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By Deana Rohlinger, Professor of Sociology, Florida State University The summer of 2019 has seen week after week of protest in Hong Kong. The unfolding events, and how the China’s government benefits from the civil disobedience, serves as a potential propaganda playbook for the Trump administration’s reaction to racial tensions in the run up to the 2020 presidential elections. The protests began June 9 when as many as a million people marched against a bill that could allow suspects to be extradited to China. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, who was appointed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in...

By R. Kelly Garrett, Professor of Communication, The Ohio State University; Robert Bond, Associate Professor of Communication, The Ohio State University; and Shannon Poulsen, PhD Student in Communication, The Ohio State University People have long mistaken satire for real news. In July, the website Snopes published a piece fact-checking a story posted on The Babylon Bee, a popular satirical news site with a conservative bent. Conservative columnist David French criticized Snopes for debunking what was, in his view, “obvious satire. Obvious.” A few days later, Fox News ran a segment featuring The Bee’s incredulous CEO. But does everyone recognize satire as...

Tax policy can be a powerful tool for enhancing racial and ethnic equity, but two new reports show how recent tax changes at the state and federal level have disproportionately blocked households of color from receiving tax cuts, even as they protected or expanded tax cuts aimed at wealthy, white households. State and federal tax systems affect taxpayers of different races differently, even when those policies don’t explicitly mention race. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “How the Federal Tax Code Can Better Advance Racial Equity” explains how seemingly “race-neutral” provisions in the tax...

By Jonathan Cohn, Assistant Professor of Digital Cultures, University of Alberta In 1988, after United States Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s videotape rental history was leaked to the press, Congress realised the threat that new technologies, through the clandestine buying and selling of personal data, had to the well-being of all citizens. They acted to fix the problem with the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a law that forbids the sharing of video tape rental information to anyone. While a law focused on videotape rental information may seem esoteric and anachronistic, debates at the time of its writing show...