Sep 30, 2025 | Blog, Energy Transition Policy & Policymaking, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report (CPR), wrote a column last month for CPR (behind a pay wall) about gerrymandering that began this way: After 47 years at The Washington Post, Dan Balz recently announced he is stepping back from his role as the...
Sep 19, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
As we watch the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) use its power to stifle political dissent, we should step back and look at the story of how we got here. It is a story about the simultaneous (re)concentration of economic power, on the one hand, and the...
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...
