Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications, co-authored the paper “Unmasking Uncle Sam: A Legal Test for Defining and Identifying State Media” with Weston R. Sagar, which was published by the UC Irvine Law Review.
In December 2018, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee published a report detailing how the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the central federal state media agency, illegally targeted social media ads at Americans at least 860 times from 2016 to 2018. The U.S. Agency for Global Media and other U.S. state media agencies have enormous resources, and if left unchecked, could unduly influence public opinion, threaten the free and independent press, and subvert democratic accountability. To address this growing concern, this article proposes a new, comprehensive legal test for defining and identifying state media that incorporates existing approaches for analyzing government publications employed by the federal government and independent media platforms.