By Burt Glass
Nearly three of four Americans (72%) surveyed say skills in media literacy are important inthe face of intentionally misleading or inaccurate information in the media, according to the new Media and Technology Survey out today from Boston University’s College of Communication conducted by Ipsos.
The new year began with the World Economic Forum releasing its 2024 Global Risks Report which describes hazards occurring in the global landscape from year to year. Topping the 2024 report is the threat of mis- and disinformation intensifying societal divides around the world over the next two years.
Indeed, in the year ahead, the American public is facing numerous issues that require informed decisions. We are navigating a presidential election, military action in Ukraine and Gaza, continued resistance against taking meaningful action on climate change, and lingering waves of Covid-19, just to name a few. Each of these on its own is challenging enough. However, dealing with all of them simultaneously and combined with the increased use of generative artificial intelligence, the media ecosystem is poised for a tsunami of disinformation: deliberately false content intended to mislead.
Do we trust US media to get us this information accurately? According to a nationally representative poll COM conducted in 2022, roughly 60% of Americans said they trusted media to provide accurate information on the issues of climate change, elections, and vaccines. Even fewer (55%) trusted media to make a clear distinction between news and advertising. But there were stark differences in responses based upon political identity: Democrats were much more trusting of media on these topics (80%) than were Republicans (just over a third). Other national polls, such as from Gallup, indicate that Americans’ trust in media more generally is at a record low point with similar partisan divides.
The concern with misinformation is not just among elites, but is also held by everyday Americans. A recent national survey by MediaWise revealed that 4 out of 5 participants (81%) believed false or misleading online images were a problem for society. At the same time, roughly 3 in 4 respondents were not confident in their ability to identify misinformation. According to CRC fellow Dr. Joan Donovan, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies and Journalism and author of Meme Wars, “The entire purpose of media manipulation campaigns is to trick you, so it’s not easy to quickly discern fakes from facts in today’s media. Viral memes are often missing the context needed to understand the motives of the author and really viral memes will shed any reference to the original source as it is distributed. This is why we need to be able to access more reputable news sources on social media.”
Thus, now, more than ever, is when media literacy is essential. Media literacy is the ability to critically analyze stories presented in the media and to determine their accuracy or credibility. My research has shown that the more people know about the media, the better able they are to resist online disinformation efforts. According to our latest Media & Technology poll among a nationally representative sample of US adults fielded this month, 72% of respondents agree that media literacy skills are important in helping people identify misinformation, yet only 42% report knowing how to access quality media literacy training online. Yet, there is demand for these skills as nearly 7 in 10 reported interest in learning how to better distinguish between true and false information online, especially when it comes to identifying misinformation generated with AI.
Given the challenging times before us, I am pleased to welcome a new voice among our CRC fellows who study mediated communication dysfunction. Dr. Betsi Grabe joins COM this month as the Dalton Family Professor and will be directing the Emerging Media Studies PhD program. While the first part of Dr. Grabe’s career was spent conducting research to understand the media’s role in facilitating informed citizenship, more recently her focus has shifted to researching disinformed citizenship. “My sense is that the integrity of the global information ecosystem is critical to the longevity of the democratic way of life,” Grabe tells me. “Actionable research that shapes public debate, informs policy, and empowers citizens is urgently necessary and arguably, part of our social responsibility as academics.”
We are fortunate to have so many esteemed researchers who are committed to understanding why and how media affect us and society at this time of extreme information disorder. I look forward to working with Dr. Grabe and the continued efforts among all CRC fellows in conducting research that matters.
December wraps up another busy semester for the CRC. Our Colloquium Series, which originated in 2009, consists of monthly research presentations that highlight current and original research of CRC fellows. Our Fall Colloquium Speakers were EMS PhD Candidate Alexis Shore (September), Dr. Deborah Jaramillo (October), and Dr. Joan Donovan (November). If you are interested in presenting your research as part of our Colloquium Series this Spring, please sign up here.
Every semester, the CRC also invites a distinguished scholar from outside the university to share their outstanding scholarship, expertise, and experience with the BU community. Our Fall 2023 DeFleur Distinguished Lecturer was Dr. Kjerstin Thorson (Michigan State University) who spoke about news exposure in a datafied media world.
In promoting a culture of research and collaboration, our fellows met monthly as part of our Work-In-Progress meetings. Special guests this semester included representatives from BU’s Institutional Review Board and representatives from the offices of BU’s Federal and Foundation Relations. Moreover, our PhD fellow Briana Trifiro launched a Lunch & Learn series enabling doctoral students the opportunity to talk with faculty and Emerging Media Studies PhD alumni about their academic research and careers.
