State of the News Media 2025

About this course:

After a tumultuous start to the second Trump administration, hard questions persist about the news media in the United States and globally. In this course, we survey a long-running trend of declining consumption of traditional news content in newspapers and television, now being accelerated by declines in consumption of even digital news content. We explore how the very understanding of what constitutes news is changing, a phenomenon notable for its generation and gender gaps, as well as for the popularity of information sources which would never have satisfied previous definitions. We touch on how ownership of news media is shifting away from historically public service models to an environment of “news” merely as a means of promoting non-journalism business interests. We also look at how artificial intelligence is surpassing previous technologies in creating fictitious content nearly indistinguishable from news, and whether the importance of fact checking and investigative journalism is being lost to American citizens of the future. This course will be recorded. Students will have access to videos for the duration of the course.