Media Freedom in a Changing World

Center for Intl. Media Law & Policy Studies

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Welcome to Media Freedom in a Changing World, a podcast produced by the Center for International Media Law and Policy Studies in The Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. The podcast features experts who will discuss issues related to the intersection of media freedom and the digital age. Special thanks to producer Tanka Dhakal.

12/19/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: David Greene

David Greene is the senior staff attorney and civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco. He serves on the steering committee of the Free Expression Network, the governing committee of the ABA Forum on Communications Law, and on advisory boards for several arts and free speech organizations across the country. He has written and lectured extensively on many areas of First Amendment law. In this episode, Greene discusses possible privacy threats from various uses of smartphones and the “Internet of Things” and how to assess and address those threats. He also discusses information access and privacy concerns raised by attempts to ban social media use by minors, as well as the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent upholding of a Texas law requiring adult websites to use age verification technology to block access to the sites by minors.

26 min
12/01/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Frank LoMonte

Frank LoMonte is senior legal counsel to the newsroom at CNN, advising the network’s 3,000 worldwide journalists on a wide range of legal issues implicating the right to gather and distribute news. He joined CNN in 2022 from the faculty at the University of Florida, where he taught media law and ran the Joseph L. Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, a think-tank focusing on the public’s right of access to information. For nearly 10 years, he served as national director of the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit supporting journalism students and educators nationwide. At the SPLC, he launched the “New Voices” project to enact state laws safeguarding college and high school media against undue government censorship, which are now on the books in 18 states. In this episode, LoMonte discusses a wide range of press freedom issues, including issues related to recent controversies involving the Indiana Daily Student newspaper at Indiana University-Bloomington.

37 min
11/19/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Claudia Kozman

Claudia Kozman is an associate journalism professor in residence at Northwestern University in Doha, Qatar. She conducts comparative research on news content through a media systems approach and the theoretical frameworks of framing, sourcing, and journalistic role performance. Specifically, she examines the media coverage of conflict and the public’s media uses during political turmoil. Her research on conflict takes a war and peace journalism framing approach to better understand how the media cover wars and protests. She earned her Ph.D. at Indiana University in Bloomington. In this episode, Dr. Kozman discusses peace journalism as an alternative to how journalists typically cover conflicts. She discusses how a focus on solutions-based journalism and shifting conflict coverage from political and elite perspectives to citizen perspectives could improve the way wars and other conflicts are covered in the news media.

30 min
11/03/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Michelle Gomez

Michelle Gomez is a rising scholar and media producer. A native of Guatemala City, her work as a media law and ethics researcher has attempted to bridge legal analysis with advertising and political communication. Her work focuses on privacy, data collection for deceptive and misleading consumer practices, media literacy, and human rights. Her work centers on Guatemala, Central America, and the broader Latin America region. She is a two-time graduate of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and hopes to pursue a law degree and a Ph.D. to connect her interests with the law. In this episode, she discusses her recent research on privacy, data collection, and AI, including the pros and cons of government use of AI in Guatemala.

15 min
05/14/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Anastasia Micich and Emma Troha

Anastasia Micich and Emma Troha are master’s students at the University of Minnesota Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Ms. Micich’s research focuses on the intersection of advertising and digital technology, specifically through a consumer protection lens. Her interests lie in privacy and deception in advertising and its intersection with legal regulations. Ms. Troha is interested in information law, specifically regarding issues of Section 230, the First Amendment and associated policy issues, and political communication law. She has looked at influencer regulations, political advertising, and compelled and subsidized government speech in her work. In this episode, Ms. Micich and Ms. Troha discuss their recent paper, presented in March at the Southeast Colloquium at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, that questions the government’s attempts to ban the social media app TikTok from the United States. Their paper argues that the proposed ban of the Chinese-based app, which was upheld by the Supreme Court but paused by the Trump administration, is inconsistent with punishments meted out to U.S.-based social media platforms for similar or worse violations of user privacy. The paper raises concerns about the unprecedented use of a prior restraint against a media platform.

29 min
04/22/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Carl Bernstein

Carl Bernstein is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist best known for breaking the Watergate story for the Washington Post, leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon and setting the standard for modern investigative reporting. He is the author of five best-selling books, an on-air political analyst for CNN, and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair magazine. Bernstein is the 2024-25 IU Poynter Chair and Visiting Roy W. Howard journalist in residence. In this episode, Bernstein discusses whether we need a federal shield law, what sources should expect from reporters in a more hazardous era for sharing information, and what drives trust, or the lack of trust, in the news media.

28 min
04/11/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Samantha Barbas

Samantha Barbas is the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. Professor Barbas is the award-winning author of seven books and focuses on journalism, privacy, defamation and the First Amendment. Her most recent book, "Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan," was included in The New Yorker’s list of the best books of 2023. Her previous book, "Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle Over Privacy and Press Freedom," won a silver medal in the U.S. History category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards. She received the Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2020. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and gave the 2023 Constitution Day Lecture for the Library of Congress. She previously taught at the University of Buffalo School of Law in New York and earned her law degree at Stanford University and her Ph.D. in history at the University of California Berkeley. In this episode, Professor Barbas talks about why New York Times v. Sullivan still garners a great deal of attention 60 years after it was decided. She also discusses recent arguments, including some by current Supreme Court members, that the decision should be reconsidered.

30 min
03/18/2025

Media Freedom in a Changing World: Ari Waldman

Ari Waldman is a professor of law at the University of California-Irvine and the author of two books, "Privacy As Trust: Information Privacy for an Information Age" and "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power," both published by Cambridge University Press. He was honored as one of Prospect magazine’s Top Fifty Thinkers in 2020. He serves on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and he was elected chair of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC), the premier academic conference in the field of law and technology, in 2020. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and law and bachelor’s degrees from Harvard. In this episode, Waldman questions why we allow technology experts to have extensive control over how new technology, such as AI, is regulated. He also discusses how authoritarians use the language of harassment and technology tools to silence dissent.

32 min

Welcome to Media Freedom in a Changing World, a podcast produced by the Center for International Media Law and Policy Studies in The Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. The podcast features experts who will discuss issues related to the intersection of media freedom and the digital age. Special thanks to producer Tanka Dhakal.

Creator

Center for Intl. Media Law & Policy Studies
Years Active

2023 - 2025
Episodes

16
Rating

Clean
Copyright

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Media Freedom in a Changing World