UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public | Facts Under Fire: Reporting in Impossible Times

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The Forum for the Academy and the Public’s 2025 annual conference will explore the varied ways that journalism and journalists are under fire with autocratic trends threatening democracy and democratic institutions in the United States and around the world. Co-directed by Amy Wilentz (Professor of English, UCI and prize-winning author) and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Chancellor’s Professor of History, UCI with courtesy School of Law), the event will move from newsrooms to battlefields via lively discussions among experts from a diverse range of contexts.

Dean Austen Parrish will deliver welcoming remarks and Professors David Kaye and Elizabeth Loftus are included among the event speakers.

One focus will be on coverage of the two great global problems of our era: the rise of powerful and potentially dangerous technologies; and the threat of climate change. We’ll look at how and why these topics are reported or not reported. We’ll also discuss how political actors are quashing policy debates and putting forward false narratives. We’ll consider the decline of the newspaper and the media in general, as social media takes hold of the public’s mind and platforms like “X” morph from user-friendly discussion forums into politically charged platforms controlled by billionaires, and filled with bots, trolls, and AI-generated deep fakes. What is real and what is fabricated in stories about wars and elections? How does the blurring of lines between credible and misleading forms of information impact  our political discourse, our culture, and the very future of humankind, as we face a variety of unprecedented (and largely underreported) existential threats?

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