Television station KUSA in Denver, Colo., has won the 2015 Cronkite/Jackson Prize for Fact Checking Political Messages, named for the founding director of FactCheck.org, Brooks Jackson. The fact-checking award was selected by a jury convened by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, home of FactCheck.org.
The Rendell Center for Civics & Civic Engagement has moved its headquarters to the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and the two institutions announced plans to collaborate on projects to strengthen civics education in schools.
Annenberg Classroom’s That’s Your Right game has been named a finalist for a 2015 Games for Change Award. The game, a single- or multiplayer digital card game that teaches students about the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, was named one of the three finalists for Best Gameplay.
The political spin that so often is attached to discussions surrounding public policy and science is the focus of the March 2015 issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Politics and science often intermix on matters including climate change, vaccinations, fracking, nuclear power, evolution, genetically modified organisms, and stem cell research, among others.
Climate scientists inadvertently support the idea that they are partisans when they do not account for "inconvenient evidence," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, told scientists and journalists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, Calif. Jamieson also said flawed studies must be retracted much more quickly.
A new study suggests that using emotionally evocative images on cigarette warning labels such as rotting teeth and a diseased lung is important in making the labels more memorable and effective in conveying the risks of smoking. The study addresses a key point raised in 2012 by the U.S. courts, which ruled that the pictorial labels were unconstitutional in part because they "did not convey any information at all."
Peggy Charren, a major force in improving children's television -- and a grassroots activist whose work was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as the inaugural Annenberg Public Policy Center award for distinguished lifetime contribution to children's television -- died Jan. 22 at her home outside Boston.
Visiting Scholar Jo Holz (ASC ’81) joined the Annenberg Public Policy Center in July to begin work on a sociocultural history of American children’s television. Her resulting book will cover the development of major television shows from the beginning of children’s programming up through present-day offerings.
Supermodel Petra Nemcova was vacationing in Thailand a decade ago, on Dec. 26, when it was hit by a devastating tsunami that destroyed communities in 14 countries and took the lives 230,000 people. Amy Jordan, APPC's associate director, writes in The Hill about Nemcova's work to turn tragedy and social media into social action.
Year after year, the suicide rate is at its lowest in the United States during the holiday season, but nearly three-quarters of U.S. newspaper stories linking suicide and the holidays during the 2013-2014 season incorrectly said the opposite.