Towards a democratic news media and society: creating and navigating our information society for a sustainable future
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation provides an up-to-date interdisciplinary analysis of the state of our global news media system (with particular emphasis on the Canadian/North American scene), the implications and possibilities of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), and a positive vision for a more democratic news media and society, while introducing new theoretical concepts and policy recommendations. The investigator utilized, and adapted, an illuminative evaluation (qualitative) approach in which a diversity of media professionals (primarily from alternative/progressive media) and communications scholars were interviewed for their opinions on the state of our news media, the impact of ICTs (primarily the Internet/World Wide Web), and their insight into how we can improve our old and new media culture for a sustainable and democratic future. These illuminations, derived from semi-structured interviews and augmented by response-based literature reviews and reflection, allowed the investigator to garner an in-depth, and fresh, analysis of the key developments, issues, challenges and opportunities facing our global information society as we begin the 21st Century. Among the various illuminations and proposed solutions contained in this study are two primary findings. The first finding, or illumination, involves the investigator's development of a new information model/media literacy tool, which the author calls the Information Quality Continuum (IQC), to serve as a conceptual instrument to help guide citizens, news media providers, communications scholars, educators and policy makers to create, navigate and shape a more democratic news media and society—a democratic “information society” that provides citizens with a wealth of what the researcher calls Vital Human Information (VHI), as opposed an undemocratic “information economy” that primarily provides consumers with a superfluous flood of Trivial Consumer Information (TCI). The researcher also operationally tests the IQC (via a quantitative Internet news archival search) to further clarify, and elaborate on, its theoretical and practical usefulness. The second major illumination involves a proposal for a new breed of public journalism, which the author calls “People's Journalism” (based on the Popular Education traditions of Paulo Freire and the principles of Participatory Research), that would serve to significantly democratize and improve our existing news media system. Taken together, these two illuminations, as well as other insights derived from this investigation, offer hope and prescriptions for achieving viable and democratically informed 21st century society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".