Research Event: Trust and the Media Event

Description of talk

We live in an age of mass communication. Information and opinion circulate at speed around digital networks that have enabled the conversations we are able to have among ourselves as individuals and as citizens. Governments, too, seize the opportunities afforded by expanding technologies of communication not only to inform their citizenry but to manage opinion, shape expectations, and persuade of their own legitimacy. We see this close to home with the recent creation of a Downing Street Press Briefing Room wherein the image of the British government is to be carefully curated through narratives presented to the press. But the process is not without risk. Seeking to command the narrative may stretch the boundaries of the credible, as the recent publication of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report on racism (March 2021) suggests.
Yet these dynamics around the exploitation and control of available media by public authorities have deep historical roots. What form media takes varies across the ages and can encompass diverse forms of the written word as well as images. This panel event seeks to open up a conversation about the workings of trust in the media across historical time and place.

Speaker Information

Dr Jennifer Gaskell (Political Science) is a research fellow on the TrustGov project. Her presentation draws on insights from a first-of-its-kind comparative qualitative study of political trust using focus group discussions in eight countries: the UK, US, Australia, Italy, Croatia, the Philippines, Argentina and Zimbabwe. It will present a citizen perspective on their interactions with different sources and types of media and information and how these relate to their political trust generally, and in the context of the COVID pandemic.

Dr Elisabeth Forster (History) is a specialist in modern China. Her talk focuses on how Chinese newspapers spread rumours and conspiracy theories about intellectuals during protests in 1919 against the clause in the Treaty of Versailles that gave German colonial concessions in China to Japan. It shows how this press strategy inadvertently created one of the most important cultural turning points in China's modern history.

Dr Priti Mishra (History) specialises in modern India. The talk explores the implications of one of the first major sedition trials aimed at a newspaper editor in colonial India during the Plague Epidemic of 1897. By drawing parallels between State intervention in media freedom during the 1897 Plague Epidemic and the present Covid pandemic, the talk will unravel the fraught connections between bio-political crisis and authoritarian censorship.

Dr Annelies Cazemier (History) is a specialist in ancient Greece. Her talk discusses a public announcement made by the Romans at the Isthmian Games of 196 BCE, in which they declared the city-states of Greece free. It considers the setting in which this political message was broadcast and explains how it was received. The Romans capitalised on Greek religious sites and festivals as places of communication, but the question is whether they lived up to their promise.

This panel event will take place via Microsoft Teams. Please ensure you book a place to receive the meeting link. The deadline for bookings is 12pm on 09/06/21.