Shear Colbert Symposium “Fact or Fake: Information Today”
Marshalltown Community College will host the Shear Colbert Symposium on the theme of “Fact or Fake: Information Today” with three speakers this spring. The lecture series
was organized by Dr. Tom Colbert in 1984 as a memorial to his predecessor, Professor George A. Shear.
The Symposium will begin with the lecture “If It’s Fake, It Can’t Be News” with speaker Rekha Basu on Thursday, February 24, from 11 am to noon in Dejardin Hallon the MCC campus and also via Zoom.
Longtime Des Moines Register columnist, Basu, has written news stories and opinion commentaries for print and online publications, blogged, been a guest on national TV talk shows, been syndicated by various wire services and hosted an online talk show of her own. She’ll talk about what separates legitimate news from agenda-driven propaganda, why it can be hard to tell the difference, and why society suffers when the two are confused.
Basu contends that “some politicians like to dismiss any news that doesn’t favor them as ‘fake news.’ Some interest groups have set up websites promoting stories purporting to be news but which are in fact concocted to fit an agenda. And now the Iowa Senate will no longer allow news reporters from mainstream Iowa news outlets on the Senate floor to report on the proceedings. Senate leaders claim they can’t determine which of the multiple print, online, blogger, radio or TV news sources are worthy of inclusion.”
On Thursday, March 31, the second lecture “Fakes, Hacks, Fibs & Tales: Journalism Ethics” will be presented by Dr. Michael Bugeja, Iowa State University
Bugeja teaches media ethics and technology and social change. His scholarship has been published in Journalism Quarterly, Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, Journalism Educator, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, New Media and Society, American Journalism, American Communication Journal, and other academic journals.
Dr. Bugeja has published 24 books across genres, including three books by Oxford University Press: Interpersonal Divide: Searching for Community in a Technological Age; Interpersonal Divide in the Age of the Machine; and Living Ethics Across Media Platforms. He has twice won the distinguished Clifford Christians Award for Research in Media Ethics. His latest work is Living Media Ethics: Across Platforms, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2019. In 2019, Dr. Bugeja received Iowa State’s highest academic title of distinguished professor for his contributions to media ethics and technology. Of the more than 225 faculty members to receive this title since 1956, fewer than 12 have been so named in the humanities.
Bugeja’s presentation explores how journalism, especially news, has eroded over time, leading to a culture of lies exacerbated by social media. Worse, journalism has resorted to talking heads rather than to reporters in the field, drowning us in a sea of opinion. This has led to a consumer world without “why.” The internet promised a global village. What we got was a global mall. We use mobile technology to such extent that ethical values—truth, responsibility, fairness, justice, dignity, et. al.—have been replaced by machine values, such as importance of self over others, boredom over attentiveness, oversharing over privacy, affirmation over information. The long-term solution is teaching media and technology literacy in the schools. The short-term solution is to restore truth in your everyday life.
The final speaker on Thursday, April 14 is Drake University STEM Librarian and Associate Professor of Librarianship Dan Chibnall. His lecture is entitled
Professor Chibnall is an academic librarian specializing in embedded librarianship, information literacy skills, science communication, and helping students become better researchers. He works closely with STEM faculty & students at Drake University while also teaching courses titled “Science Fiction, Science Fact,” “Communicating Science,” “Fake News, Filters, & Falsehoods,” & “Science & Democracy.”
Chibnall’s presentation will explore how a multitude of different information behaviors, cognitive processes, mobile technologies, & personal expectations of information retrieval have enlarged old social problems & created new ones. Humans have always created, sought out, analyzed, & applied information in the past, but our technology has now accelerated beyond our traditional behaviors, allowing us to have wholly new relationships with data, facts, & scientific realities. The solutions to dealing with these problems, both old & new, do exist but they must come from a variety of different disciplines and areas of life and will require all of us to become not just better consumers and creators of information, but also better sharers.
All the lectures will be available via Zoom at https://iavalley.zoom.us/j/94078727759 or link through the MCC calendar. For more information about the Symposium, visit the Symposium website at https://sites.google.com/view/shearcolbertsymposium/2021-2022.