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Brian Creech

@briancreech.bsky.social
2.2K followers 1.2K following 123 posts

Professor and Chair, Lehigh University Department of Journalism and Communication

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
New: Through a series of complex agreements with cities, the White House built a massive license plate camera database accessible to the feds. The program aggregates data across license plate companies (Flock, Axon, more) & is searchable by many agencies: www.404media.co/how-cities-a...
404media.co
How Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Massive Federal Surveillance Program
How the federal government built a massive database of license plate reader data through an anti-drug trafficking program.
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Aram Sinnreich @aramsinn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Please share: Great academic #job in my school. Associate /Full Professor of Interactive Media Film and Media Arts School of Communication
american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Associate or Full Professor of Interactive Media Film and Media Arts School of Communication
American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meani...
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The most amazing thing is that this is like a page 29 story across the US
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emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Read @courtwatch.bsky.social review the stories that don't get told as corporate media (in this case, McClatchy) lays off all the legal journalists. www.courtwatch.news/p/the-rabbit...
courtwatch.news
The Rabbit Hole: Covering What McClatchy Will Miss
With the private equity-owned newspaper chain laying off 90 reporters, we look at the court stories they’ll miss.
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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 25/09/2026
I love the straightforward refusal by establishment DC political outlets to acknowledge that corruption is a thing
semafor.com
View: White House is isolated in brushing off AI safety
President Donald Trump’s call to leave AI “exactly where it is” contrasts even with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
CNN can’t stop complaining this morning about the ban on White House access for 3 news organizations, and while it’s bad, maybe it is not *quite* as bad as the fact that 3,500 local newspapers have folded in the last 20 years. www.poynter.org/business-wor...
poynter.org
An alarming number of independent publishers and small chains closed papers last year, new Medill study finds - Poynter
The United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs since 2005, the report found
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I live in an oil heat house (PA), & saw how things were trending in Spring. Now in the middle of converting to gas after pushing it off for years. It' a huge outlay, even w/ rebates. I'm lucky to have savings, favorable financing, & utility that runs new lines for free. I am def. in the minority
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Signal boosting, but I am pleased to share the annual call for Journalism History's essay competition, this year focusing on the intersections of theory and history. It's a great a way for historians outside of the AEJMC/AJHA orbit to contribute, and very much welcomes jr. scholars & grad students.
ournalism History essay competition, 2026-2027
 
Call for essays
 
What journalism history can do: Mending the relationship between theory and history in journalism and media studies
 
There appears to be a peculiar habit in journalism and media studies of treating history and theory as though they belonged to different rooms of the same house - usefully coexisting, sometimes engaging, but often content to remain in separation. This division of labor has produced excellent work in both directions, but it has also quietly reinforced the idea that history is raw material rather than an intellectual partner to theorization.
 
James Carey's founding provocation for this journal ran against exactly this assumption . He called for a history that would function as an intellectual history of journalism's ideas, one that asked not just what happened but what journalism thought itself to be at any given moment, and why.
 
That question has never stopped being relevant, but it has become newly urgent. The past decade has produced a wave of theoretical vocabulary in journalism and media studies, from metajournalistic discourse to field theory and boundary work. These largely language- and text-driven approaches are deeply amenable to historical insight, even if they do not always announce themselves this way. With increasing attention to how journalism's authority has been claimed, contested, and revised over time; how boundaries have been drawn and redrawn against competing epistemic and cultural forms; and how the discourse journalism produces about itself helps to constitute what journalism is allowed to be, the time is right to deepen historical engagement with the field's intellectual traditions. In other words, the theoretical tools currently reshaping the field are already asking historical questions, whether or not the scholars using them think of themselves as strictly historians.
This raises a problem worth confronting directly: if our best current theory is implicitl…The fundamental questions for the call are:
How might scholars rethink and redefine the archive with relation to the current scholarly conversation about institutionalized silences and historical erasure?
How might theory intervene in how we interrogate what is present and absent in the archive?
How might journalism and media historians contend with the idea that historical accounts are themselves the reconstruction of power dynamics?
How has the growth of decolonial perspectives and subaltern epistemologies evolved into an important contemporaneous trend in the field?
Essay topics could include, but are not limited to:
Reviews of historiographic literature in journalism, public relations, mass communication, visual communication, and related subjects that have successfully incorporated theory into their premises and conclusions
Arguments asserting specific theoretical perspectives (e.g. social scientific, structural/ poststructural, post/decolonial, etc.) as pertinent to historical media research
Case studies applying theory to specific historical events or archives in journalism and mass communication fields
Archival analysis and questions about institutionalized silences in recovering media history
A sample of inspirational readings:
Adiprasetio, J. 2025. “Decolonizing Communication and Journalism Studies in Southeast Asia: Historical and Epistemic Excavations on Indonesian Scholarship.” Journalism History, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2025.2584024
 
