This week in CIS 720, we were pleased to host Seth Lewis, Professor and Shirley Pap\u00e9 Chair in Emerging Media at the University of Oregon, for a seminar titled \u201cFolk Theories of Institutional Failure: What Comparing Journalism, Medicine, and Academia Reveals About American Cynicism.\u201d 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!<\/p>\n
Title:<\/strong> Abstract:<\/strong> Bio:<\/strong> 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 Tom\u00e1s 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.<\/p>\n He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Stanford, Columbia, and Yale, among other universities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week in CIS 720, we were pleased to host Seth Lewis, Professor and Shirley Pap\u00e9 Chair in Emerging Media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-news-events","9":"post-with-thumbnail","10":"post-with-thumbnail-large"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5102,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100\/revisions\/5102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/cis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFolk Theories of Institutional Failure: What Comparing Journalism, Medicine, and Academia Reveals About American Cynicism<\/p>\n
\nJournalism, medicine, and academia are rarely studied together, yet the American public increasingly views them in strikingly similar terms \u2014 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 \u2014 a common narrative people tell themselves about how the world works \u2014 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 \u2014 and across \u2014 knowledge institutions.<\/p>\n
\nSeth C. Lewis is Professor and Shirley Pap\u00e9 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.<\/p>\n