One of the unique technologies available in the CRC is our biometric tools which include devices for measuring heart rate, sweat levels in the skin, as well as facial and eye movements. For the first time ever, the CRC hosted an onsite workshop led by an iMotions Product Specialist. Attendees received hands-on training in our iMotions software, designing biometric studies, interpreting data, and drawing actionable conclusions. If you are interested in learning more about biometrics, a quick primer is available here.
Given the University’s commitment to involving students in research, the CRC continued to facilitate fellows’ efforts to recruit students as research participants via our SONA research participant management system. The SONA system gives both graduate and undergraduate students an opportunity to become involved with various research activities across COM while earning course credit for doing so. This semester, 13 research opportunities were available to students from 24 different COM courses. I hope you will consider including your courses in the Spring semester. To enroll your courses, please fill out this form. For more information about how our SONA program works, please visit our website or email comsona@bu.edu.
I am incredibly grateful for the commitment and hard work of our staff this fall. Amanda King joined us in September as our Lab and Research Manager and has been quickly getting up to speed on CRC technologies and activities. I look forward to working with them in the Spring semester and beyond. I would also like to thank our wonderful graduate assistants who helped to keep the Center running. Zain Bali (MCR) was our SONA administrator doing the behind-the-scenes work on our research participant management system. Snigdha Bhowmik (FTV) was our Communications Assistant writing about and promoting our activities. And Xinyue “Tracy” Cui (FTV) was our Events Assistant capturing our activities for posterity and making them available on our website. Thanks to you all!
To our CRC community of fellows, I wish you all a joyous and restful holiday season and look forward to the many new and exciting activities we are planning for 2024!
With multiple wars raging and the world enduring infodemics, pandemics, and climate-related disasters, it may seem difficult to be grateful for much of anything at present. However, at this time of Thanksgiving in the United States, I wanted to pay homage to a former First Lady whose actions touched on all of these calamities. Rosalynn Carter died this past Sunday on November 19, 2023 at the age of 96 at her home in Plains, Georgia. To do so, I turned to COM’s Senior Associate Dean, Dr. Tammy R. Vigil, whose expertise includes women as political communicators and who has authored two books about First Ladies including Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992-2016 (University Press of Kansas, 2019) and Melania & Michelle: First Ladies in a New Era (Red Lightning Books, 2019). The following is a tribute from Dr. Vigil:
Rosalynn Carter often appeared the picture of demure, middle-class femininity in a well-ironed blouse neatly tucked into a simple A-line skirt. Yet, behind the outward image of reserved simplicity stood a fearless first lady who broke barriers and pushed boundaries. Rosalynn Carter, well-known as a champion of mental health, served as the key White House administrator on behalf of the Mental Health Systems Act and testified in front of Congress as part of her advocacy efforts. She also vigorously supported the Equal Rights Amendment, led workshops on alleviating unemployment, and supported cultural exchange programs. Carter was frequently an official emissary of the president, embarking on diplomatic efforts in Brazil, Costa Rica, Rome, and Thailand, negotiating on behalf of the president and the nation in a manner few first ladies dared to do. Her courageous efforts to use the “velvet pulpit” of the first ladyship in a meaningful fashion resulted in Time magazine dubbing her “the second most powerful person in the United States” in 1979. Her high level of activity led to legislative efforts to curb her influence, yet she persisted. Rosalynn Carter helped formalize the Office of the First Lady, creating resources and space for future presidential spouses to more effectively advocate for causes that impact a wide range of constituents.
During the more than four decades since she left the East Wing, Rosalynn Carter travelled the world as an inspirational and assertive figure whose goals were, as she put it, “waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope.” She continued to crusade for causes she believed in and remained politically active throughout her life. Through the Carter Center, Rosalynn worked toward peace in the Middle East, led public conversations about sexual inequality, promoted childhood immunizations, and drew attention to the importance of caregiving. In 2018, she led a chorus of former first ladies who spoke out against the separation of migrant children from their families at the southern US border, drawing attention to the humanitarian crisis and calling for change. Two years later, she narrated a video segment for the 2020 Democratic National Convention in which she argued for national unity and optimism. Rosalynn Carter was a model of activism, compassion, determination, and empowerment.
I am grateful for the work of Mrs. Carter on behalf of our country and humanity. I am also grateful for the work of my colleagues whose communication research illuminates these important actors.
I wish you and your families a Happy Thanksgiving with time to reflect and reconnect.
