Former Duke public affairs vice president John Burness talks with OLLI member Frank O'Neal, who came to the Judea Reform Education Building Dec. 2 to hear Burness talk about news media trends.
Burness, a visiting professor of the practice in the Dewitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, titled his Conscious Aging Series talk "From Linotype to Twitter: How We Get Our News and What It Means to Our Democracy."
He said he would like to see news outlets routinely report the funders behind think-tank experts quoted and invited to appear on broadcasts. "It's the information you need in a democracy," he says.
Burness lamented the "dramatic" decline of local media, noting that there were once at least five reporters covering Duke and its medical center on a full-time basis and now there are none who exclusively cover the university. The local trend also affects the amount of news being fed through the "news pipeline" to national outlets, he said.
A bright spot, however, is the transformative power of social media, seen especially in repressive societies.