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Jeff St. Onge, Ph.D., blends two tracks in his work —balancing a passion for communication and media studies with his love of music.

St. Onge, who is associate professor of communication studies in the Getty College of Arts & Sciences at Ohio Northern University, created a course that focuses on how music communicates. And, in his other courses and writing, he focuses on the current information climate and its impact on democracy. 

His popular course on Music, Communication & Cultures, offered every year, takes a different approach to the topic.

“I wanted to create a class that was really about how music itself communicates. So, it’s kind of different than anything that’s out there,” said St. Onge. In addition to teaching at �������Ƶ and researching and writing about communication, he hosts a show about music on Toledo community radio station WAKT-FM. He also plays drums in a local band, is taking piano lessons, and writing a book drawn from his insights on teaching.

Each week the class focuses on a different genre of music—jazz, funk, reggae, heavy metal, hip hop, dance music, blues, and country music. Students in the class work from a playlist and discuss how the different genres communicate—how jazz uses improvisation or how funk uses rhythm to communicate, for example.

St. Onge sets the categories and chooses classics of each genre for the playlist, but students are encouraged to improvise and add contemporary versions of the music to their presentations. The class attracts students from a variety of areas from engineering to business, from musical theatre to pharmacy. 

“They come from every corner of the university, which makes it cool to teach because it’s not that common to have such a diverse student body in a class,” he said.

In his other communication teaching and writing, St. Onge focuses on the forces that shape the public conversation.

“I’m always thinking about ways research can improve democracy,” he said. Currently, that includes looking at some of the darker areas of the information environment— disinformation and propaganda.

“Social media is an amazing propaganda tool just because so many people interact with it frequently throughout the day in ways that don’t involve critical thinking,” St. Onge said. On the positive side, the internet/social media enables new types of journalism and gives people wider access to information. On the other hand, that information is not always provided by journalists trained to ferret out the truth and separate rumor from facts, he added.

While fact checking sites like Politifact and Snopes can work to correct disinformation, people tend to believe information that aligns with their own worldview, he added.

“I’m glad these sites exist and it’s important to have a record of what’s true and what’s not true, and, for some people it will change their mind,” St. Onge said. Facts alone, however, are not always going to persuade everybody, he added.

People don’t have to become cynical, but do need to learn how to sort disinformation from all the reports they are bombarded with daily. St. Onge’s advice: read constantly from multiple sources to get different perspectives and include information from reputable, objective media.

 “If I could wave a magic wand, I would have every third grader in the United States take a media literacy course, and a second one when they’re a little older because that’s how you know what to look for,” he said.

In his classes, he makes the point by having students look at an array of social media profiles, and try to guess which ones are real and which are fake. Some of the profiles are set up by trolls and exist “just to make people angry and fight about stuff.”

Having public discussion about issues is vital to our democracy, St. Onge said.

“Freedom of speech is so important in that it gives people freedom to dissent and discuss issues.” But, he added, people need to agree that issues exist. For example, “If we don’t collectively agree that climate change is a threat, we’re never going to pass any policies that effectively address it. You need a baseline of fact to make progress.”

Despite the divisions in public opinion, St. Onge believes, he said, that civil discourse is possible.

One of the favorite essays he’s written, he said, is titled “On Radical Friendliness: Productive Citizenship in an Age of Division,” published in Rhetoric Review. The article focuses on a norm of behavior for interacting with people in positive ways. “That has a ripple effect and that’s something the average person can do to counteract some of the negative things that are out there.”