Robert Corn-Revere, Chief Counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), discusses their mission and activities and his recommendations for changes in media law to improve democracy.  Corn-Revere has appeared on multiple lists of best lawyers since 2017. Some of his expertise is summarized in his (2021) The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder : the First Amendment and the Censor's Dilemma, building on his extensive research and experience including three earlier books. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves. More on Corn-Revere and FIRE is available in the companion “Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression” on Wikiversity, which also supports a moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview. Copyright 2026 Robert Corn-Revere and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Ethan Corson is a Democrat running for governor of Kansas in the August 4 primary. Three Democrats have filed to compete in this primary: Ethan Corson: https://ethanforkansas.com/ Cindy Holscher: https://cindyforkansas.com/ Curt Skoog: https://curtskoog.com/ The interviews with Senator Holscher and Mayor Skoog air June 30 and July 14, respectively. Copyright: The comments of the candidates are all in the public domain. The composition is copyright 2026 Spencer Graves and Craig Lubow Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Cindy Holscher is a Democrat running for governor of Kansas in the August 4 primary. Three Democrats have filed to compete in this primary: Ethan Corson: https://ethanforkansas.com/ Cindy Holscher: https://cindyforkansas.com/ Curt Skoog: https://curtskoog.com/ The interviews with Senator Corson and Mayor Skoog air July 7 and 14, respectively. Copyright: The comments of the candidates are all in the public domain. The composition is copyright 2026 Spencer Graves and Craig Lubow Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Katerina Canyon describes the Peace Economy Project (PEP), their vision and activities. Canyon is PEP's Executive Director. She holds a BA from Saint Louis University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) from the Fletcher School. Her publications include two recent books of poetry, a novel, and numerous shorter pieces of political commentary disseminated in a variety of outlets. PEP works to "Cut Military Spending [and] Fund Human Needs." They are "guided by the belief that true security is built through care, dignity, and a shared well-being—not punishment, militarization, or fear." Their work is grounded in 8 core values: Human Dignity. Nonviolence. Peaceful and Civic Engagement. Community Safety Over Militarization. Accountability and Transparency. Care-Centered Policy. Solidarity Across Difference. Thoughtful, Strategic Action. Canyon is interviewed by Spencer Graves. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion “Peace Economy Project” on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Katerina Canyon and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Joanna Lewis and Suzanne Hogan with the 816 Bicycle Collective discuss their work helping humans obtain, maintain and use bicycles. They accept donations of bicycles and distribute them to those who want them in exchange for donated time, resources or revenue, depending on the individual's circumstance. They also help humans maintain bicycles. Their shop at 518 East 31st Street, KCMO, has only limited hours -- Monday and Thursday 3-6 PM and Saturday noon-3 -- but they have a permanent bike repair stand with tools and an air pump on the Cherry Street sidewalk.  They will have an annual "fund-rager" party to raise money to pay bills. They accept donations of items to raffle off as party. It's not on their website right now, but ... . Lewis and Hogan are interviewed by Spencer Graves. More information is available on their website at 816bike.org. Copyright 2026 Joanna Lewis, Suzanne Hogan, and Spencer Graves Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license

Prolific author and media critic Nolan Higdon discusses his research on problems with the media and what he thinks humans should do to better advance their interests in society. He is a lecturer at California State University, East Bay, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a prolific researcher, podcaster, contributor to general news outlets, and author, co-author or co-editor of at least eight recent books. He is interviewed by Spencer Graves. A moderated discussion of the issues raised in this interview is available in the companion "Let's agree to disagree and seek common ground" on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Nolan Higdon and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Tricia Maxfield and Ryan Bernsten with American Public Square (APS) discuss their program in general and their June 18 event on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence including "Self-Evident Truths". APS was founded by Allan Katz, who came to Kansas City after serving as US Ambassador to Portugal (2010-2013). They work to build stronger, more connected communities through civil discourse, engagement and education. They organize in-person and virtual events featuring expert panelists discussing complex