Six N.Y. Senators Don Hoodies for #Trayvon Martin

The 'Ground Zero Mosque' Case Study. Today, media provide up-to-date news essentially while events are occurring.  But although many people watch, listen or read breaking news, very few have the knowledge or take the time to assess how events are framed.  That means that sensationalized coverage of breaking events can have a disproportionate impact on how audiences understand key stories in the news.

by Zoe Pollock Scott Horton interviewed father and son Charles and Gregory Fried about their book, Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Horton asked why they paired torture with privacy and surveillance: [After 9/11] the general public, and even the informed public, reacted as if both transgressions were equally serious and equally deserving of condemnation. Indeed, there may have been a markedly greater tolerance of torture than of surveillance—maybe because few of us expect to undergo torture, but all feel our phones or Internet may be tapped into. This gets things exactly wrong.…

The Power of Pop Culture. The following is a guest post from Dr. Hussein Rashid, a member of the Our Shared Future Advisory Board. Dr. Rashid took part in our recent panel discussion, “Across the Atlantic: Islam, the West and the Repercussions of 9/11.”