Carey, James W. 1974. “The Problem of Journalism History.” Journalism History 1 (1): 3–27. doi:10.1080/00947679.1974.12066714.
 
Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in two acts." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
 
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2020.
 
Nerone, John. 2013. “Why Journalism History Matters to Journalism Studies.” American Journalism 30 (1): 15–28. doi:10.1080/08821127.2013.767693.
 
Roessner, Amber, Rick Popp, Brian Creech, and Fred Blevens. 2013…he winning essay will receive a $100 (US) prize. Top essay(s) will be published in the Journalism History journal; runners-up may be published on the Journalism History website.
 
To be considered for inclusion in the essay series, please submit the following to jhistoryjournal@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time December 31, 2026:
A brief CV (including publications)
A 500-word synopsis of the topic you plan to discuss in your essay, along with a list of key primary and secondary sources you plan to draw from
An affirmation that the essay has not been proposed or published elsewhere
Essay selection will be decided by January 30, 2027, with a schedule of publication to follow. Completed essays will be due by April 30, 2027.
Completed essays will be 1,500 to 2,000 words, excluding citations. Authors should cite primary and/or secondary sources to support their arguments. Both abstract and full essay submissions must be in English. The Chicago Manual of Style must be used for accepted essays.
Questions may be directed to Josie Vine, online content and e
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 17/09/2026
NEW: We spent months investigating a little-known media startup called Brown Brothers Media, which buys legit news sites and turns them into AI-powered zombie content farms What blew my mind was its traffic -- it appears to be getting more readers than NPR or CBS News futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 17/09/2026
have I mentioned lately that oligarch-owned media consolidation is bad
hollywoodreporter.com
Universal Is Getting Cold Feet on Releasing the Elon Musk Documentary (Exclusive)
The Comcast-owned studio is not yet committing to rolling out Alex Gibney's movie that it paid millions to acquire for non-North American release before the political winds shifted.
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Don't. Print. Lies. In. The. Newspapers. Don't. Speak. Lies. On. The. Podcasts. Journalism, what is it, anyway?
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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
"The idea that preparing students to succeed in an AI-saturated world requires reimagining college as an AI incubator is not a sign of technological acumen, but of tech illiteracy." This is so good.
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Bobby Allyn @bobbyallyn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"It sounds like Musk doesn't like the documentary, so he wants to do whatever he can to shut it down and intimidate distributors. It would be a much more impoverished democracy if we weren't allowed to make documentaries about public figures that were critical of them." www.npr.org/2026/09/10/g...
npr.org
Elon Musk threatens to sue over Gibney documentary's "space lasers" claim
The tech billionaire's attorney has put documentarian Alex Gibney and his production company on legal notice, claiming the Oscar-winning director defamed Musk in his nearly four-hour documentary.
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Max Read @maxread.info · 10/09/2026
one takeaway i had from working in digital media in the 2010s was that it's pretty bad for your brain and your understanding of your career/the world when your industry becomes the main subject of twitter and twitter becomes the main context for your industry. also bad for the industry overall
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Patrick Creech @creech.dev · 04/09/2026
Apparently my brother was quoted in the WSJ!
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Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The Vibes are ... a given political elite’s theory of public opinion. This theory provides some information about public opinion, when the political elite is not completely disconnected from it. It usually provides much more information about the beliefs and ideology of the relevant political elite
programmablemutter.com
What Should We Do With Vibes-Based Analysis?
The Vibes Ain't Nothing But the Vibes.
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Perry Bacon @perrybaconjr.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
An absolutely essential @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social piece. I want to share almost every sentence on here. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/you-can-ig...
hamiltonnolan.com
You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits
One easy trick to make yourself smarter.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Proud of our Brown & White students as they come back to the semester ready to work, even amid a surprise budget cut from our student senate. We have engaged alums, broad support and the paper will be fine. But they are handling this so well and ethically. thebrownandwhite.com/2026/09/03/s...
thebrownandwhite.com
