On the afternoon of June 19th, our school invited Professor Lars Willnat from Syracuse University to give a lecture entitled “News Media in Trump Times”, aiming to expand students' international horizons and help students establish globalization. Communication concept.
Lecture site
Professor Lars Willnat first analyzed the case of how Trump, the US President, used digital media to disseminate information, and introduced Trump's long-standing false news phenomenon to the public's vision after he was elected. He pointed out that Trump used the ulterior motive to hurt the competitors, denied the results of the polls, and denied the authenticity of the news of traditional media such as CNN and the New York Times. The criterion for judging the true and false news is only whether the content is reported. Good for one's own side. Despite this, Trump's every tweet has been tens of thousands of likes and forwards. Professor Lars Willnat believes that the Twitter President frequently judges the authenticity of news by himself, which leads to the decline of American people's trust in social media and the increase in trust in traditional media such as newspapers and television.
Later, Professor Lars Willnat also pointed out that technological development has helped the threat of false news production to the current media environment. Because false news is often more shocking and interesting than facts and truth, it spreads faster and has a greater impact. The development of science and technology provides support for improving the authenticity of fake news. Taking video face-changing as an example, people can use AI and other technologies to forge news videos and audio. As the technology is iterated and matured, seeing The proposition that is true is already facing challenges, and the false video that is illusory is more and more difficult to distinguish.
In response to the question of how to identify increasingly variable news in a complex media environment, Professor Lars Willnat said that we must understand that the truth is above everything else and learn to think critically. He suggested that the media literacy education should start from the dolls and cultivate children's critical thinking from an early age. At the same time, the audience should fully understand the media's information screening cost and raise the information consumption habits of high-quality news payment.
Teacher and student photo
Finally, the students asked questions to Professor Lars Willnat about the subject matter of the lecture. Professor Lars Willnat affirmed the seriousness of the students and answered them. Trump's tweet governance has had a certain negative impact on the news media industry. At the same time, it also makes people pay more attention to and think about the authenticity of news. This is not the era of a certain individual, and each of us is hard to stay out of the way. (copywriting/lisha, Luo Yunjuan, Yang Can)
Guest Profile: Lars Willnat is Professor of John Ben Snow at the Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. He was the head of the Department of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky. He was at Indiana University, George Washington University and Hong Kong. He teaches at the Chinese University and has lectured and researched in more than 30 countries. He has served as a special professor of “****” in China and a Fulbright research scholar in Malaysia and South Korea. Since 2019, he has also served as a researcher at the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China. His teaching and research direction includes news research, public opinion, media effects, international communication, etc. He has published more than 50 journal articles and book titles, and co-edited and published five books.
