Episode One – Information Environments

It is nearly impossible to avoid the news in modern life. It’s there on your commute, it’s there when you get home, it’s on your facebook feed, on your twitter feed… for many of us, it’s there before we even get out of bed.

Yet many of us are dissatisfied with the news. It is often criticized as failing to cover important issues, or injecting too much bias and slant. Though, without the time to do a ton of independent research, most of us have a hard time explaining exactly what that bias is, or what’s missing. We just have the sense that our news is …incomplete.

And if you’re like most people, the only thing more disturbing than the news you listen to is the news your neighbors listen to. Or maybe your dad listens to. Or your kids.

There was a time where all of America listened to the same news – we had a lodestone where we would all meet – at 6PM every weeknight – and we all got a baseline of information that we could all share, and against which we would all compare notes.

That time is long gone – and you can go your entire life watching news, and yet never once listen to the particular type of news that your neighbor spends HER life watching.

We know that’s doing something to us, as communities, as families, as a nation. But what?

We are going to attempt to tackle that question. But more importantly, we will be giving you the tools to tackle that question for yourself.. Decode the News is not a news digest where we rehash all of the stories of the week one more time through one more perspective, it’s a toolbox that we will build together to help you critically consume information in your life. These tools will be coming from the best of what modern social science has to offer.

My name is Meagan Zurn, but people know me as Zee. I hold a PhD from the London School of Economics where I studied the media coverage of the 2008 Financial Crisis and compared that to how average Americans understood the recession and the economy. What I found was people could be attuned to the news, yet know very little about the actual policies and events that impact our daily lives.

Many people I spoke to had lost their homes, their businesses, and their jobs to the financial crisis, but they couldn’t explain what the financial crisis was. Not even in a really basic way.

Again, this wasn’t because they weren’t watching the news – they all watched it nightly and read the papers. There was a question here that needed to be answered.

Part of that answer became clear when I looked into the news during the financial crisis. Hardly any of the stories during that time actually explained what the crisis was, or who had caused it. Even fewer stories explained potential solutions to the crisis, or things we could do to help prevent such a thing from happening again.

The news has our attention – but what is that attention being awarded with?

This is the question my doctoral work led me to, and that question is still nagging at me. So I am starting this show. This is not the first Podcast I’ve been a part of. Some of you may know me as the co-producer of the British History Podcast, and the creator of that show, Jamie, will be a part of this show as well, though this time he will be my co-producer using his legal background to help me drill down into the issues.

Every week, we will bring you a major story covered in the news – and we are going to break it down together.

This show will also talk about what social science has to say about what the news does to us as individuals and as a society, and what it has to say about the social and economic forces which are shaping modern journalism. There are very smart people doing groundbreaking work on these questions, but hardly anyone knows what they’ve discovered. We will try to fix that problem by bringing you cutting edge research.

My goal for this, again,