By: Michelle Amazeen
In the mid-1980s, Rolling Stone Magazine underwent an image transformation. Widely perceived of as a magazine carrying content that only appealed to a niche population of counterculture hippies, the award-winning “Perception. Reality.” advertising campaign, created by advertising agency Fallon McElligott, disputed that notion. Through a series of over 60 print executions, the ads conveyed that readers were actually mainstream and affluent.
Similarly, the Communication Research Center (CRC) is sometimes perceived of as having activities that primarily involve programming with speakers from other universities and/or research presentations by BU COM faculty. It’s true that since 2011, the Dr. Melvin L. DeFleur Lecture Series has annually invited two distinguished scholars from outside the university to share their scholarship, expertise, and experience with the BU community. Even before then, since October 2009, the Communication Research Colloquium Series has hosted monthly research presentations every semester that highlight current and original research of CRC fellows. However, to say that CRC activities are primarily limited to speaker series is not reflective of reality.
Since 2011, the CRC has facilitated scores of research studies, many involving surveys. Our fellows review survey research protocols to ensure the rights and welfare of humans participating as subjects in research. Dozens of these studies have sampled from the student population of COM made possible by our SONA participant recruitment and study management software that we acquired in 2016. Other studies are based upon non-student populations, such as this one – covered by CNBC – about U.S. adult perceptions of climate change.
Still other studies involve in-lab controlled experiments approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board. One study, for example, examined the ability of participants to recognize whether media content was a news article versus “native advertising,” a form of sponsored content that imitates journalism. Some participants who arrived at the CRC were provided an iPhone on which to view the content while others were provided with a laptop. As predicted by the Persuasion Knowledge Model, even the participants most motivated to engage with news were less likely to recognize that content was advertising when viewed via the iPhone.
Beyond surveys and experiments, the CRC has hosted focus groups in our state-of-the art focus group facility. The adjacent viewing room with a one-way mirror allows for unobtrusive observation, and the digital recording tower can create audio/video recordings of sessions.
Our on-site data analysis and coding lab with dual-monitor computer stations facilitates the analysis and coding of media content. In one study, for instance, researchers conducted a content analysis of commonly binge-watched online original TV programs for portrayals of violence. Consistent with Cultivation Theory, the programs were often violent, with non-white women more likely to be targets of sexual violence and non-white men more likely to be the perpetrators.
You can learn more about this study from the news coverage it generated in 2019 on Boston 25 News.
Many other studies conducted by CRC fellows rely upon social media data obtained from the varying social media listening tools we offer or leverage COM’s Media & Technology surveys that poll nationally representative samples of U.S. residents.For example, one such study reported by the Boston Globe examined adults’ perceptions of dating apps and another, reported by eWeek, examined artificial intelligence.
Indeed, the reality is that, more than just a forum for scholars to present their research, the CRC has been helping its fellows produce research that has been covered in national news media, from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to CNN. That’s research that matters.
By: Amanda King
On September 21st, Boston University’s College of Communication welcomed the Dean’s Advisory Board to 640 Commonwealth Avenue. The Advisory Board is a critical component to the success of COM, allowing accomplished individuals from within the industry to offer their knowledge and expertise. These visits help to bridge the gap between industry and academia, creating an ever-evolving learning environment designed for the benefit of students and faculty alike.
Beginning with some back-to-school highlights and program reviews, the day began on a high point, celebrating the successes of the previous year. Program reviews of various departments gave industry leaders and BU faculty a platform to develop next steps. Before breaking for lunch and mingling with the Dean’s Council – leadership within the college – the COM IT team unveiled the newly revamped Studio West, a space for students to evolve their storytelling.
Following lunch, the Board reconvened for a discussion surrounding the future of Journalism at Boston University. Ensuring the continued future of journalistic integrity and relevancy starts with the students’ curriculum. Updates with Development and BU Trustees, respectively, followed.
A tour of the Communication Research Center by the Associate Dean of Research, Dr. Michelle Amazeen, commenced after a short walk to 704 Commonwealth Avenue. The CRC is a collaborative research environment, where both faculty and students can test their theories using cutting-edge technology. Dr. Jim Cummings, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies, graciously led a demonstration using the CRC’s biometric technologies, which gather and enable analysis of imperceptible changes in participants’ physiology. Using galvanic skin response sensors and eye-tracking, he demonstrated how researchers are able to glean insight from the most minute eye movements and heartbeats.
