Mar 30, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
“All culture is Internet culture.” – Taylor Lorenz (technology and media writer) The first two months of the second Trump administration are best understood as a kind of retributive lashing out at the people who MAGA voters believe have been attacking,...
Feb 25, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
I recently began teaching a course on the regulation of “networks, platforms and public utilities,” using a 2022 casebook by the same name. It is from a group of progressive legal scholars who are trying to recover the national memory of the public interest reasons...
Feb 15, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
Much of the energy world is waiting on the Trump Administration to disperse funds that Congress directed to be used to support specific types of energy projects. The Administration’s withholding of that money is just one small stream in a firehose of illegal,...
Oct 30, 2024 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
One of the recurring themes in Climate of Contempt is that while modern media doesn’t change human nature, it does amplify the worst aspects of human nature in powerful ways. The book recommends extended political dialogue across ideological and partisan boundaries, a...
Jul 15, 2024 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism
In an earlier post I noted the growing list of scholars who warn of parallels between historical transitions from democracy to repressive dictatorships, on the one hand, and U.S. politics today, on the other. Part of what they see has to do with the recent...