Jamieson Wins Everett M. Rogers Award From USC Annenberg

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has been named the 2018 recipient of the Everett M. Rogers Award by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

In announcing the award today, USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center praised Jamieson as “a pioneer in the fact check movement” and “a widely sought-after authority on the ways the public gets its political information as well as the impact of political ads on public attitudes.” It noted that she is a co-creator of “two nonpartisan websites that monitor and aim to reduce deception and confusion in U.S. politics, FlackCheck.org and FactCheck.org, which became a central resource for the 2016 presidential campaign."

Jamieson, who is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, will present a talk at the USC Annenberg School on March 5 on how Russian trolls and hackers exploited the U.S. news media and social media to sow discord, undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, and bolster Donald Trump’s electoral prospects. She also will consider how the United States can minimize its vulnerabilities to future electoral intrusions by foreign actors. In November, Jamieson wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Could Russian trolls have helped elect Donald Trump?”

The award honors the late Everett M. Rogers, a professor and associate dean at USC’s Annenberg School who developed the diffusion of innovation theory, which seeks to explain how ideas are spread among people. Rogers introduced the term “early adopters.”

Past recipients of the Ev Rogers Award include MIT professor Sherry Turkle, a scholar of technology’s impact on society and author; Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter; Duncan Watts, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research; Martine Bouman, scientific director and founder of the Center for Media & Health, in the Netherlands; and Stanford sociology professor Mark Granovetter.

Jamieson is the author or co-author of 15 books, including Packaging the Presidency, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, Spiral of Cynicism, Dirty Politics, and Presidents Creating the Presidency.