about
Summit brings together news executives
to tackle an immediate threat facing
democracy and the news ecosystem:
misinformation at scale.
The scourge of misinformation threatens the very foundations of the news media. It is journalists who must be the bulwark against this rising and continuously flowing tide, and it is the directors and executives of news organizations who must convey to their staff the primacy of this problem. The News Leaders program brings these executives and journalists together with academics to develop best practices that the industry can uphold to protect the information ecosystem from the corrosive forces of misinformation-at-scale.
On the Technology and Social Change Project (TASC) at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, our research into misinformation shows that journalists are crucial to fighting this problem, but are also uniquely vulnerable to accidentally accelerating it. The Media Manipulation life cycle model, developed by Dr. Joan Donovan and TASC team, shows that when manipulators attempt to hijack the public’s attention with falsehoods, it is the decisions made by reporters and editors that can make all the difference. How a story is framed, when it is reported on, the words leading a headline — all of these choices made quickly and on deadline have ripple effects throughout the information ecosystem, and can mean the difference between a lie that’s dead on arrival, and — lies so big they lead to political violence and undermine democracy.
Newsrooms must develop protocols and systems to allow journalists to weigh their choices when it comes to how and when to cover misinformation, and how to avoid being hoaxed by disinformation. But it is unreasonable to ask every journalist to be steeped in the research into how propaganda works and how technology is changing and amplifying it. So, we at TASC have created this program to arm leaders from across the country with best practices tailored to the specific needs of their newsrooms.
From 2021-2023, the News Leaders program brought together small cohorts of press leaders to tackle the problem of misinformation-at-scale and media manipulation. Over the course of a semester, the News Leaders work with one another and the TASC team- including Research Director Joan Donovan (PhD), Associate Director Brandi Collins-Dexter (JD), Senior Researcher Dr. Rob Faris (JD), and journalist Emily Dreyfuss, to develop standards and practices to handle this threat to the media ecosystem and the functioning of democracy.