social, political, and economic challenges shaping our nation serving a diverse member community. APS also works to improve civics education. Ambassador Katz is also a distinguished professor with the University of Missouri Kansas City Bloch School's Department of Public Affairs and the College of Arts and Science's Political Science Department and a Distinguished Professor in Residence in the Department of Political Science at William Jewell College. Tricia Maxfield is Program Director and Ryan Bernsten is Director of Brand & Partnerships for American Public Square. They are interviewed by Spencer Graves. _______ Sources (accessed 2026-05-22): * "Our Story" under "About APS" at AmericanPublicSquare.org. * "Allan J. Katz" on Wikipedia. Copyright 2026 Tricia Maxfield, Ryan Bernsten, and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license

Communications professor Allison Butler discusses her new book, The Judgment of Gender: How Women Are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture with Spencer Graves. She compares how women like Britney Spears, Anita Hill, and Monica Lewinsky have been portrayed with the treatment of comparable males. She notes, for example, that, "in the years since the Dobbs (2022) decision, fully sentient female bodies have fewer legal rights than either fetuses or embryos. She asks, "Why aren't women allowed to be complicated?", documenting how men are allowed to abuse their power for personal gain, but women are more likely to be demonized for comparable offenses. Her recommendations include critical media literacy, asking how stories are told, and who gets to tell them. "The vast majority of the mainstream media in the United States are approved, produced, and distributed by private, for-profit corporations whose primary priority is profit. ... Once we understand that, we can work to make a change. We can say 'no' to unfair or limiting stories of women and girls by simply ignoring them (and therefore not contributing to further views, clicks, or likes of them, online), and we can actively push back by demanding change from media producers. Media producers profit off our attention; if we shift that attention, we may be able to shift their power." Butler is a senior lecturer and associate chair of Communication and Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is author or co-author of multiple books and articles on the need for and implementation of critical media literacy, including the following: Educating media literacy: The need for critical media literacy in teacher education (Butler 2020), Key scholarship in media literacy: David Buckingham (Butler 2021), Critical media literacy and civic learning: Interactive explorations for students and teachers (Maloy et al. 2021), and The media and media: A guide to critical media literacy for young people (Project Censored and The Media Revolution Collective 2022). She also has a 2024 book on Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools (Higdon and Butler 2024). A moderated discussion of these issues is available in the description of this interview in the companion "How women are centered and silenced in the major media" on Wikiversity. Copyright 2026 Allison Butler and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Kimmy Igla discusses the draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) published by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the Department of Energy (DOE) for the production of new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons at six different sites in the US, one of which is the Kansas City National Security Campus, which has a controversial history. You are invited to review the PEIS available at pitpeis.com and submit written comments up to July 16, as described in pwkc.org/Plutonium. Ms. Igla is a leader with PeaceWorks Kansas City and Physicians for Social Responsibility KC. She currently serves on the board of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability and is a founding member of the No Nukes KC Coalition. Ms. Igla was a leader in organizing a May 6 workshop to coach humans on the best way to write comments responding to this PEIS. Help with that May 6 session came in part from Dr. Chanese Forté of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who discussed their research summarized in their testimony at the May 7 public comment hearing in Kansas City concerning the draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the production of new plutonium pits for nuclear bombs. An expert in environmental toxicology, they discuss the history of toxicants found at the Kansas City nuclear weapons plant and what new pit production could mean for the future of Kansas City and humanity. Background Dr. C.A. Forté is a scientist in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program specializing in environmental toxicology and epidemiology. Their work with UCS focuses on the health and well-being of communities affected by nuclear weapons mining, exposure, and the threat of exposure. Prior to this, they worked at the US Navy and Marine Corps as a deployment health epidemiologist researching active service member deployability and the environmental impacts of the US Norfolk Naval Hospital. Dr. Forté has