Associate Professor of Journalism Amanda Sturgill spoke on misinformation and tensions leading up to the 2020 presidential election for Perth, Australia, radio station RTR FM.
The world is watching as the United States prepares to elect its next president. That global interest was evident this week, as Perth, Australia, radio station RTR FM turned to Associate Professor of Journalism Amanda Sturgill for insight into Election Day 2020.
Host Danae Gibson interviewed Sturgill on the Nov. 3 edition of RTR’s “The Swing,” a weekly discussion about global politics. Sturgill, author of “Detecting Deception: Fighting Fake News,” touched on national tensions, media literacy and misinformation leading up to the 2020 election.
“Large media have sort of come under a lot of fire, and so they’re sharing information on social media, and news has become very deconstructed,” Sturgill told Gibson. “At one time you would have said ‘well, this is a well-known news network or this is a well-known newspaper, and I know that they’re using journalism standards of ethics and practice,’ but now you’re taking the facts from that, and they’re coming in 240 characters in a tweet, and one tweet looks a lot like another tweet, and it’s really hard to tell apart what those are, so it sets up a really good situation for bad actors to create misinformation, and we have bad actors creating information both domestically and from abroad.”
Click here to listen to the entire interview, in which Sturgill also discussed the COVID-19 pandemic and a recent incident in Graham, North Carolina, where two students were arrested and student journalists were pepper sprayed while covering a local march to the polls.