Experiment Shapes Author’s Life and Career

Tilted Mirrors cover art

When John Pollock (EIL Spain ’63) lived with a family in Bilbao, Spain during his time as an Experimenter, two activities changed his career and life.  One was learning to be comfortable in another language; the other was reading local newspapers, accessing political and social perspectives rarely encountered in the US. Both activities were transformative. The combination of in-country experience and undergraduate training in Spanish was critical in helping John obtain graduate fellowships and admission to distinguished graduate programs, leading ultimately to a Ph.D. in Latin American politics at Stanford. John’s story is an example of how a summer abroad, living with and experiencing another culture, can impact an individual for the rest of his life.

 Language skills apart, John’s exposure to multiple media perspectives on public affairs outside the US kindled a lifelong interest linking different geographic or community environments to varied coverage of critical events. Instead of examining the impact of media on society (the perspective adopted by most journalism and communication professors), John was interested in exploring the reverse question: What is the impact of society on media? As a professor working with undergraduates at Rutgers (where he became director of the Latin American Institute) and later, The College of New Jersey, John noticed major differences in coverage comparing «The New York Times» and «Times» of London reporting on a coup d’état in Brazil, election of a socialist president in Chile, and civil disturbances in South Africa. John’s search for the origins of this varied coverage took him far beyond traditional explanations emphasizing differences in the attitudes or professional orientations of journalists, newsroom organizations, or media ownership patterns. 

 Over many years John and multiple teams of students uncovered major differences in cross-national reporting linked to discrepancies in wealth (Gross Domestic Product per capita), education (literacy rate) or other measures of inequality or vulnerability (infant mortality rate) in different countries. In the US, exploring coverage of critical issues across multiple major cities also revealed similar links between community/city measures of income and educational inequality and variations in newspaper coverage of such issues as physician-assisted suicide, global warming, obesity, bans on smoking in public places or on smoking ads targeting children, gun control, trying juveniles as adults, stem cell research and foreign policy issues such as the turnover of Hong Kong to China and NAFTA.

 Recently John collected several of his most significant studies into a book: "Tilted Mirrors: Media Alignment with Political and Social Change - A Community Structure Approach", published by Hampton Press (Cresskill, New Jersey). Harvard communication scholar Thomas Patterson, commented: "(This) impeccable study is a terrific piece of research. 'Tilted Mirrors' belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to know how the press in America truly operates. Pollock's unsettling findings go far beyond previous work in illuminating the relationship between a community and its daily paper." John’s current research compares coverage of AIDS among several sub-Saharan African countries. For John, an Experiment summer in 1963 stimulated a fascination with foreign languages and an eagerness to explore the impact of different communities on media coverage of public policy.