a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences and a second PhD in Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to pursuing their doctorate, they earned a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Georgia, with a focus on epidemiology and biostatistics. They recently lent this expertise to Kansas Citians at a May 6 information session to help citizens prepare to give public comment on the draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the production of new plutonium pits, the softball-sized radioactive cores of nuclear bombs. On 2024-09-30 US District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis ruled that the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the DOE's semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to properly consider alternatives including environmental impact before proceeding with their plan to produce plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. This decision culminated several years of litigation. Written comments invited until July 16  Written comments can be submitted up to July 16 by email to [email protected]. Include the document number: DOE/EIS-0573 with your submission. Their draft EIS is available at "https://pitpeis.com". While DOE is officially required to respond to all comments they receive, their conclusion may not otherwise be impacted unless the US Congress decides to change the program, e.g., by enacting legislation changing the mission from producing new nuclear weapons to accelerating the transition to renewable energy, as discussed by Wallis (2023) Warheads to Windmills (Indispensable Press). This would simultaneously reduce threats associated with global warming while also reducing the power of Iran and the fossil fuel industry over the global economy. This is discussed further on pwkc.org/eis. In person hearings  Public comment hearings on the environmental impact are being held in five cities across the US with ties to nuclear weapons manufacturing, May 5, 7, 12, 14, and 20. Kansas City is one of those five. The Kansas City public comment hearing was May 7 at the Hillcrest Community Center. Eighty percent of the non-nuclear parts for US nuclear weapons are produced at the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC) operated by Honeywell. Dr. Forté was one of about 40 speakers who gave comments at the hearing. All opposed the NNSA's goal of new pit production. Dr. Forté explains their issues with the draft PEIS. This includes the lack of transparent information about Kansas City's involvement in the pit program and the cumulative impact to all sites concerned. Though there has been no mention of the Kansas City plant directly handling plutonium, there are still a number of other environmental toxins the final PEIS needs to and does not adequately address. It was revealed that over 2,400 contaminants were present at Kansas City's former nuclear weapons plant at the Bannister Federal Complex which was shut down and replaced by the National Security Campus on Botts Road in 2014. News reports have documented serious health concerns and premature deaths among former employees who were exposed to toxins while working at the Kansas City plant. The Kansas City Defender recently interviewed one of those workers, Maurice Copeland, who also testified at the May 7 hearing. With the NNSA's budget for the Kansas City plant being doubled and money appropriated specifically for "pit production" despite the DOE's claims Kansas City will not be directly involved, Dr. Forté and others who attended the hearing are rightfully concerned: what will this new plutonium pit program mean for KCNSC workers and residents in the surrounding area? Dr. Forté is interviewed by Spencer Graves coppyright 2026 Chanese Forté and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

Yaël Eisenstat discusses the impact of online platforms on public health, safety and democracy. She is currently[1] the Director of Policy and Impact at Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D),[2] working on policy solutions for how to hold social media and other online platforms accountable for their effects on public safety and democracy. Previously, she was Vice President at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology & Society (CTS). She was a Facebook election integrity head in 2018 and later became a whistleblower, speaking publicly about the dangers to democracy stemming from the company's decisions and products. She has held other other positions protecting democracy including as an intelligence officer, diplomat, and White House advisor. C4D contributed to the recent March 24, 2026, jury verdict in a civil case against Internet companies in New Mexico.[3] Eisenstat is interviewed by Spencer Graves.[4] Eisenstat's work Eisenstat's work includes a TED Talk and an SXSW panel in 2020 and a 2024  research report on tech platforms and political violence. 