Theodore L. Glasser

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Stanford University

New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake news. What is fake news? Is it an item on Breitbart, an article in The Onion, an outright falsehood disseminated via Russian bot, or a catchphrase used by a politician to discredit a story he doesn't like? This book examines the real fake news: the const...

The public journalism movement, which began in the early 1990s and lost momentum a decade later, sought to revitalize public life and civic engagement by encouraging the press to promote and improve opportunities for public debate and discussion. It invited journalists to find ways, through their coverage of local issues, to empower the community.

When the Journalism Studies Interest Group of the International Communication Association was formed in pre-Katrina New Orleans in 2004, online journalism looked very much like offline journalism. Yes, content was available on a computer screen rather than on a piece of paper or over the airwaves. But otherwise, it was much the same: produced by a...

This text discusses the forms of selection of information and production of news stories. For its authors, the central question in this respect is what it means to say that news reports are true. In other words, what are the criteria and values corresponding to stories seen as true. The analysis is part of the wider discussion on the relationships...

The FCC's laissez‐faire approach to format allocation underscores the Commission's aversion to diversity as a goal of the First Amendment. The FCC's format policy confuses variety with diversity and thus fails to recognize that competition in the marketplace typically mitigates against the ideal of pluralistic programming.

Mainstream American journalism rests on a pluralist model of democracy that conserves the status quo, essentializes culture, and trivializes diversity. A very different understanding of diversity emerges from a multiculturalist perspective that questions existing arrangements, posits a relational view of culture, and defines diversity in terms of p...

Using Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm's classic Four Theories of the Press as their point of departure, the authors consider what the role of journalism ought to be in a democratic society. They examine the philosophical underpinnings and political realities of journalism, thereby identifying four distinct yet overlapping rol...

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Journalists' common sense, their everyday moral intuitions, offers a practical but flawed way of knowing right from wrong. But rather than discounting or dismissing this “naive everyday ethical knowledge,” which would rob journalism of its normative substance, we propose to rehabilitate it through a process of public justification. Grounded in aspe...

An examination of prize-winning journalistic exposés uncovers the narrative strategies by which the innocence of victims, and the blame for their plight, are established

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty argues that liberal democracy has had “the last conceptual revolution it needs.” He also suggests that journalism, like literature, helps realize the benefits of this revolution by telling stories about suffering and injustice—stories that contribute to a sense of human solidarity. This essay examines a...

IntroductionIn Search of a RoleThe Press and the LawMalice Without WitPomp and ProvenancePracticing FreedomThe Limits of LibertyCrafting a ConstitutionSafeguarding LibertyEnlarging the Fourth EstateThe Bloodiest WarThe Bottom LinesTurning AwayThe First and the FourteenthThe News BusinessToward ProfessionalismTrash and FlashThe Is and the OughtThe C...

Public journalism is apparently gaining influence in newsrooms throughout the US. It seems to be a genuinely innovative effort to move journalists away from thinking about the claims of separation that have long defined the practice of journalism toward thinking about the claims of connection that might redefine and reinvigorate the role of the pre...

It is remarkable how many journalists embrace the principles of public journalism but fail to recognize the importance of applying those principles to journalism itself. While the press stands ready to expand the opportunities for public debate by inviting everyone to participate, journalists typically exempt themselves by declining invitations oth...

A comparison of three news stories illustrates how journalists can use irony to undercut and even reverse the literal or ostensible meaning of what is being reported. As a rhetorical device aimed at establishing the conditions for competing interpretations of a text, irony enables journalists to report “the facts? accurately and impartially while a...

In this essay, we examine the cultural consequences of a press that seeks to be both a detached observer of fact and a “custodian of conscience.” Drawing upon interviews with distinguished investigative journalists, we examine the diverse ways that these reporters have found to work within, but never resolve, the tension between objectivity and adv...

Investigative journalists long have had an adversarial relationship with powerful institutions and those in public office, stemming from the "righteously indignant" reporters of the early nineteenth century penny presses who guarded the interests of the public. Currently, investigative journalists are in a difficult position if they have to report...

Monitoring the activities of governmental bodies is vital for citizen groups whose livelihoods and educational opportunities are dependent on legislative approval. In an uncertain, changing political climate, however, simple monitoring is frequently inadequate. Organizations need to understand legislators' attitudes toward them and their needs so t...

Children's Television: The First Thirty‐Five Years, 1946‐1981 (Part I: Animated Cartoon Series), George W. Woolery (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983), 385 pp., $27.50. Classroom Combat: Teaching and Television, Maurine Doerken (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 1983), 316 pp., $23.95. Children's Understanding O...

In focusing on the epistemology of journalism, this paper seeks to determine how reporters, particularly investigative reporters, know what they know. It begins by distinguishing between the validity of knowledge claims and their everyday justification, assuming the latter to be the proper focus for a phenomenological study of what passes as knowle...

Argues that there is no principled way to distinguish between the language used in the television program "Scared Straight" and that used by comedian George Carlin on radio station WBAI-FM, ruled indecent by the Supreme Court in "FCC v. Pacifica Foundation." (FL)

While radio is America's most abundant medium, its content is characterized more by sameness than by diversity. Stations find it more profitable to duplicate mass appeal programming formats than to program to minority tastes. Such rational business decisions come at the expense of the listening audience which is given few formats from which to choo...

Because of judicial indifference and legislative inaction, the conflict between the right of privacy and the freedom of the press is no closer to a resolution than it was a century ago. William Prosser's reduction of the common law of privacy into four separate torts has not solved the problem. The concept of "newsworthiness" has not been helpful e...

In an effort to establish a workable standard of liability in libel suits, the judiciary may be well on its way to endorsing the tenets of objective reporting. As articulated by the Court of Appeals in Edwards v. National Audubon Society, the First Amendment protects the “accurate and disinterested” reporting of “newsworthy accusations”; in their r...

Offering a synthesis of research and thought on the notion of newsreading as a form of play, this paper focuses on newsreading as a symbolic action of incorporating cultural attitudes by reading a newspaper. Sections of the paper discuss the following topics: (1) play, culture, and communication--defining play in its cultural and communicative cont...

TELEVISION NETWORK NEWS: ISSUES IN CONTENT RESEARCH. Edited by William Adams and Fay Schreibman. School of Public and International Affairs, George Washington University: Washington, D.C., 1978. 231 pp; GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. By Edwin Diamond. MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1978, 263 pp; NEWSGATHERING. By Ken Metzler. Prentice‐Hall; Englewood Cliffs, N...

THE MESSENGER'S MOTIVES: ETHICAL PROBLEMS OF THE NEWS MEDIA. By John L. Hulteng. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, 1976. 262 pp. $8.95/$4.95.TELEVISION PRODUCTION HANDBOOK. By Herbert Zettl. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1976 (3rd Edition). 534 pp.BIAS IN THE NEWS. By C. Richard Hofstetter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 197...