The turn of the evening brought no less excitement with it as the Dean’s Advisory Board spent time conversing with tomorrow’s top-communicators in an intellectual exchange facilitated by Dean Mariette DiChristina. In anticipation of the Black Media Symposium the following day, the Board met with many media professionals, symposium speakers, and titans in their fields, and shared perspectives on breaking barriers facing Black voices.
The visit was a resounding success and we look forward to welcoming the Board back in 2024.
By: Snigdha Bhowmik
In this era of digital communication, we have become accustomed to sharing our lives with the world, one screenshot at a time. Whether it's a hilarious meme, an inspirational quote, or a juicy tidbit from a private conversation, the act of capturing what's on our screens has become second nature. But let's pause for a moment and consider something that most of us have overlooked: screenshots can be a privacy issue, and it's high time we pay attention.
Alexis Shore, Ph.D. Candidate of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University’s College of Communication will be presenting her research on the topic “Platforms as Rulemakers for Interpersonal Communication: The Case of The Screenshot Feature” as part of the Communication Research Center Colloquium Series. Shore aims to make people think about taking screenshots in a new and safe way through her talk.
Screenshots can be incredibly handy. They allow us to save information, document conversations, and share content quickly. However, their normalization in today’s society comes with a significant privacy trade-off, one that we often downplay or ignore.
When asked about why she believes this topic is relevant in today’s age, Shore said “We use digital communication every day to talk to people so this privacy issue overlaying our conversations threatens our ability to speak to each other. We don’t use texting to just talk about surface-level mundane things, we use it to gossip and share secrets.” The very existence of the screenshot feature makes us fear disclosing intimate details about our lives via text message and also hinders our ability to talk candidly in person, she explains. You never know when your privacy and expectations are violated because now they leave behind a digital paper trail that can never be erased.
This talk will apply an extended version of communication privacy management theory (CPM) to study screenshot collection and sharing of private digital messages. Recommendations for future study and design of the screenshot feature, as well as its broader implications for interpersonal surveillance, will be discussed. To learn more about privacy management decisions and perceptions, join us on 28th September at COM 209 from 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM. You’ll definitely leave the room thinking twice about capturing your next screenshot.
By: Michelle Amazeen
With the start of the academic year, I’d like to welcome you to the fall 2023 semester and share some information about the CRC.
First established at Boston University in 1959, the CRC serves to support its fellows as thought leaders who advance communication-related theory and methods in addressing society’s challenges. We are located in the lower level (basement) of Alden Hall at 704 Commonwealth Avenue. You can read about our facilities and technologies and bookmark our website at https://sites.bu.edu/crc/.
We are excited to welcome our new full-time Lab and Research Manager, Amanda King, effective September 18th. Amanda is a COM graduate, earning a Master's in Emerging Media Studies in 2021. We are joined by three graduate students who will be working in the Center this fall:
This fall, we have several events lined up:
Colloquium Series:
Dr. Melvin L. DeFleur Distinguished Lecture:
CRC Policies:
Fellows interested in reserving rooms for research purposes or reserving our technologies may do so using QReserve. To make reservations you will need to create your own QReserve account, associated with the CRC. Instructions for how to do so are included in the CRC Resource Guide. New and returning fellows are encouraged to review the CRC Resource Guide to (re)familiarize yourselves with our resources. Please also familiarize yourself with the policies and protocols of conducting research at the CRC, available here. Note: the Request for Research Study Details form (in step 2) is currently not available. To help us plan for use of the CRC this fall, in lieu of this form please email the following information to crccom@bu.edu.
For researchers planning to use the SONA Research Participation Pool, the CRC will continue to offer its COM Research Review Board (RRB) as an alternative to IRB for review of survey-based studies that adhere to the COM Master Protocol. To fairly allocate the workload, all faculty fellows who utilize SONA are expected to serve on the RRB.
For the fall 2023 semester, we will be unable to accept the use of SONA for class projects of individual students. Should you be willing to oversee the administration of such an effort as chair of the COM SONA Review Board, please email me.
Finally, please join me in welcoming several new CRC fellows who are now part of the COM community:
I wish you all a successful start to the fall semester and look forward to seeing you in the CRC.
By: Michelle Amazeen
The billion-dollar blockbuster movie this summer was Barbie. As I prepared to go see it with my mother in July, I reminded myself that I was going to see what amounts to a 2-hour advertisement for a child’s toy, a practice also known as branded entertainment. As a scholar who studies covert influence, I am particularly aware of the goals of this strategy: don’t make the content into an explicit sales pitch but also create positive associations for your brand. While not as insidious as branded content that imitates news, the commercialization of media content – especially content directed at children – has been expanding.
