Media

In a moment of extreme political polarization and communication crisis, there has never been a more important time for media scholars to intervene in public debates over media and politics. Over the course of my career, I strived to be a outward-facing academic whose work does not just analyze media but also strives to impact the national discourse.

Newspapers

CBC-Radio (Dec 20, 2025), Reuters (Oct 24, 2025), Deseret News (Oct 10, 2025), Salon (July 31, 2025), Mother Jones (July 22, 2025), AFP (June 18, 2025), The Observer (May 18, 2025), New York Times (Apri 27, 2025), Barron’s (Jan 25, 2025), Politico (Jan 9, 2025), Politico (Jan 2, 2025), Yahoo! Noticias (Dec 27, 2024), Deseret News (Dec 21, 2024), Press Watch (Dec 12, 2024),Yahoo! News (Nov 22, 2024), NBC News (Nov 15, 2024), NBC News (Sep 7, 2024), NBC News (August 31, 2024), Salon.com (Aug 27, 2024), Salon.com (July 24, 2024), Salon.com (July 3, 2024), Progressive Texas (July 2, 2024), Salon.com (June 26, 2024), Slate (May 19, 2024), NBC News (Oct 4, 2023), AFP/Yahoo News! (Sep 22, 2023) NBC News (June 16,2023), NBC News (May 29, 2023), Salon.com (June 5, 2023), Salon.com (April 28, 2023), Fair.org (April 24, 2023), Washington Post (Jan 23, 2023), New York Times (Nov 5, 2022), Salon.com (Aug 29, 2022), Snopes (Aug 23, 2022), Billboard (Aug 15, 2022), The Boston Globe (Nov 27, 2021), Illiberalism Studies Program (Nov 17, 2021), Deseret News (Sep 30, 2021), Forbes (Feb 10, 2021) The Boston Globe (Feb 9, 2021) The Daily Telegraph (Nov 7, 2020) Asahi Shimbun (Nov 2, 2020) Vice News (Oct 29, 2020) The Washington Post (Sep 3, 2020) Insider (July 28, 2020) Weekendavisen (Mar 12, 2020), Columbia Journalism Review (March 4, 2020) Columbia Journalism Review (Jan 23, 2020) Newsday (May 26, 2019), Clarion (May 13, 2019), Business Insider (Nov 26, 2018) The Washington Post (Oct 8, 2018) New York Magazine (Nov 2, 2017) Agence France-Presse/Yahoo! News (Sept 20, 2017) Business Insider (May 18, 2017) The Dallas Morning News (Feb 16, 2016).

Television, radio & podcasting

In 2021, I worked closely with Vice TV’s popular Dark Side of the 90s series on its sixth episode “Tabloid TV” about Rupert Murdoch’s role in tabloidizing American journalism. The episode was structured directly around the claims and timeline of my book’s first history chapter, and I appeared in the program itself as an expert commentator. This episode debuted on national television on July 12, 2022.

ESPN 700: The Drive (July 24, 2025) —CNN, The Lead with Jake Tapper (March 13, 2025). —Shifting Terrain (Nov 4, 2024) —ESPN 700: The Drive (July 8, 2024) —Let it Rip, CUNY TV (July 2, 2024) —Free Speech TV (June 28, 2024) —The David Pakman Show (June 18, 2024) —One World, Two Countries (Feb 26, 2024) —Poliittinen Talous (Oct 12, 2023) —The David Pakman Show (June 13, 2023) —NPR-KNKX (June 20, 2023) —CUNY TV (Apr 19, 2023). —The Young Turks (Jan 23, 2023). —Vice TV, Darkside of the 90s, Season 2, Episode 6 “Tabloid TV” (July 12, 2022) —The Michelangelo Signorile Show (June 1, 2022) —TV3 Barcelona (Oct 26, 2020) —Class & the Everyday podcast (Oct 22, 2020). “Fox Populism, Reece Peck.” —NowThisNews podcast (Dec 17, 2019) —Kongressen (Oct 2, 2019) —Another God Damn Podcast (Jun 19, 2019) —New Books in Political Science podcast (Mar 8, 2019) —WNBC New York (July 21, 2016)

Personal YouTube Channel

This personal YouTube channel serves as a repository for video recorded interviews and talks I have given. I thematized and edited some of these clips down to 2 to 3 minute segments to make them more accessible.

Civic activity

Surpassing these media appearances in civic portent, in early 2022 I was among a select group of media scholars that was interviewed by the Congressional Investigatory Committee on January 6. I was asked to provide a written testimony assessing Fox News’s role in fomenting the Capitol riot, which I submitted in April 2022. A version of this analysis will appear in my forthcoming book chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, “The Illiberalism of Fox News: Theorizing nationalism and populism through the case of conservative America’s number news source.”  

Diploma Divide working group

My final research objective is motivated by a sense of civic responsibility. In this moment of extreme polarization and communication crisis, there has never been a more important time for media scholars to intervene in national debates over politics, news, and technology. In the last two U.S. election cycles, the gap between the college-educated and non-college-educated has emerged as one of the most politically salient social divisions in the country. And this type of educational polarization is not unique to American politics either. As recent research has empirically established, educational polarization is a global trend that structures the sociopolitical divisions in almost every major Western democracy.

Last year, I was honored to join a working group called the Diploma Divide that was established to address this very issue. This organization was spearheaded by UC Hastings scholar Joan C. Williams and is comprised of leading sociologists, political scientists, and legal scholars. It receives funding from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and has California Congressman Ro Khanna as its Honorary Chair. The collective’s first conference will convene in San Francisco on November 8. I am one of two media scholars to be given a speaking role. Whereas Fox Populism showed how the conservative network used populist moral narratives and aesthetics to amplify tensions between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans, my work with the Diploma Divide seeks to show how news styles in online independent media could help build a broad coalition and transcend the class-culture gap.