The Signal School · mass media, journalism & screen
Media Studies, Ethics & Literacy
The press, the platform, and the person reading: what media does to what we know, and what it owes us.
Practical skepticism for daily reading — sourcing, framing, and telling reporting from something wearing its clothes.
Syllabus · 2 units · ~8 hours
Unit I — Where News Comes From
Wire services, beats, and the news pipeline · Reporting, aggregation, and opinion — the labels · Who pays for journalism, and why it matters
Unit II — Reading Defensively
Checking the source before the claim · Headlines versus stories: the gap · Lateral reading: what fact-checkers actually do · Charts and statistics that shade the truth
The recurring dilemmas of the field — privacy against newsworthiness, harm against truth, and codes that guide the call.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~16 hours
Unit I — Frameworks
Consequences, duties, and virtues in the newsroom · The professional codes and their limits · Whose interest is the public interest
Unit II — The Hard Cases
Naming victims and suspects · Graphic images: showing the worst · Deception in reporting: ever justified? · Conflicts of interest, declared and hidden
Unit III — New Terrain
Synthetic media and the ethics of the fake · Platform amplification and editorial duty · Making the call: a decision method
Five centuries of reaching everyone at once — print, wire, broadcast, and network, each remaking its public.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Print and the Public
The press and the pamphlet wars · The penny paper and the mass audience · Yellow journalism and the first ethics backlash
Unit II — The Broadcast Century
The telegraph and news at wire speed · Radio: the fireside audience · Television and the shared national evening
Unit III — The Network Era
The web breaks the bundle · Platforms, feeds, and algorithmic editors · What persists: every era's moral panic
The legal frame around the free press — defamation, privacy torts, prior restraint, and the rights of the recorder.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~20 hours
Unit I — The Constitutional Floor
The First Amendment and its actual text · Prior restraint from Near to the Pentagon Papers · Public forums and press access
Unit II — Defamation
Libel elements: the plaintiff's checklist · Actual malice and the public figure · Opinion, hyperbole, and fair report
Unit III — Privacy and Newsgathering
The four privacy torts · Recording laws and hidden cameras · Shield laws and protecting sources · Copyright and fair use for working media
The mechanics of falsehood at scale — why it spreads faster than correction, and what actually slows it down.
Syllabus · 2 units · ~10 hours
Unit I — The Anatomy of a False Story
Misinformation, disinformation, malinformation · Why falsehood outruns correction · The role of emotion and identity in sharing
Unit II — Countermeasures
Prebunking versus debunking: the evidence · The backfire effect, revisited and mostly retired · Verifying images, video, and quotes yourself · Talking to someone who believes a false thing