Media & Culture

Richard Campbell is professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University, as well as the 2019 recipient of the university’s Benjamin Harrison Medallion for his “Outstanding Contribution to the Education of the Nation.” Campbell is the author of “60 Minutes” and the News: A Mythology for Middle America (1991) and coauthor of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (1994). He has written for numerous publications, including Columbia Journalism Review, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and TV Quarterly. Campbell is cocreator of Stats+Stories, a long-running podcast sponsored by Miami University and the American Statistical Association, and winner of the 2021 Communication Award from the Mathematical Association of America. His other projects include the digital Oxford Observer newspaper and Report for Ohio, initiatives aimed at getting more young journalists real-world experience covering under-reported areas in rural and urban communities. He is executive producer of a 2019 documentary on the role that Oxford, Ohio, played in 1964’s Freedom Summer, titled Training for Freedom: How Ordinary People in an Unusual Time and Unlikely Place Made Extraordinary History. He served for ten years on the board of directors for Cincinnati Public Radio and holds a PhD from Northwestern University.

Bettina Fabos is a professor of visual communication and interactive digital studies at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the executive producer of the interactive web photo history Proud and Torn: A Visual Memoir of Hungarian History (proudandtorn.org); the cofounder of a public digital archive of Iowa family snapshots, Fortepan Iowa (fortepan.us); and a champion of the Creative Commons. Fabos has also written extensively about critical media literacy, Internet commercialization, the role of the Internet in education, and media representations of popular culture. Her work has been published in Visual Communication Quarterly, Library Trends, Review of Educational Research, and Harvard Educational Review and she has received numerous awards for her creative work. Fabos has also taught at Miami University and has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

RON BECKER is a professor of media and communication and strategic communication at Miami University. He is the author of Gay TV and Straight America (Rutgers University Press) and co-editor of Saturday Night Live and American TV (Indiana University Press). His work has also appeared in publications like The Craft of Criticism, The Television Studies Reader, How to Watch TV, Reading the Bromance, The Velvet Light Trap, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Becker holds a Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.