DISINFORMATION, MISINFORMATION—FINDING THE TRUTH
This registration provides a seat at the Lebanon Opera House to attend this session in-person.(This event is open seating, meaning you will not have an assigned seat number.)
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often credited with the observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” and 40 years ago, when Moynihan popularized this quip, it was generally accepted. No longer. Especially since the rise of social media and the 2016 election, there has been increasing recognition that facts themselves have become a battleground, amid widespread disinformation (that is, the often viral circulation of falsehoods) and misinformation (the intentional promulgation of untruths) are considered epidemic by many.
Our conversation about this will consider how prevalent the problems really are, what practical difference they are making, including in our politics, how the press has been responding (for both better and worse), how these phenomena in America interact with similar issues elsewhere, and what might be done to get us back closer to Moynihan’s vision.
SPEAKER: JOEL SIMON
Founding director, Journalism Protection Initiative, CUNY
Joel Simon is the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative. Simon began his career as a journalist in Latin America, before joining the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1998. He served as CPJ executive director from 2006 to 2021. In 2022 Simon was a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, and also Senior Research Fellow at Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, most recently The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, co-authored with Robert Mahoney. He writes regularly on press freedom issues for The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. You can visit his personal website here.
SPEAKER: DICK TOFEL
Principal, Gallatin Advisory LLC, author of Second Rough Draft
Richard Tofel is the principal of Gallatin Advisory LLC and author of the newsletter Second Rough Draft. He was the founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013 until 2021. As president, he had responsibility for all of ProPublica’s non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. During the period of Tofel’s business leadership, ProPublica published stories that won seven Pulitzer Prizes.
Tofel is an Instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he led a faculty seminar on “The Pandemic, the Press, and Public Health” and teaches a course on “Engaging with the Press.” He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, with responsibility for its international editions and U.S. special editions, and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. Just prior to ProPublica, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation.
SPEAKER: BRANDY ZADRODZNY
Features reporter, NBC News
Brandy Zadrozny is an award-winning digital and television investigative and features reporter for NBC News where she covers disinformation, extremism, and the internet. She is a former research fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and host of the NBC News' podcast, “Tiffany Dover is Dead."