Media

Over the course of my career, I strived to be a public, outward-facing academic whose work does not just analyze media but also strives to impact the broader media ecosystem and intervene in national debates over politics, pop culture and technology. I have collaborated with journalists from top media organizations to translate theoretical concepts for popular audiences and to frame news stories using historical context and empirical support. Experiencing media production from a journalist practitioner’s perspective has, in turn, enriched and sharpened my academic analysis of mass communication.

Newspapers

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 (November 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) 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 November of 2021, I worked with Vice TV’s popular Dark Side of the 90’s series on an episode about Rupert Murdoch’s impact on American journalism. The episode is framed around a subchapter of Fox Populism entitled, “Tabloids for Television: A Current Affair, Inside Edition and Bill O’Reilly before Bill O’Reilly.” I am featured in this episode as a commentator, which debuted on national television on July 12, 2022.

—The Young Turks: The Conversation, “Reece Peck Breaks Down The Rise Of Right Wing Media” (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). “El boom dels mitjans ultraconservadors, l’exèrcit més lleial i indispensable per Trump.”

—Class & the Everyday podcast (Oct 22, 2020). “Fox Populism, Reece Peck.”

—NowThisNews podcast (Dec 17, 2019). “Who is Fox News?”

—Kongressen (Oct 2, 2019). “Fox News har ændret mediebilledet i USA for altid.”

—Another God Damn Podcast (Jun 19, 2019). “My Interview with Reece Peck.”

—New Books in Political Science podcast (Mar 8, 2019). “Reece Peck’s Fox Populism”

—WNBC New York (July 21, 2016). “Roger Ailes Resigns from Fox News.”

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

In the last two US 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. In 2020, all of Trump’s demographic gains came from the ranks of the uncredentialed (Pew, 2021). And this type of educational polarization is not unique to American politics either. As Piketty et al.’s recent research has empirically established (2021), it reflects a global trend that structures left/right sociopolitical divisions in almost every major Western democracy. Understanding the cultural-educational basis of partisan identity (and by extension partisan media) has never been more urgent than the present moment.

Seeking to address this sociopolitical divide, feminist legal scholar Joan C. Williams of UC Hastings Law has launched the Diploma Divide working group. This collective includes top political scientists and sociologists who have expertise in the politics of social class and is supported by Rep. Ro Khana—the group’s Honorary Chair—and is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of this working group is to produce accessible articles and white papers that can influence the thinking of policymakers, pollsters, and reporters. I was honored by Dr. Williams’ invitation to join this impressive scholarly group and to have my academic research and popular writing featured on the Diploma Divide website.