This week in CIS 720, we were pleased to host Seth Lewis, Professor and Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media at the University of Oregon, for a seminar titled “Folk Theories of Institutional Failure: What Comparing Journalism, Medicine, and Academia Reveals About American Cynicism.” The seminar sparked thoughtful questions and discussion among students and faculty about institutional trust, interdisciplinary research and the narratives people use to understand the systems around them. Mahalo to everyone who joined!
Title:
Folk Theories of Institutional Failure: What Comparing Journalism, Medicine, and Academia Reveals About American Cynicism
Abstract:
Journalism, medicine, and academia are rarely studied together, yet the American public increasingly views them in strikingly similar terms — as institutions tainted by the pursuit of profit. Drawing on 100 hour-long qualitative interviews with a diverse sample of American adults in 2025, this talk presents findings from an in-progress book that takes a deliberately cross-institutional approach to understanding public cynicism toward what we call “knowledge institutions”: professions that gather, synthesize, and present information for the public good. Our comparative design surfaces patterns that discipline-specific research tends to miss. Whereas scholarship on media trust, patient trust, and confidence in higher education typically proceeds in separate silos, our interviews reveal a shared folk theory — a common narrative people tell themselves about how the world works — that cuts across all three domains: that capitalism has subordinated these institutions’ public service missions to private financial interests. This cynicism is neither partisan nor conspiratorial; liberals, conservatives, and independents articulate it in remarkably similar ways. This talk discusses the value of interdisciplinary, qualitative, interview-based research for illuminating how people construct meaning across institutional contexts, and considers what these findings suggest for scholars and practitioners working within — and across — knowledge institutions.
Bio:
Seth C. Lewis is Professor and Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, where he is also Director of Journalism. In 2026, he will join the University of Virginia as the inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies.
His research examines the social implications of emerging technologies, with a current emphasis on what AI and human-machine communication mean for journalism, media work, and everyday life as well as how technology is reconfiguring trust, expertise, and authority. His research on these topics has led to two forthcoming books. Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity Press, with Rodrigo Zamith and Tomás Dodds) offers a comprehensive account of AI and news. American Cynicism: Why We Distrust Journalism, Medicine, and Academia (MIT Press, with Jacob L. Nelson) draws from extensive interview-based research to illuminate the narratives people tell themselves about knowledge institutions.
He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, and Yale, among other universities.