Featuring Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of FactCheck.org.
This talk is sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics’ Public Affairs Speaker Series and the Center for Science Communication Research (SCR). It is made possible in part by the Richard W. and Laurie Johnston Lecture Fund.
Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. She has authored or co-authored 16 books, including Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, which won the Association of American Publishers’ 2019 R.R. Hawkins Award and was published in a revised paperback edition by Oxford University Press in June 2020. Among her other award-winning books are Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella) and The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy). In 2020, the National Academy of Sciences awarded Jamieson its Public Welfare Medal for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues.”
In 2003, Jamieson cofounded FactCheck.org, the non-profit non-partisan website that describes itself as a “consumer advocate for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” In 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, and from 2014-2019, FactCheck won Webby Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for being the best Politics site (the Webbys have been called the “Oscars of the Internet”).
Jamieson is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association. For her contributions to the study of political communication, she received the American Political Science Association’s Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award in 1995. In 2016, the American Philosophical Society awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities.