Shorenstein Center Names Fall Fellows and Lombard Lecturer

Five Fall Fellows have been announced at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

In addition, General William L. Nash has been chosen as the Visiting Lecturer in the Laurence M. Lombard Chair and will teach a course titled The Military, the Media and National Security. The course will address the interrelationship between the media and public officials in the development and execution of United States national security policy and the press coverage of these activities.

The Fall Fellows and visiting faculty will introduce themselves and discuss their research at a panel discussion on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Taubman Building, fifth floor, at the Kennedy School. The public is invited.

"I am delighted to be able to welcome such an outstanding group of fellows," said Marvin Kalb, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center. "From South Africa and Belarus and from academe and journalism, they bring their special experiences, and I expect the mix will be exceptional as it is unusual."

Shorenstein Center Fellows

The 1998 Fall Fellows are as follows:

Katsiaryna Ivanova teaches in the department of communication at Minsk State Linguistic University and is an editor at the radio station, Belarus. Her responsibilities include reporting and interviewing on subjects ranging from political to cultural issues. She worked previously as a freelance journalist at several radio stations and at the newspaper Svobodnie Novosti. Her research project will focus on a comparative analysis of the emergence of Belarus, a newly independent country, in the national and international press.

Sean Henry Jacobs is a senior political researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), an independent public interest organization committed to promoting a sustainable democracy in South Africa. Previously, Jacobs worked as a labor and political reporter for Die Burger newspaper in Cape Town. He spent the '95-96 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar in political science at Northwestern University. In addition, Jacobs is a community media activist and contributes regular op-ed articles on the country's political transition as well as on media issues to a number of South African newspapers. His research will focus on the emerging dynamic between race, the media and the post-apartheid state.

Martha Kumar is a professor of political science at Towson State University and is a senior fellow at the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. She has spent the better part of the last two years in the basement of the White House press room where she has observed the relationship between reporters and officials. She interviewed reporters covering the White House and officials involved in presidential communications. Her published works include Portraying the President: The White House and the News Media and a variety of articles on presidential-press relations. Kumar will continue work on her book, Wired for Sound and Pictures: The President and White House Communications Policies.

Jonathan Randal has had a distinguished 40-year career as a foreign correspondent, working for United Press in Paris, London, Geneva, and Algeria, for the Paris Herald (now known as the International Herald Tribune), and for Time magazine, covering West and Central Africa until January 1966. In 1966, Randal joined The New York Times covering the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Vietnam War until 1967, when he was named bureau chief in Warsaw. In 1969, he went to The Washington Post to become an economics correspondent for Europe, then Paris bureau chief. Randal spent extended periods in Africa, Vietnam and the Middle East. In 1975, he became the Post's roving correspondent based in Paris until his retirement in 1998. Randal has written two books: Going All The Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and The War in Lebanon; and After Such Knowledge What Forgiveness? My Encounters in Kurdistan End. He will examine the decline of the American foreign correspondent and of foreign news in the media.

Jim Sleeper has written about racial politics and urban American civic cultures for 20 years. His reportage and commentary have appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Washington Monthly, The Nation, and The New Democrat. From 1988 to 1996 he was an editorial writer and columnist at Newsday and the New York Daily News. His books, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism, examine cultural pluralism and argue against making racial identity a central organizing principle of public and civic life. Sleeper will study the media's role in shaping pluralism and assimilation early in this century and now.

Lombard Lecturer

The Laurence M. Lombard professorship was established by the family and friends of Laurence M. Lombard, a director of the Dow Jones Co. for 28 years, to help build a substantial body of knowledge concerning the interaction of media and politics and their influence on public policy. Visiting Lecturer William L. Nash, retired Major General in the U.S. Army, was commander of Task Force Eagle, a multinational division organized to implement the Dayton Peace Accords in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. General Nash served as a brigade commander in Desert Storm, as program manager and advisor to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, and was a platoon leader in Vietnam. Nash has also served at Headquarters, Department of the Army, the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Headquarters, U.S. Army, Europe.

The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy was established in 1986 to promote greater understanding of the media by public officials, improve coverage by media professionals of government and politics, better anticipate the consequences of public policies that affect the media and the First Amendment, and to increase knowledge about how the media affect our political processes and governmental institutions.