One of the strengths of the program that I am participating in is that TFAS has the connections to command good speakers. Below are some of the interesting forums we have had recently.
War Coverage
Last Wednesday (June 23) we had a very interesting forum with three journalists who had covered the war: Simon Marks (Fox News; PBS), Stephen Hayes (Weekly Standard), and Mark Johnson (Charlotte Observer). All three of the panelists had been in Iraq. Two of them were embedded reporters. While I don’t know if we ended the session much closer to our goal of developing an ethic of war coverage, we did hear some fascinating accounts of the experiences of three serious journalists.
Newsweek
Monday (June 28) I was invited to a lunch at Newsweek. We heard from Rich Thomas, a long-time newsman, and Mike Isikoff. Isikoff is well known as the reporter who uncovered the Lewinsky scandal.
Ron Suskind
Monday evening Ron Suskind spoke in my leadership scholars class. Suskind is the Pultizer-prize winning author of The Price of Loyalty, the controversial book about Paul O’Neill’s time in the Bush administration. Suskind is a pioneer of an emerging genre he calls the “news novel”–historical accounts weaved into a narrative so that they read like fiction.
Suskind is a very dynamic speaker who managed to speak for almost two full hours straight. I found that Suskind’s liberal presentation was more internally consistent than some of our other guest speakers. As is often the case we ran out of time before we could ask Suskind all the questions we had.
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau
Tuesday I sat in on the daily editorial meeting for the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder. The meeting resembled an editorial meeting at a daily newspaper with each editor reporting what stories were in the pipeline and presenting ideas for upcoming stories. I enjoy hearing current events batted around in this setting.
After the meeting John Walcott, the bureau chief, spent about an hour discussing the news industry with the interns. Walcott is a big proponent of liberal arts education and humanities majors. He discourages doing graduate work in journalism in favor of focusing on a specific field like economics or foreign relations. Mr. Walcott seems to be a person who is interested in ideas and is able to think outside the standard categories. He invited us to stop in anytime to talk with him or the other editors during the next four weeks.