Shorenstein Center Welcomes Fall Class of Fellows

September 16, 1999

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The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, a research center based at the Kennedy School of Government, will introduce its 1999 Fall Fellows and Visiting Lombard Professor at 4:30 p.m., Monday, Sept. 27, in the Taubman Building (access from Eliot Street), Kalb Seminar Room T-275, at the Kennedy School of Government. The public is invited.

Among the six fellows are a syndicated columnist from the Washington Post, a former East Asia editor at the Times (London), and a communication scholar who is also a documentary filmmaker. The fellows will spend the fall researching and preparing papers on timely issues, including the relationship between the public relations industry and the news business; media use and political alienation; and race, the media, and public opinion.

Visiting Lombard Professor Lance Bennett, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, will teach a course at the Kennedy School on Strategic Communication and the Personalization of Politics.
"The Shorenstein Fellows this fall are as interesting and diverse a group as any we have had," said Shorenstein Center Acting Director Tom Patterson. "Their research interests include race, political alienation, democratization, public relations, press freedom, and political dissent. We eagerly anticipate the contributions they will make during their time at the Center."

Shorenstein Fellows
The 1999 Fall Fellows are:

Stephen Bates is literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly. He is the author of Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Our Schools (1993), If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism (1989), The Media and the Congress (editor) (1987), and The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television (with Edwin Diamond, 1984). His articles have appeared in The New Republic, Washington Monthly, The Weekly Standard, American Heritage, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a former attorney on the staff of the Whitewater Independent Counsel, Bates will write about the issues that arise when journalists are subpoenaed.

Bette Jean Bullert, assistant professor, School of Communication, American University, is a communication scholar and a documentary filmmaker. Her current research examines the role of public relations in the making of news. This expands on her prior work about how the media can enhance or inhibit the promise of a more democratic society. She is the author of Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film (Rutgers, 1997). Bullert's documentaries have been broadcast nationally on public television, most recently, Earl Robinson: Ballad of an American. She is currently producing a portrait of the Pacific Northwest indigenous leader known as Chief Seattle, and a profile of the lyricist, E.Y. Harburg. She holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Washington and an M.Litt. in politics from Oxford University. She has taught communication and documentary production at American University and Muhlenberg College.

Christina Holtz-Bacha has studied communication, political science and sociology at the University of Muenster, Germany, where she also received her Ph.D. She is now professor in communication at the University of Mainz. Before she went to Mainz in 1995, she taught communication at the University of Munich for 10 years and at the University of Bochum for 4 yearsa. She also was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1986. She has published widely in the area of political communication, journalism, and gender-related topics in communication. She currently is the speaker of the Political Communication Division of the German Communication Association. She is the co-editor of the German journal Publizistik and is a member of the editorial boards of Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and European Journal of Communication. Her research will involve media use and political alienation.

Paul Kellstedt received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1996, after which he became an assistant professor at Brown University. His work focuses on the dynamics of macro political behavior, in particular, how and why public opinion shifts through time. Currently, he is working on a book about the inter-relationships between media coverage, public opinion, and policy outcomes on racial issues in America. His articles have appeared in, among other places, the American Journal of Political Science as well as Political Analysis. His research project is on race, the media and public opinion.

Jonathan Mirsky was educated at Columbia University, Cambridge University, and the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. dissertation is on the Tang dynasty. He has taught Chinese and Vietnamese history, comparative literature, and Chinese at Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth College. In 1974 he moved to England. From 1993 to 1998 he was East Asia editor of The Times (London) based in Hong Kong. He has also written for The Observer, The Economist, and The Independent. He is a regular writer for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, International Herald Tribune, and The Spectator, and he contributes to other journals. Mirsky has accompanied prime ministers and foreign secretaries to Beijing, and has interviewed the Dalai Lama, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping. In 1990, Mirsky was named British newspapers' International Journalist of the Year for his coverage of the Tiananmen uprising. His research project is on "Disputed Facts about Tiananmen Square."

Richard Morin is director of polling, staff writer, and a nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. Morin came to The Post in 1987 from The Miami Herald, where he had been survey and research editor for five years. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, urban affairs reporter and an editor at the Herald for five years. He worked as night police reporter, city hall reporter, and investigative reporter at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, Arizona, for four years before joining the Herald. In 1980, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Special (Investigative) Reporting. In addition to his duties as a staff writer for the Post, Morin writes a weekly column on public opinion that appears in the Washington Post National Weekly, and in Washingtonpost.com. He also writes two other columns for the Post: a general interest column, "Unconventional Wisdom," for the Sunday "Outlook" section and a column on think tanks and foundations, called "The Ideas Industry." He studied survey methodology, computer programming, and applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in 1983 and 1984. His research project is "Four Years Later: Democracy and the News Media in South Africa."

Visiting Lombard Professor
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.

Visiting Laurence M. Lombard Professor Lance Bennett works primarily in the area of media and politics and has contributed to the literature of political psychology, communication theory, and culture. He has published two books on public opinion, including Public Opinion in American Politics. He is also co-author of Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom; News: The Politics of Illusion, and The Governing Crisis: Media, Money and Marketing in American Elections. His recent research includes studies of how public policy debates are structured in the United States and Sweden, how the media affect the foreign policy process, and why different groups are included and excluded in news coverage of political issues. He has served as chair of the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association, and on editorial boards of major journals in political science and communications. He teaches courses on Political Communication, Qualitative Methodology and Media & Society. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.