On Thursday, July 13, Helen Boaden will be the featured speaker at the Summer Institute Speaker Series at the Hebrew Center. Ms. Boaden was formerly the director of BBC Radio and prior to that BBC News. She is an award-winning program maker and journalist in radio and television.

Ms. Boaden’s talk is entitled In Search of Unbiased Reporting and will address the challenges facing journalism today, including political and economic pressures.

“The reason this matters is because proper information, real facts, matter for democracy,” she said in a phone call with the Gazette. “Democracy is often fueled by opinion, but facts are a critical part of it.”

Social media presents additional challenges to journalistic standards and democracy, she added.

“The way newsfeeds work on social media, especially Facebook, kind of mean you just hear opinions you agree with from people you like,” she said. “And that is not healthy for democracy in my view.”

Ms. Boaden says this is particularly concerning given that increasingly people have come to rely upon social media for their news. She will touch on events including the 2016 presidential election and Brexit to illustrate recent challenges to journalistic standards of objectivity and balance.

The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. on July 13 at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, and will be followed by a question and answer session.