This article was originally published on December 5, 2025 on the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies website. The McGee Center aims to equip individuals with the essential skills and knowledge required to adeptly navigate and critically assess narratives in the dynamic media landscape of the 21st century. Through innovative research endeavors, collaborative educational initiatives, and active engagement with the community, the McGee Center is helping build a future where media literacy becomes a cornerstone for informed and empowered citizenship.
This week marked the end of the McGee Center’s first Buchanan Library Fellowship, a semester-long experiential learning opportunity to “deepen students' understanding of resources and services in Vanderbilt Libraries.” The fellowship culminated with a presentation of their exhibits at the Showcase.
Our project originated from an idea John Geer, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Vanderbilt Poll, had about investigating coverage of higher education in the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (TVNA). We’ve seen increased coverage of U.S. colleges and universities in recent years, which made us wonder how higher education has been portrayed by national television media over the past 50+ years.
We ran an initial query that returned 39,041 results, from which several themes emerged: student protests, cost/value of college, research and discovery, and perceptions of liberal bias. Professor Geer, Media Analyst Namrah Khan and I then pitched this idea for a Buchanan Fellowship, and this query became the baseline for our project Making the Grade: Examining the Media's Framing of Higher Education. We selected three undergraduate research fellows, Armani Dill, Lauren Somogye and Ansley Steele, to dig deep into this dataset and the TVNA more broadly to build a digital library exhibit that tells a story from the data.
To support their efforts, we provided some scholarly context, including an introduction to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University so they could connect media coverage to public opinion at various times in TVNA’s history. But perhaps the biggest undertaking was teaching fellows how to use the Databricks data intelligence platform to refine datasets supporting their individual analysis.
Each fellow’s final exhibit is a thoughtful exploration of how the media has reported on key issues related to higher education: the rising cost of college, affirmative action in college admissions and the politicization of higher education conversation. Although they converged on mostly the same topics, fellows gleaned their own informed insights and took their own approach to selecting representative clips to tell their story. They included coverage of legal landmarks, personal anecdotes, political perspectives and news punditry to illustrate how media can help shape the tropes that come to define a complex topic like higher education. You can take a look at each fellow's exhibit here:
- Armani Dill: Media Bias & Accessibility Politics
- Lauren Somogye: From Policy to Perception: The TV News Journey of Affirmative Action and the Rise of Meritocratic Discourse
- Ansley Steele: How Television News Framed the Cost of College, 1980–2025
Armani reported that one of her biggest takeaways was realizing the importance of checking her own biases and assumptions about popular opinions and perceptions especially when it comes to social issues and the media. "Working in the TVNA and getting to participate as a Buchanan fellow allowed me to use real research and analysis to draw conclusions that were backed with facts and direct observations, which is something I think everyone even those outside of academia would benefit more from," she said.
This semester was a fantastic foray into the Buchanan Fellowship experience and an especially fulfilling way to work with some exceptional Vanderbilt students. The McGee Center is looking forward to hosting more fellowship opportunities — including one coming up in spring with Dr. Sabrina Spicer: Speak Up for Science: Investigating Media Coverage of Scientific Discovery.