2020 TED talk In Eisenstat's (2020) TED talk, she said that around 2015 she began to notice that she was losing the ability to engage with others who were thought differently. Conversations with others in the US were becoming more difficult than conversations she had had as a CIA officer and diplomat drinking tea and talking with outspoken anti-Western clerics and suspected terrorists in Africa. Many of those engagements began with mutual suspicion but none degenerated into shouting or insults. In some cases she built collaboration on areas of mutual interest. Her most powerful tools were to listen, learn and build empathy. Most of her contacts wanted to feel heard, validated and respected. But social media companies like Facebook incentivize inflammatory content contributing to a culture of political polarization and mistrust. This generates revenue for Facebook and similar companies that make money from clicks, "because the shortest path to a click is anger or hate", in the words of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, interviewed 2024-08-19 for this Media & Democracy series. When Facebook asked Eisenstat in 2018 to lead their work to support global elections integrity for political ads, she agreed. She left six months later, speaking openly about Facebook's inability to meet its responsibility to secure elections, subsequently documented, e.g., in the thousands of internal Facebook documents that Haugen released to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021. 2020 SXSW panel Eisenstat was part of a "panel about the Future of Tech Responsibility" for the 2020 South by Southwest festival. The festival was cancelled due to COVID-19, but the panel was held virtually. This panel included a discussion of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended by the Communications Decency Act of 1996.[5] It was "written before platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter existed" -- written while Google was a research project by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Section 230 includes, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."[6] Eisenstat says that it's time to revisit Section 230, to demand accountability where Internet companies promote or suppress information based on the content while protecting web freedom otherwise. This is similar to the recommendations of Dean Baker that when Internet companies make money by promoting information differentially based on content, they should be liable as are legacy media under the US Supreme Court decision in NYT v. Sullivan (1964). In other cases, they should be treated as common carriers like telephone companies. 2024: Tech platforms and political violence More recently, Eisenstat et al. (2024a, b) are insisting that, "Tech Platforms Must Do More to Avoid Contributing to Potential Political Violence". The New York Times had reported that, "a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal," particularly targeting public officials and democratic institutions. A survey from the Brennan Center found that 38% of election officials have experienced violent threats. They attributed these threats primarily to tech platforms and gave seven recommendations in four themes "congruent with any number of papers that academics and civil society leaders have published over the years." They said that platforms must develop robust standards for threat assessment and engage in scenario planning, crisis training, and engagement with external stakeholders, with as much transparency as possible. should enforce clear and actionable content moderation policies that address election integrity. should enforce their rules uniformly, not exempting politicians and other political influencers. must clearly explain important content moderation decisions, ensuring transparency especially when it comes to high profile accounts. They hope that increasing demands for accountability will prompt platforms to act more responsibly and prioritize the risk of political violence both in the United States and abroad. More on Wikiversity More on this including a moderated discussion of the issues raised is available in the companion article on Wikiversity on "Online platforms' effects on public health, safety and democracy". Notes Yael Eisenstat, Wikidata Q82046593 Cybersecurity for Democracy, Wikidata Q139568543 McQue (2026), "C4D and the Courts: Meta Guilty Verdicts". Cybersecurity for Democracy. Wikidata Q139572464. Spencer Graves, Wikidata Q56452480 Reid (2020). 47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material, 1996, Wikidata Q139570261 Bibliography Bobby Allyn (25 March 2026). "Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial". NPR. Wikidata Q139572103. Yael Eisenstat (August 2020) Dear Facebook, this is how you're breaking democracy, TED, Wikidata Q138844363 Yael Eisenstat (2021). "Section 230 Revisited: Web Freedom vs Accountability". Cornell Tech. 13 May 2020. Wikidata Q139568755. Yael Eisenstat; Justin Hendrix; Daniel Kreiss (2024a). "Preventing Tech-Fueled Political Violence: What online platforms can do to ensure that they do not contribute to election-related violence". The Bulletin of Technology & Public Life. 22 May 2024. Wikidata Q139571027. Yael Eisenstat; Justin Hendrix; Daniel Kreiss (2024B). "Tech Platforms Must Do More to Avoid Contributing to Potential Political Violence". Tech Policy Press. Wikidata Q139571163. Katie McQue (24 March 2026). "Meta ordered to pay $375m after being found liable in child exploitation case". The Guardian. Wikidata Q139572337. ISSN 0261-3077. Blake E. Reid (4 September 2020), Section 230 of… what?, Wikidata Q139570229