Student Senate cuts University Productions and The Brown and White funding allocations with more cuts on the way - The Brown and White
Lehigh Student Senate voted to slash allocations of two organizations and unveiled proposals to adjust funding of 12 others on Tuesday. It was the first of at least two meetings that will dole out mor...
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Weird to be one of the expert sources on people being mad at the tech industry, but well, you put in the hours and here you are: www.wsj.com/business/med...
wsj.com
Hollywood’s New Shows Take Aim at Big Tech
They are about innovators, once heralded as making the world a better place, trading their lofty virtuous ambitions for profits and power.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Weird to be one of the expert sources on people being mad at the tech industry, but well, you put in the hours and here you are: www.wsj.com/business/med...
wsj.com
Hollywood’s New Shows Take Aim at Big Tech
They are about innovators, once heralded as making the world a better place, trading their lofty virtuous ambitions for profits and power.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Newly published work at Journalism and Media, looking at local news coverage of AI data center development in Pennsylvania, asking what happens to journalism’s representational authority amid sustained economic decline. www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/7/...
mdpi.com
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Eric Deggans @edeggans.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Associated Press quoted me in its story on Society of Professional Journalists revision of Code of Ethics. My fave: "“I wish some people who owned journalism outlets would read the code, because too often they’re pressuring their employees to do things that are unethical..." READ: loom.ly/KsiQaWY
loom.ly
For a century, journalists have had a voluntary ethics code. Editors are giving it an AI-era reboot
The Society of Professional Journalists is revising its Code of Ethics for the first time since 2014.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Newly published work at Journalism and Media, looking at local news coverage of AI data center development in Pennsylvania, asking what happens to journalism’s representational authority amid sustained economic decline. www.mdpi.com/2673-5172/7/...
mdpi.com
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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Paid political influencers are highly effective propagandists. Which is why Pete Hegseth is paying them to manipulate other Americans in state-funded, prev undisclosed influence ops. Gift link: wapo.st/4x0p3pf
wapo.st
Pentagon secretly installs military influencers in civilian roles
Conservative veterans with large social media followings have been hired by the Defense Department and are amplifying Pete Hegseth’s culture-war fights.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It's mostly not about the technology, itself. They are angry about A.I. because they are anxious about how to be successful. No one in charge will tell them the new path to upward mobility. No seems to want to even figure one out. All anyone will talk to them about is A.I.
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Brad Simpson @bradleyrsimpson.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
This is quite literally an extinction level event for graduate education in several fields in the United States.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Tfw you realize reviewer 2 was using AI this whole time….
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
There’s an aggressively paid for influence op going on right now to defend AI slop as art and protected speech across platforms. AI execs realize they have a problem and don’t wanna get Marie Antoinette’d. The free ChatGPT trip is the tip of the iceberg. First person to nail it down gets a Pulitzer.
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Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Cyclospora is about more than Americans getting sick. It’s about the cost of grift and broken institutions. And it raises questions about why DOJ, which has jurisdiction, doesn’t seem to be doing anything. joycevance.substack.com/p/bad-food?r...
joycevance.substack.com
Bad Food
It’s not hard to follow the money
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
This basically feels like the executive education grift, which is selling the institutional brand to an audience that wants the prestige at a discount, but also at a price that is just beyond what normies would pay.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Explaining to my kids dessert pizza was a thing and they are looking at me like I just told them phones were once attached to walls and had wires.
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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 20/08/2026
Not that TAH will be dislodged from his lucrative lane of rage-baiting boomers (watch for the book-length version coming soon) but it is good to have this on the record by Andrew Baker analyzing the events at Bates with integrity and political perspective. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...
newsletter.thedriftmag.com
Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story
Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Wow, when this guy turns from smoothed path permitting and boosterism, you know something’s changed.
