“Nonpartisan News Reporting in an Age of Partisanship” has been announced as the first panel to be presented at The 10th European Conference on Arts & Humanities (ECAH2022) and The 9th European Conference on Media, Communication & Film (EuroMedia2022).
The panel for this presentation is composed of distinguished journalists from The Wyoming Truth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news operation dedicated to helping the community and fighting for the rights of local citizens, operating out of the United States.
The ECAH/EuroMedia2022 Organising Committee is currently calling for papers to be presented at the event. Submit your abstracts by May 6, 2022 to participate.
To participate in ECAH/EuroMedia2022 as an audience member, please register for the conference.
This plenary will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.
Abstract
Nonpartisan News Reporting in an Age of Partisanship
In a divided world, where can people find the truth in news? In Europe, the United States and elsewhere, journalists often take sides, presenting news with an unvarnished bias. To wit: Witness the news coming out of Ukraine. Propaganda is part and parcel of war. But now it is even more underscored, fueled by social media, as Russia has created draconian laws, with the threat of imprisonment, to prohibit the media from using the word “war” to describe the horrors unfolding in Ukraine. This is where the Wyoming Truth comes in. As a nonprofit news operation, we seek to cover the news in a nonpartisan way, to allow people to make up their own minds about the news, whether it’s about politics, criminal justice, or anything else. News media has, of course, undergone significant tectonic shifts over the past centuries; indeed, it was in the United Kingdom that the tabloid form was invented and exported to the United States. But the impartiality of news has given way to something of a free-for-all in news coverage today. We hope to help restore a journalism that fosters confidence in fairness, impartiality and accuracy.
Speaker Biography
Alec Klein
Wyoming Truth, United States
Alec Klein, president and co-founder of the Wyoming Truth, is a bestselling author and award-winning investigative journalist formerly of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. His groundbreaking investigations have uncovered a wide array of wrongdoing, leading to significant reforms, congressional hearings, changes in federal law, criminal convictions and more than half a billion dollars in government fines. His investigations have also set free several prisoners across the United States who were wrongfully convicted of murder and falsely accused of other crimes. And he has helped dozens of excessively sentenced prisoners gain their freedom and regain their lives through parole, commutations and pardons. Alec is the founder and CEO of Matthew 56 Consulting, LLC, a media firm with clients throughout the United States and abroad, and Matthew 56 Investigations, LLC, which has successfully probed cases across America. Alec has won a number of national awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award, business journalism’s highest honour, and given talks throughout the world, including Japan, France, Canada and South Africa.
Edward Klein
Wyoming Truth, United States
Edward Klein, a board member of the Wyoming Truth, is a well-known editor, writer and public speaker with a distinguished career in American journalism. After serving an apprenticeship as a copy boy for the New York Daily News, he went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which awarded him a fellowship to Japan. There, he learned to speak Japanese and travelled throughout Asia as a foreign correspondent for United Press International. Upon his return to New York, he joined Newsweek, where he became foreign editor and then assistant managing editor with jurisdiction over foreign and military affairs. From Newsweek, he became editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine, which he led to new heights of public interest and editorial excellence. During his editorship, a writer for The New York Times Magazine won the first Pulitzer Prize in its history. Since then, he has written many articles for Vanity Fair and other national magazines. For Parade, he wrote Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, the most widely read column in the English language. Ten of his nonfiction books have all appeared on The New York Times Best Seller List.
Shen Wu Tan
Wyoming Truth, United States
Shen Wu Tan is a reporter for the Wyoming Truth. She formerly worked as a general assignment reporter at The Washington Times in D.C. and at the Altoona Mirror in central Pennsylvania. Shen has a journalism degree from Northwestern University and an English degree from Washington State University. While enrolled at Northwestern, she was selected as one of ten student journalists to help investigate the 1976 quadruple murder case of William Thomas Zeigler, a Florida death row inmate. For three months, she worked as a reporting intern for the Weekend Argus in Cape Town, South Africa. Shen was born in China and adopted by a Canadian family in the 1990s. After briefly living in Canada, Shen moved with her family to Rock Springs, Wyoming—their first place of residency in the United States—and lived there for about 10 years. Since then, Shen has lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, moving to and residing in different parts of the United States, including Las Vegas, Chicago and the District of Columbia.
Madeline Thulin
Wyoming Truth, United States
Madeline Thulin, writer and coordinator of Wyoming Truth, was born and raised in Jackson, Wyoming. After facing several health issues which resulted in open heart surgery and a stroke, Madeline is passionate about giving the voiceless a voice and working on their behalf. Madeline graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder in December of 2020 with an undergraduate degree in Sociology. She writes about undocumented immigration in Wyoming and the difficulties it presents recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. She also focuses her writing on social inequality in Teton County, which reports one of the biggest wealth gaps between the top 1% and the remaining 99% of the United States.
