Introduction

11/16/20

Hello! My name is Adam Cooke and I am currently a social data science major in the UMD Media Scholars Program. While I have chosen to pursue a degree in math, I’ve always been interested in current events and how the media portrays them to the average person. It’s likely that I got this interest from my dad, who spent most of his career as a reporter before becoming an editor for an online legal news publication. Ever since I was a little kid, he’d tell me about how certain news stations go about reporting and whether or not that process had led to responsible coverage of a particular story. As I grew older, I started noticing how STEM-oriented my education was becoming and how it neglected extremely important life-skills like media literacy. Of course, this didn’t affect me too much since I had a parent in the journalism field, but I cannot say the same about many of my peers. In fact, I found myself arguing with a friend from high school not too long ago about how the mainstream media shouldn’t platform climate-denialists. He’s a really smart guy, but I could sense that our STEM-intensive background hadn’t provided him with sufficient enough media-literacy skills, and it’s exactly why I joined the Media Scholars Program. I think it’s really important to learn about how exactly to interpret the gigantic assortment of information being hurled at us every day.

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