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Author Claire Potter will talk about her new book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy, with guests: Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, David Greenberg, and Nicole Hemmer.
A wide-ranging history of seventy years of change in political media, and how it transformed — and fractured — American politics.
With fake news on Facebook, trolls on Twitter, and viral outrage everywhere, it’s easy to believe that the internet changed politics entirely. In Political Junkies, historian Claire Bond Potter shows otherwise, revealing the roots of today’s dysfunction by situating online politics in a longer history of alternative political media.
From independent newsletters in the 1950s to talk radio in the 1970s to cable television in the 1980s, pioneers on the left and right developed alternative media outlets that made politics more popular, and ultimately, more partisan. When campaign operatives took up e-mail, blogging, and social media, they only supercharged these trends. At a time when political engagement has never been greater and trust has never been lower, Political Junkies is essential reading for understanding how we got here.
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Presented by the Democracy Seminar & the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, at The New School for Social Research.
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Claire Potter is professor of history at the New School for Social Research and co-executive editor at Public Seminar.
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
The Democracy Seminar is a project convened by publisher and founding editor Jeffrey Goldfarb and senior editors Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey C. Isaac. This world-wide discussion among pro-democracy intellectuals and activists addresses the political, social and cultural obstacles to democratic governance; investigates the rise and appeal of illiberal philosophies and practices; and explores ways for rolling back autocratic politics. Read here about the first international meeting of the DS project.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies hosts transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
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Claire Potter is professor of history at the New School for Social Research and co-executive editor at Public Seminar.
Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Koźmiński University, author of books, Reshaping Poland’s Community after Communism: Ordinary Celebrations (Palgrave, 2019) and Marxism and Sociology: A Selection of Writings by Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Brill, 2018). Her research interests include post-1989 democratic transformation and the public sphere, everyday practices, as well as media in political and cultural change. Her current project focuses on politics in online tabloids in Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States in the context of 2015-16 elections and the role of emotions in the online public sphere.
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
He also runs the Democracy Seminar, a worldwide committee of scholars, journalists, activists, and citizens who seek to understand the origins of the threats, to analyze their dimensions and, most importantly, to exchange ideas and experiences about how to oppose them.
David Greenberg is a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a frequent commentator in the national news media on contemporary politics and public affairs. He specializes in American political and cultural history. His most recent book, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton, 2016) examines the rise of the White House spin machine, from the Progressive Era to the present day, and the debates that Americans have waged over its implications for democracy.
Prof. Greenberg’s first book, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003) won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Award, and Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Award. Calvin Coolidge (Henry Holt), a biography for the American Presidents Series, was published in December 2006 and appeared on the Washington Post’s list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles (Basic Books, 2006) was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”
Formerly a full-time journalist, Prof. Greenberg is now a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, where he writes a regular column. He previously served as managing editor and acting editor of The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor until the magazine’s death-in-all-but-name in 2014. Early in his career, he was the assistant to author Bob Woodward on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (Simon & Schuster, 1994). He has also been a regular contributor to Slate since its founding and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Daedalus, Dissent, Raritan, and many other scholarly and popular publications.
His awards and honors include the Hiett Prize in 2008, given each year to a single junior scholar in the humanities whose work has had a public influence; a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. He graduated from Yale, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his PhD from Columbia. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Suzanne Nossel, and their children, Leo and Liza.
Nicole Hemmer is an Associate Research Scholar at the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Penn Press, 2016). She is co-founder and editor of Made by History at the Washington Post, as well as a columnist for Vox and The Age in Melbourne. From 2013-2018, she wrote a weekly column on politics and history for U.S. News & World Report. She created and co-hosts Past Present, a weekly podcast where three historians discuss the latest news in American politics and culture. She has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Politico, NPR, and CNN, among others.
