Student journalists are going through a protest
Investigating Disinformation in College Campuses and Pro-Palestinian Protests: Vittoria Elliott and the Columbia Spectator
Disinformation can be found in a variety of ways. It feeds on times of crisis when authoritative information is needed the fastest. This couldn’t have been more obvious last week as police departments raided college campuses and pro-Palestinian protests across the country.
That’s why I invited my colleague, senior politics writer Vittoria Elliott (hey Tori!), to cowrite today’s newsletter. In this issue, we speak with student journalists across the country about their work amid an overwhelming amount of disinformation.
Student newspapers were tasked to cover their peers, as well as the false narratives being spun about and around them, during last week’s campus protests.
Esha Karam,managing editor at the Columbia Spectator, told us that they did not see all of this coming. It was quite shocking when the things started to pick up.
The New York Police Department raided the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia last week, but only Karam and her colleagues were allowed on campus. With outsiders barred from campus, the Spectator staffers were forced to contend with the conspiracy that was swirling around the protests.
WIRED.com: A Conversation with Student Journalists About Campus Administration and the Student-Journalist Experience at Leah Feiger
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is on social media. There is a person named Makena Kelly. Please write to us at [email protected] with your name and email. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
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We’re going to talk about why you both want to talk to the student journalists, and how you’re going to tell the story on WIRED.com. What specifically about them and their situations made them the perfect people to learn from and understand what’s been happening on the ground here?
Makena Kelly is a person. Yes. So I think the big thing to note is that these student journalists have been covering their campus every day, not just for this semester, but last semester. Many of them have been for a long time.
Makena Kelly. They know these people, they know the administrators, they understand how the system works, and that’s why they become an important resource. Like how we saw that with all of these.
