is a serial offender in the propagation of mis- and disinformation in the same vein that he accuses the media. This article adopts a corpus analysis of Trump’s Twitter discourse to highlight his accusations of fake news and how he operates as a serial spreader of mis- and disinformation. Our data show that Trump uses these accusations to demonstrate allegiance and as a cover for his own spreading of mis- and disinformation that is framed as truth.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saketh Sundar ◽  

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, headlines ranging from “Coronavirus forecasts are grim: It’s going to get worse” to “Covid-19 cases and deaths in the US will fall over the next four weeks, forecast predicts” have dominated the news (Achenbach, 2020; Kallingal, 2021). The weekly-published Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 forecasts have become the go-to forecasts for the media, the public, and various levels of government (Cramer et al., 2021). These projections, generated from epidemiological forecasting, not only inform the public’s caution towards the pandemic but are also crucial for officials to create public health guidelines and allocate resources in hospitals (Gibson et al., 2020). But where do these predictions come from?


Author(s):  
Gabrielle Samuel ◽  
Rosie Sims

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 contact tracing app was announced to the British public on 12th April 2020. The UK government endorsed the app as a public health intervention that would improve public health, protect the NHS and ‘save lives’. On 5th May 2020 the technology was released for trial on the Isle of Wight. However, the trial was halted in June 2020, reportedly due to technological issues. The app was later remodelled and launched to the public in September 2020. The rapid development, trial and discontinuation of the app over a short period of a few months meant that the mobilisation and effect of the discourses associated with the app could be traced relatively easily. In this paper we aimed to explore how these discourses were constructed in the media, and their effect on actors – in particular, those who developed and those who trialled the app. Promissory discourses were prevalent, the trajectory of which aligned with theories developed in the sociology of expectations. We describe this trajectory, and then interpret its implications in terms of infectious disease public health practices and responsibilities.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Shepperd

Abstract Through detailed archival analysis of personal letters, this article examines how the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934 inspired the formation of the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), and influenced Paul Lazarsfeld’s development of two-step flows and media effects research. Buried in federal records, a post-Act Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Pursuant that mandated analysis of educational broadcasting additionally turns out to be the causative reason that Theodor Adorno was brought to America by the Rockefeller Foundation. Crucial to the intellectual history of media and communication theory, Lazarsfeld invited Adorno not only to develop techniques to inform educational music study, but to strategically formulate advocacy language for the media reform movement to help noncommercial media obtain frequency licenses. The limits and pressures exerted by the FCC Pursuant influenced the trajectory of the PRRP research, and consequently, the methodological investments of Communication Studies.


Author(s):  
Valentina Marinescu

The focus of the present article is on the analysis of the influence exercised by media narratives on the Romanian audience's reconstructions of social movements from January-February 2012. The analysis was interested to show what are the aspects involved in the publicizing of this media event in Romania, by focusing on the event narrative built in such a way to transmit a particular significance related to the protest movements related to the crisis of the health public system in Romania. Two research methods were used in collecting the data: a survey on two hundreds Romanian respondents and quantitative content analysis of five national Romanian newspapers. As the results show, the high consumption of mass media messages does not determine whether the public adopts the media narratives concerning the events from the beginning of year 2012. At the same time, the analysis shows that in the case of the media events that took place in Romania in January-February 2012 the impact of the media narrative on the way in which the audience from Romania rebuilt those protests was a minor one and other factors had played a major role in triggering massive mass protests in Romania.


Author(s):  
Abbigail J. Tumpey ◽  
David Daigle ◽  
Glen Nowak

Effective communication during an outbreak or public health investigation is crucial for fostering adoption of public health recommendations and minimizing or preventing harm. During outbreaks, a comprehensive communication strategy integrating news media, social media, and partner engagement is essential for reaching affected persons and for keeping everyone informed about public health actions and recommendations. The strategies outlined in this chapter are the foundation for rapidly and effectively conveying information and public health recommendations to the persons at risk, the media, and the different entities involved in the response. Regardless of the public health event’s cause, core communication actions and steps will be similar; however, in every outbreak or public health investigation, perceptions and needs will vary among target audiences, partners (i.e., persons or organizations that can play a role in the crisis response), and persons or organizations with a connection or interest in the outbreak (stakeholders).


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