Enemy of the People? Press, Politics, and Public Debate

• Thomas Chatterton Williams, Journalist and JMU Writer in Residence
• Catrin Gersdorf, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Chair of American Studies
• Joshua Yaffa, Moscow Correspondent, the New Yorker Magazine
• Peter Hoeres, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Lehrstuhl für Neueste Geschichte
• Andreas Jungbauer, Redaktionsleiter der Mainpost

The press has been called many things and assigned varying roles in the public debates of modernity. Early popular printing aligned itself with the voice of the people. Later political thinkers enthroned the press as a fourth estate or power able to balance established political institutions. In the current moment, however, journalists more regularly find themselves accused of partisanship, dissimulation, and overall destructiveness summed up in the Stalinesque phrase "enemy of the people." This panel brings together journalists and scholars to assess contemporary press cultures and the possibilities they offer for productive debate in an age of "Twitter Rage" and supposedly "Fake News".

View also https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/schreibzentrum/writer-in-residence/