Sep 10, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Readers of this blog are regularly subjected to my whining about people ignoring what empirical social science research has to say about the roots of our political dysfunction. 🙂 In the Internet era, having an opinion and commanding an audience passes for deep...
Sep 4, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
In Climate of Contempt I lament the way today’s political information environment breeds so much interpartisan fear, anger, and distrust that we “under-attend[] to the health of our democratic institutions.”[1] But one thing I did not do in my book was to...
Aug 25, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
One of the consequences of our balkanized, fractured, and insular information environment is that fringe political movements can grow more efficiently, away from public view. People who share the same false beliefs and harbor the same political resentments can nurture...
Jul 26, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
The Trump Administration has given people who care about the environment a lot to be alarmed about. The president has (i) used mass firings at the EPA and DOE to hobble those agencies’ ability to execute laws that promote clean energy, (ii) refused to enforce...
May 4, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
[This is the last post in a multi-part look at new books addressing what we know, and don’t know, about today’s politics. Part 1 is here; part 2 is here; and part 3 is here.] The Final Book: Focus on Public Debate The books we have reviewed to date have...
Apr 12, 2025 | Blog, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
As a couple of billionaires (or one billionaire and one pretender) run roughshod over legal standards and democratic norms, it reinforces the suspicion that economic elites get the policies that they want at the expense of the public interest. Folk wisdom says that he...