Daniel Hallin, professor and chair of Communication at the University of California, San Diego will present talks on February 23 and 24 as part of the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Mellon-funded Grants Workshop Speaker Series. Hallin is an expert on political communication and the role of the news media in democracies. The talks are co-sponsored by the Center for Communication and Sustainable Social Change, the Center for the Study of Communication, and the Department of Communication.
Hallin’s first talk, “Comparing Media Systems: Beyond the Western World,” will be at 4 p.m. on February 23, and his second talk, “Health and the Public Sphere: The Politicization of Health Reporting, 1960s-2000s,” will be at 12 p.m. on February 24. Both talks are in the Campus Center Room 803.
Hallin’s talk on media systems will extend the analysis presented in his 2004 book with Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. In that work, the authors focused on democracies in Western Europe and North America to determine the influence of different political systems on the media and, in turn, the sway of the media on politics. Hallin’s talk at UMass will focus on his current comparative research, which draws on data from Latin America and other non-Western regions of the world.
Hallin’s talk on health reporting will focus on changes in newspaper coverage of medicine and public health over five decades, based on a content analysis of articles from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. His analysis, conducted with Charles Briggs, suggests a complex pattern that includes a growing emphasis on controversy in health reporting and a more critical stance toward medical authorities—a move toward a “public sphere model” in which recipients of health information are conceived as citizens or policymakers (as opposed to, for example, patients or consumers).
Daniel Hallin has written widely on media and politics, including war coverage, television news “soundbites,” and the history of American journalism. His books include The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam and We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere.
While at UMass, Hallin will also mentor Assistant Professor of Communication Emily West, who is developing a grant proposal for support of her research on consumer subjectivity in health care.
Hallin’s visit is also sponsored by the UMass Amherst Office of Faculty Development’s Mutual Mentoring Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Both talks are free and open to the public.