CFOM Seminar Series Recordings 2024/2025

Visual journalist and Assistant Professor at Temple University, Tara Pixley, talks about how we can provide safety training for journalists that are identity-aware, trauma-centered and equally oriented toward everyday risks

As risks to journalists have escalated in recent years across all reporting environments, it’s become increasingly evident that safety training must become a foundation tool provided for all journalists. Simultaneously, a recognition of how trauma is connected to news media production in various ways has spurred significant efforts in some newsrooms and journalism schools to integrate trauma-centered reporting practices across the industry.

Pulling from interviews with professional journalists and media safety trainers, autoethnography from two decades as a visual journalist and recent work as a safety trainer, I speak to how college journalism programmes and professional media industries might adopt new methodologies for holistic risk assessment and management as well as provide safety training for journalists that are identity-aware, trauma-centered and equally oriented toward everyday risks. Such changes would engender safety training that is more inclusive of all newsmakers reporting in a multitude of environments from a range of embodied experience.

Tara Pixley, PhD, is an award-winning visual journalist and Assistant Professor of Journalism at Temple University where she also directs the Master of Journalism program. Dr. Pixley’s research connects journalism studies with critical theory to study ethics of care in photojournalism and efforts to re-vision marginalized communities via the new(s) media sphere. Her visual work intersects with her scholarship and advocacy, each understanding photography/film as an opportunity to frame race, gender, climate futures, LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities through a liberation lens. She also studies anti-racism in gen-AI/synthetic media, movement journalism, climate visuals and solutions visual journalism. She is a Fulbright Specialist in visual media, and has previously been a Reynolds Journalism Fellow, Pulitzer Center Grantee, an awardee of the World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative and a Knight Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, ProPublica, The Atlantic, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Visual Communication Quarterly and The Black Scholar, among many others.

CFOM hosted a joint online panel with the Disinformation Research Cluster based in the School of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Sheffield: ‘Elections, Disinformation and Journalism: Taking Stock of 2024’. The panel event brought together civil society organisations, academics and journalists for a discussion focusing on, what has been called, a ‘super year’ of elections and how they have been reported on at a time when disinformation and AI are on the rise alongside increasing fears surrounding journalists’ safety when reporting on political events. 

Elections and Disinformation in Africa 

This presentation will focus on an overview of research that was conducted regarding the general elections in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. The study involved interviews with various stakeholders engaged in combating disinformation, including fact-checking organisations, journalists and academics.

Nicola Davies-Laubscher holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Cape Town, where her research explored COVID-19-related misinformation on social media. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University.

Journalists’ Safety reporting the US elections

This presentation will focus on the work undertaken by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the work they have spent in the past year preparing U.S.-based journalists to cover a contentious election through their safety training and resources, and what that looked like. The CPJ trained more than 740 journalists and there is still a lot we do not know about what the next administration will look like for journalist safety and press freedom.

Lucy Westcott became director of the Committee to Protect Journalist’s (CPJ) Emergencies Department in October 2021. She oversees CPJ’s assistance and safety work worldwide. Westcott joined CPJ in 2018 as the James W. Foley Fellow. During her fellowship, she focused on safety issues for women journalists in non-hostile environments and assisted with the creation of safety resources for journalists globally. In 2021, she played a prominent role in CPJ’s response to the Afghan crisis, including helping Afghan journalists and their families evacuated to Qatar. Prior to joining CPJ, Westcott was a staff writer for Newsweek, where she covered gender and immigration. She has reported for outlets including The Intercept, Bustle, The Atlantic, and Women Under Siege, and was a United Nations correspondent for the Inter Press Service.

Beyond the Russian West divide. Polarisation and politicisation of war and peace in Georgian elections 2024

Dr. Sofia Gavrilova is a human and political geographer. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2019 and is currently a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on decolonization and de-Sovietization in knowledge production, policy-making, and identity construction in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Dr. Gavrilova has also contributed to projects mapping the geography of Stalin’s Terror and the Gulag system.

Buying Silence: How Oligarchs, Corporations and Plutocrats use the Law to gag their critics

Leading libel solicitor, David Hooper, talks about the hijacking of libel laws by wealthy individuals to shut down public interest reporting 

In the first seminar of 2024/2025, we are pleased to welcome David Hooper as our guest speaker. David will be talking about his book ‘Buying Silence’ which describes how wealthy individuals and corporations have gradually hijacked our libel laws and how Russian oligarchs, plutocrats and corporations suborned English law firms into bending to their will getting them to act in cases and using methods which they should have declined to be involved with.

David will discuss who brings SLAPP actions, why and how and what it is like taking on an oligarch such as Boris Berezovsky. He will also speak about what it is like being personally hacked and working with the FBI and then being personally subjected to a SLAPP action in Greece. 

David will talk about the importance of freedom of speech and the need for a proper anti-SLAPPs law and the need for equality in this area of the law and an end to the gross overcharging by law firms in libel cases.

David Hooper is a leading libel solicitor, having worked with top publishers and newspapers, as well as a serving prime minister and many key figures in business and politics. His previous books include Public Scandal, Odium and Contempt, Official Secrets: The Use and Abuse of the Act and Reputations Under Fire: Winners and Losers in the Libel Business.