Barbie Zelizer is a media scholar and academic known for her research on journalism, collective memory, and visual culture in news media. She is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Zelizer has written extensively on how journalists construct narratives and how images shape public understanding of major events. Her books examine the professional culture of journalism and the historical forces that influence news production. She is the author of How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism’s Decline, published by Polity in 2025, which analyzes how Cold War politics shaped modern journalistic practices and institutions.