Junck Colloquium with A.J. Bauer

Please join us for a Mary Junck Research Colloquium talk about media bias with A.J. Bauer, Ph.D., Friday, Oct. 24.

We will serve lunch at 11:30 a.m., with the talk to follow at noon, all in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room on the second floor of Wilson Library. We request that attendees register below to help with food planning.

Speaker

A.J. Bauer is a historian, ethnographer and former journalist who researches historical and contemporary right-wing movements in the United States and beyond. His work focuses on the role of media activism, press criticism and ideological journalism in the formation of political movements and identities.

He is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. He also serves programming chair of the Office of Politics, Communication and Media in the UA College of Communication & Information Sciences.

Keynote

Drawing from his forthcoming book “Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press” (Columbia, 2026), Bauer tracks the rightward shift of structural media criticism in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He contends that bias discourse—attempts to theoretically or empirically prove or disprove media bias—relies on an unwarranted faith in exposure. Bias claims assert that political disagreement is fundamentally an epistemological problem—that if only people had “the facts” they would see the world, and share the political interests, of the claimant. 

While the idea of “liberal media” bias has played a central role in modern conservative movement strategy and identity formation, progressive and journalistic attempts to respond have too often failed by accepting the claim’s core premise. What would it look like to reject bias discourse outright? Instead of endlessly debating the ideological and normative slants of various media, what if we saw bias for what it is—an acknowledgment of ideological disagreement, and an invitation into a distinct practice of political world-building?