Biden Policy Dinner

In today’s technological age, the social media app Snapchat has become a medium for photo sharing, text communication, and now a primary news source for millions of young Americans. Peter Hamby and his team at “Good Luck America” are the driving force behind Snapchat’s news sharing model, which has earned high praise for reaching a demographic that more traditional news outlets are struggling to capture.

Hamby began his journalism career at CNN, as a producer for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and then as an embedded reporter during the 2008 and 2012 presidential election cycles; winning multiple Emmy awards along the way. In 2015, he joined Snapchat as its director of news.

On Thursday, October 25, the Biden Institute welcomed Hamby as the special guest for our October Biden Policy Dinner. Forty students and professors from the Department of Communication and the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware were invited to engage in a conversation with Hamby regarding the current state of the political media. After giving the students and faculty a background on his own career in journalism, he opened the floor to many substantive questions regarding how politics is covered in various mediums and the realities of broadcast news today. Questions ranged from content moderation on social media websites to the role of the media in being the check on the various branches of government. Students and faculty found his perspective to be refreshing in this age of political polarization, commenting on the earnest and sincere nature of the dialogue between him and dinner guests.