Winter 2019
Reel deal: Clark Pederson of Deadliest Catch
Clark Pederson, a Washington State University alumnus, married the daughter of Captain Sig Hansen on TV show Deadliest Catch, and that was just the beginning of the danger. » More ...
Communication, Academic
Winter 2019
Reporting from the hard path
Los Angeles Times reporter Andrea Castillo, a 2012 Washington State University alumna, reports on refugees and immigrants to document history as it unfolds. » More ...
Fall 2018
A formula for funny
When Kelsey Cook ’11 was a junior in college she delivered her first stand-up performance during an open-mic night at a campus dining hall.
“You’re basically intruding on everyone’s dinner,” she recalls. Even if the crowd thought something was funny they had food in their mouth so she couldn’t really hear their reaction.
Cook has since made a name for herself in comedy and last spring made her stand-up debut on The Tonight Show and earned her first credit on Comedy Central.
She was also back on the road performing stand-up, including a weekend last April at the Spokane Comedy Club where a … » More …
Fall 2018
Rescripting gender roles
Sex is everywhere, researchers Stacey Hust and Kathleen Rodgers point out, but, strangely, we get very nervous talking about it—especially with our adolescent children.
That’s a concern to the two Washington State University collaborators, who just published a book, Scripting Adolescent Romance: Adolescents Talk about Romantic Relationships and Media’s Sexual Scripts, that examines the power of media, so chock full of sex and violence, to shape the gender roles of children and adolescents in ways that last a lifetime.
So powerful are the … » More …
Summer 2018
Talkback for Summer 2018
Truth or consequences
I retired in May 2017 after forty-plus years teaching philosophy in various colleges, and I can corroborate the observations of Professor Hindman and Ms. Donaway.
Thirty or forty years ago, people listened to whatever the disc jockey selected for air time. Now, people can drive from Pullman to New York and choose to hear only what they want. One consequence is that young people are trained to think that they never have to hear what they don’t want to hear—including
campus speakers.
The remark, “When you remove truth from the equation, all that is left is power,” captures the … » More …
Spring 2018
Truth or consequences
Fake news nearly started a war between Qatar and its neighbors in 2017. In Pakistan, a highly placed official bought into a fake news story warning that Israel was going to destroy Pakistan, and tweeted a warning at Israel that his country, too, was a nuclear power. And in Washington, D.C., an armed vigilante burst into a pizzeria and fired three shots, thinking he was bringing down a sex-slave ring.
While news has never been neutral, something has changed: Information has become weaponized. What’s changed, says Washington State University communications professor Doug Hindman, is that the marketplace of ideas has broken down under the … » More …
Spring 2018
How to become information literate?
It takes four moves and a habit…
Michael Caulfield’s approach to information literacy is simple. He argues that we should teach students to be fact checkers instead of rhetoricians. In rhetoric, readers spend a great deal of time reading closely, analyzing syntax and word choice for tone. Fact checking, though, is quick, involving only “four moves and a habit,” Caulfield, director of networked and blended learning at WSU Vancouver, says. A recent Stanford University study supports the idea that a fact-checking strategy is superior to close reading.
Look for previous work. When fact-checking a particular claim, the quickest, simplest thing to do is to … » More …
Spring 2018
At Home with Ernie Pyle
Edited by Owen V. Johnson ’68
Indiana University Press: 2016
A glimpse into the life and times of American journalist and Indiana favorite son Ernie Pyle, as seen through an extensive collection of Pyle’s folksy newspaper columns stretching from his student days in 1921 until his death by sniper fire during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
The homespun Hoosier, as Pyle was known, grew up in small-town … » More …
Spring 2018
Living the fighting spirit
Hunting and rodeoing, playing football and singing in the school choir. For Charles Hudson ’84, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in rural North Dakota also meant listening to stories from his Hidatsa mother and white rancher father. One of them was about a huge flood — and it wasn’t a myth.
Six years before Hudson was born, construction of the Garrison Dam submerged 550,000 acres of Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara (the Three Affiliated Tribes) land, resulting in Lake Sakakawea and forcing hundreds of families to flee, including Hudson’s. The tragedy only inspired his parents to triumph over it.
… » More …
Spring 2018
Fact or Fiction? Using the Web to Quickly Fact-check Social Media Feeds
Although titled Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, Michael Caulfield’s book is in fact for all of us. That’s why he subtitled the book as also being for “other people who care about facts.” As he writes, the web “is both the largest propaganda machine ever created and the most amazing fact-checking tool ever invented.”
Most efforts at teaching web literacy have focused, the Washington State University staff member writes, on time-consuming critical thinking and on producing and publishing things on the web. While both are valuable skills, they fail to address the much more urgent need: how to evaluate the information we are presented with … » More …