This technique isn’t new. In 1931, the radio drama “March of Time” documented the work of journalists by reenacting famous news events such as the Hindenburg disaster or the disappearance of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart. In reality, it was actually branded content, produced by Madison Avenue ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) that was intended to cross promote Time magazine to radio audiences. In other words, it was an ad, just like the Barbie movie.
Watching the movie with this critical mind-set, I found myself enjoying it more than I expected. As a misinformation researcher, I was surprised by the intellectual winks to psychological theories such as Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance and William J. McGuire’s inoculation theory. As one Barbie says to another, “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power.” That is, exposing patriarchy will build immunity against it. Alas, just talking about patriarchy doesn’t confer resistance to it. Indeed, most Americans believe there is more work to do in attaining gender equality.
Although I enjoyed the movie, my expertise is not in examining media representations. This expertise is, however, in the purview of the Communication Research Center’s newest Fellow, Dr. AnneMarie McClain. As an Assistant Professor of Media Science, Dr. McClain focuses on understanding how media – and conversations around media – can be used to promote positive outcomes for children and families, especially marginalized children and families. I asked Dr. McClain her thoughts on the Barbie movie, and this is what she shared:
The girl power! The outsmarting of the boys! The nostalgic rollerblades! As a millennial who loved Barbies, there were many elements of the new Barbie movie that struck right to my childhood core. However, as a mother raising small children and an academic who studies representation and identity socialization, it is important to highlight that the film missed some opportunities to be truly expansive in its representation and boundary-pushing.
The film had loud chords of feminism, some progressive commentary on various issues in our real human world, and unflinchingly included a trans Barbie, Barbies with bigger bodies, and dolls of various ethnic-racial identities as just part of the gang. Yet, the film largely stuck to the gender binary: real and fictional worlds of only females and males, rendering nonbinary individuals, gender fluid people, and people of other genders essentially invisible. The theory of invisibility (Fryberg & Townsend, 2008) suggests that without representation, it becomes harder to see yourself positively and to navigate your environments. The film missed moments to capture how the Barbie franchise has inspired people of all genders, not just girls. Importantly, Mattel has a line called Creatable World with dolls that can change their gender expression; featuring those dolls in the film, too, would have more accurately represented the world that we live in -- and that we need to celebrate.
Additionally, although the film featured BIPOC Barbie and human characters, the favorite doll of the Latine family was the white so-called "stereotypical Barbie.” This racial element was never addressed. Given concerns about how play may reflect BIPOC girls’ beliefs about their identity (e.g., Sturdivant & Alanis, 2021), this wide-reaching film missed opportunities to explicitly affirm that brown and Black dolls can be favorites, too. Barbieland also had a Barbie-version Mount Rushmore replica, a monument of European settlers carved into the sacred Black Hills of the Lakota Sioux, along with an unnecessary analogy that referenced smallpox harming Indigenous populations. Though these examples were not the center of the film, they could cause harm to Indigenous communities, who are already unfairly and minimally represented in U.S. media (e.g., Leavitt et al., 2015). The film also leaves room for more sensitive language around mental health – for example, it could have avoided using ableist language like “crazy” and “insane” and removed the commercial that makes light of mental health challenges where various conditions like OCD were “sold separately.” The Barbie movie tried to drive home an important message about how girls and women can be anything they want to be, but it could have also more explicitly celebrated another key part of inclusivity as well: that whoever any of us are is already enough, too.
While it might be unfair to demand a summer movie be all things to all people, Barbie’s social failures go beyond identity dynamics.
In an interesting postscript to the movie, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) – an environmental activist group – employed a classic technique of protest, called culture jamming, to draw attention to the overwhelming use of plastics in society. Given how much oil it takes to produce a single Barbie, more than three cups, the environmental damage caused by the production of Barbies and all of her accessories is concerning to those who care about the environment. The BLO produced a series of press releases purportedly from Mattel that announced its commitment to entirely stop using plastics by 2030 as well as the launch of a new decomposible line of Barbie dolls made from organic materials such as mushrooms, algae, seaweed, clay, and bamboo. At least three national news organizations fell for the influence campaign and published articles about the pledge and new doll line including People, The Washington Times, and Dow News Wire.
In response to questions about the ethics of their culture jamming efforts, a BLO activist stated that, “What we’re fighting against is half a century of misinformation from the plastics industry and from fossil fuel companies and interests that are trying to convince people that recycling is a viable solution to the plastic waste problem.”
Thus, the Barbie movie has been a case study in how covert influence campaigns are being used to both entertain us as well as to hold powerful corporate interests to account.