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Ashley Rattner @ashleyrattner.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
This essay is very good
defector.com
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I think this gets to the heart of liberal-left complaints about the press. Political reporters think we're criticizing them for not being on "our" side. We're not. We're criticizing them for not being on journalism's side. Unplug from the DC celebrity access system and do honest independent work.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I subscribe to the print edition of the Atlantic still (I know), and all I will say is that there are at least three more interesting articles in this issue that should be generating DISCOURSE, including one considering, after all this time, if the Taliban actually won.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Colleagues at Journalism History have published an excellent special issue on the Institute for Propaganda Analysis that interrogates midcentury, post-war origins of communication research, & how many of the political blindspots of the era explain problems today: www.tandfonline.com/toc/ujhi20/c...
tandfonline.com
Journalism History
Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. Volume 52, Issue 3 of Journalism History
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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Regardless of the merits of this piece, it's a symbol of a creeping trend at real news orgs like The Atlantic or lesser ones like the Free Press: A first-person account, written to stoke outrage, with no evidence offered to the reader that the events have been independently corroborated. 1/
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The thing about that “why I quit academia” piece in the Atlantic is that a half-dozen women wrote better, smarter versions of it a decade ago.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Watching everything around data centers this year, I’m starting to think no one in Silicon Valley ever actually watched the Simpson’s as much as they may have claimed.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Looks like those guys found the plausible deniability they were looking for.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 31/07/2026
Josh is onto something important here. Big tech cos have been able to dodge much regulation—dodge the structuring of markets and competition and the relationship with society that govts impose. But with data centers, local zoning and local organizing are now in play. It’s a different world.
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John A. Farrell @biographer.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
There is no natural law that says that a news organization like CBS News or the Washington Post cannot lose its audience and fade into irrelevance.
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Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation @wolgjournal.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Published at last! the final issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation is now online at www.scienceopen.com/.../cdba69db.... This is a special issue that commemorates the legacy of Vincent Mosco and shows the relevance of his ideas for understanding the new world order
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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Watch it till the end. This is moral clarity -- TMZ understands the moment, and what that Rand Paul kangaroo court was, better than any coverage I've seen so far. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zaO...
youtube.com
This Is Personal
YouTube video by TMZ
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Alvaro M. Bedoya @bedoyausa.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
People think "Hollywood" is rich and famous. The reality? Film and TV is a national industry. It's a blue collar industry. And it is an industry free fall. My latest for @newrepublic.com on how the Paramount merger would crush blue collar workers who can not afford it newrepublic.com/article/2136...
newrepublic.com
There’s a Blue-Collar Hollywood—and the Paramount Merger Will Kill It
Hollywood isn’t all glamour. It’s thousands of line workers. And a Paramount takeover of Warner will make their lives even more precarious.
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Brian Creech @briancreech.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Watching centrist dems like Shapiro struggle to thread the data center needle after touting econ dev. bona fides in landing these centers 18 mos. ago as everyone is now united in opposition, I see why the party permanently struggled after NAFTA. True or not, both things feel like intentional harm.
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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Turned this rant into a blog post. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/the-data-c...
davekarpf.beehiiv.com
The data center backlash Is working. That's why the New York Times is so concerned.
I have a
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 25/07/2026
Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.
science.org
The Assault On Science Funding Continues
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