Campus & Community

Shorenstein Center announces spring fellows

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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 2001 spring fellows and visiting faculty on Monday, Feb. 5, at 4:30 p.m. in the Taubman Building, Kalb Seminar Room T-275, at the Kennedy School. The event is open to the public.

Among the fellows and visiting faculty this spring are a former newspaper editor from Stockholm, a former president of CNN-US, a columnist from the Boston Globe, and a former Clinton speechwriter. The fellows will spend the spring semester researching and writing on topics as varied as the media’s coverage of health care, the new economy, and the biotechnology revolution.

“This is an especially spirited and engaging group of fellows, and we at the center are expecting the atmosphere around here to be charged with electricity,” Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center, said.

The 2001 spring fellows

Hans Bergström was the chief editor of Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden’s leading newspaper with 1 million daily readers. He was previously editor in chief of the Nerikes Allehanda newspaper in Örebro, Sweden. He is a member of the board of Dagens Nyheter and continues to write as a senior columnist and science reporter. Bergström is an associate professor of political science at the University of Göteborg. His Ph.D. thesis focused on governmental transitions. He also has researched new media logic and its effect on political culture and trust. Bergström worked as a political consultant and speechwriter for the chairman and then prime minister of the liberal party. Bergström will work on a book about the biomedical revolution, and will specifically examine what images of age convey in American and European newspapers.

Trudy Lieberman, a journalist for more than 30 years, is director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at the Consumers Union. She is a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, a contributor to The Nation, and continues to write about health policy for Consumer Reports. She has won numerous awards and honors including two National Magazine Awards, 10 National Press Club Awards, a Fulbright Fellowship to study health care in Japan, and a John J. McCloy Fellowship to study health care in Germany. She teaches media ethics as an adjunct professor at New York University. Lieberman is a graduate of the University of Nebraska and was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in economics and business journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Lieberman will examine how the media contribute to waste and harm in health care.

Jeff Madrick is the editor of Challenge magazine, an economics columnist at The New York Times, and a regular economics contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of “The End of Affluence” (Random House, 1995) and “Taking America” (Bantam, 1987), both named notable books of the year by The New York Times. Business Week magazine also named “Taking America” one of the 10 best business books of the year. Madrick was an Emmy-award winning economics reporter and commentator for NBC News and WNBC-TV. He was executive editor of “Business Times” on ESPN. As a columnist for Business Week in the 1970s, he won the Page One Award. He also served as Business Week’s financial editor and was formerly a columnist for Money magazine. Between 1978 and 1981, Madrick was an executive for Columbia Pictures and a Wall Street financial consultant. He is a graduate of New York University and Harvard Business School. He is an adjunct professor of social sciences at Cooper Union in New York City. Madrick will examine how today’s media have reported, analyzed, and questioned the new economy.

David Nyhan is a columnist and associate editor at the Boston Globe. Nyhan has covered nine presidential elections in a career that has taken him to every state and 20 foreign countries. He is a frequent commentator on politics for CNN, C-SPAN, New England Cable News, and public television in Boston. Prior to joining the Globe, Nyhan wrote for the Associated Press and the Evening News in Salem, Mass. In 30 years at the Globe, he has been statehouse bureau chief, congressional and White House correspondent in the Washington bureau, and assistant managing editor in charge of news, and he has directed the paper’s political coverage. He wrote a book about the 1988 presidential campaign. In 1996 he was a Reuter Foundation Fellow at Oxford University. Married and the father of three, Nyhan graduated from Harvard in 1962. Nyhan will examine issues of fairness in journalism in the context of the Internet, Web-casting, and television.

The visiting faculty for spring

Rick Kaplan, former president of CNN-US, will be the Visiting Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer and will teach a course on whether American media meet the needs of a modern democracy. He has been a broadcast journalist for more than 30 years. As president of CNN-US (1997-2000), Kaplan galvanized CNN’s ability to provide up-to-the-minute live coverage and analysis of breaking and ongoing news events. Under his leadership, CNN produced global “Millennium 2000” coverage, and several series, including “Investigating the President,” “Showdown with Iraq, Ground Zero,” and “Investigating the President: Media Madness?” Kaplan joined ABC News in 1979 as a senior producer for “World News Tonight.” He then served as executive producer for ABC network programs, including “Good Morning America” news, “Nightline,” “Primetime Live,” and “World News Tonight.” Prior to joining ABC, Kaplan was a producer for “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” He is the recipient of many awards, including 34 Emmy Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, Overseas Press Club awards, and two George Polk awards. The Laurence M. Lombard Professorship that Kaplan will hold was established by the family and friends of Laurence M. Lombard, a director of the Dow Jones Company for 28 years, to help build a substantial body of knowledge concerning the interaction of media and politics.

Rick Berke, the chief political correspondent and senior writer for The New York Times, will be an adjunct lecturer teaching a module called “Press and Politicians: Behind the Scenes of the 2000 Campaign.” Since joining The New York Times in 1986, Berke has covered the White House, Congress, and domestic policy, as well as presidential and congressional elections. From 1981 to 1986 he was at The Baltimore Evening Sun, where he worked as the Washington correspondent for the paper, in addition to covering several beats in Baltimore. He was the general assignment reporter on the city desk of the Minneapolis Tribune in 1980. Berke received his M.S. in journalism in 1981 from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and his B.A. in political science in 1980 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Timothy E. Cook is the Fairleigh Dickinson Jr. Professor of Political Science at Williams College where he has taught since 1981. As adjunct professor, he will be teaching two courses: “Media Strategies and Governance” and “The Politics of Sexual Diversity: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Politics in the U.S. and Beyond.” Cook was the Visiting Laurence M. Lombard Professor at the Shorenstein Center in 1989-1990. In 1995, he was visiting professor of political science at Yale. His books include “Making Laws and Making News: Media Strategies in the U.S. House of Representatives” (Brookings Institution, 1989); “Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates, and Media in a Presidential Campaign” (co-author; University of Chicago Press, 1996); and “Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution” (University of Chicago Press, 1998). Cook has also published widely on political communication in the United States, political socialization, and representation in Congress. Cook received his B.A. in 1976 from Pomona College and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin in 1982.

Michael Waldman is a former director of speechwriting at the White House from 1995 to 1999. He is an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government and will teach a module on “Speeches and Speechwriting: Beyond the Bully Pulpit.” Waldman has crafted four State of the Union Addresses, two Inaugural Addresses, and Clinton’s acceptance speech for the 1996 Democratic convention. He has written or edited nearly 2,000 presidential speeches. Prior to becoming assistant to the president and director of speechwriting, Waldman was special assistant to the president for policy coordination at the Domestic Policy Council and the Office of Strategic Planning and Communications. He served as deputy communications director for the Clinton-Gore campaign and for President Clinton. From 1989 to 1992 he was director of Public Citizens Congress Watch. Waldman was a fellow at the Institute of Politics in the fall of 1999. He is the author of “POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words that Defined the Clinton Presidency.”

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, to improve coverage by media professionals, to 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.