In democracies, the press has been described as the fourth branch of government because of the essential role that information plays in mobilizing citizens for political action. However, today, the trust that Americans have in mass media is at the lowest point on record. What accounts for this distrust, what political problems does it pose, and how might this situation be remedied? Hamilton accurately observed, "Men are governed by opinion," but immediately cautioned, "this opinion is as much influenced by appearances as by realities." While authoritarian regimes have long recognized the value of controlling appearances through overt propaganda and restrictions on free speech, the corruption of news media in the US and other Western democracies has followed a more complicated path and presents unique challenges. The lecture will explore and critique three dynamics that have caused news media to stray from the normative end of reporting realities: government actors attempting to engineer consent in clandestine ways as foreseen by the father of public relations, Edward Bernays; journalists embracing the role of activists as defended by Stanford Professor Ted Glasser; and media participants becoming captive to rival hermeneutic frameworks in ways that render them unintelligible to one another as elucidated by Alasdair MacIntyre's account of "tradition constituted rationality." While legal protections for free speech and the development of online marketplaces for ideas provide valuable foundations for resisting such corruptions of the news media, they remain limited. The lecture will conclude, however, by examining emerging technological protocols that promise to improve both fact-checking and epistemically productive debate at scale without reliance on undemocratic forms of censorship.

William English is a political economist at the McDonough School of Business of Georgetown University where he is an assistant professor and member of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. Since 2019, he has served on the National Council on the Humanities. He previously served as the research director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and as a post-doctoral research associate with the Political Theory Project at Brown University. His research has focused on empirical policy evaluation, behavioral economics, and institutional ethics. Dr. English received a BS and BA from Duke University, a Masters from Oxford University, and a PhD in Political Science from Duke University.