Recently in Silha Events Category

In Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the U.S. Supreme Court will address whether the First Amendment bars the state of California from restricting the sale of violent video games to minors. This year’s Silha Lecturer, Paul Smith, will argue on behalf of the video game dealers’ group in that case. Smith’s lecture, titled “Not Child’s Play: The Misguided Effort to Regulate Violent Video Games” will take place on Monday, Oct. 18, 2010.

The Silha Center hosted a broad spectrum of events in March and April 2010. Topics covered included crime in the virtual world, the effects of corporate public relations, and the health of journalists themselves as well as the journalism industry.

The ground is shifting in the conventions of media as we've known it in this country," according to Chuck Lewis, the 2009 Silha Lecturer. "The major media outlets don't have enough staff, they've gutted their newsrooms, they have one reporter doing the job of three or four people. And then we've got nonprofits ... that want more traffic and more reach and impact than just their Web site." According to Lewis, these conditions constitute a fundamental change in investigative reporting in the United States.

LIn a forum event titled “Without Fear or Favor: Objectivity Revisited,” journalists, scholars and members of the public met at Minnesota Public Radio’s (MPR) UBS Forum in downtown St. Paul on February 26 to discuss one of journalism’s most challenging topics: objectivity.

Attorney Robert Corn-Revere will deliver the 22nd Annual Silha Lecture on Monday, Oct. 1, 2007. His lecture, “The Kids are All Right: Violent Media, Free Expression, and the Drive to Regulate,” will examine the conflict between the First Amendment and government controls over media content that reaches children at a time when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress are poised to consider new regulations on violence on television.

Attempts to legislate violence on television and video games are likely to continue, even though “the kids are all right,” according to the 2007 Silha Lecturer.

Despite intense opposition based on “as much passion and emotion as reason,” a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) argued that the recent decision to relax the 32-year-old ban on joint ownership of media outlets would improve news coverage through the combination of resources at the Silha Fall Forum Oct. 23, 2008.

Silha Lecturer Siobhain Butterworth was introduced as “a member of an endangered species.” As readers’ editor, or internal ombudsman, for The Guardian newspaper in London, Butterworth is among a shrinking group of editors whose primary responsibility is to address reader complaints, clarifications, and corrections in the daily newspaper and online.

At a March 25 Silha Spring Forum, Stephen Cribari, a criminal and constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said an ever-changing digital landscape has raised questions about constitutional interpretation. “Do we have to adjust the way we live to the Constitution, or do we need to adjust the Constitution to the way that we live our lives in an increasingly technological time?” Cribari asked.

As media coverage of an imminent swine flu pandemic raised concerns around the world, about 80 community members, journalists, journalism students, and professors gathered to discuss health news reporting at a spring ethics forum and town hall meeting titled “Fever Pitch: Does Health News Reporting Leave Consumers Out in the Cold?”