Investigating Power - Then and Now

“Investigating Power – Then and Now”
Panel Discussion and Preview of Online Multimedia Project Honoring
Independent Journalism in America
April 25 6:30 p.m. in the Holeman Lounge

For his newest book, The Future of Truth: Power, the News Media and the Public’s Right to Know (Public Affairs), bestselling author Charles Lewis has been researching the most mortally consequential deceptions by government and private industry, the origins and trajectories of public relations and propaganda, and the truth-telling capacity of journalists and their news organizations over the past century. In our new warp-speed world, the number of public relation specialists has doubled and the number of newspaper reporters and editors has decreased by more than a third over the past 20 years. How can the American people know the real-time truth about those in power when independent, in-depth reporting has become rare? What are the most important aspects of new media technologies, the emerging new nonprofit journalism ecosystem, citizen muckraking and the global right-to-know movement?

Lewis, executive producer of the project and founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and professor of journalism at American University has produced “Investigating Power,” an online multimedia project honoring independent journalism in America. The project includes the observations and recollections of 23 important national journalists who have functioned as canaries in the mineshaft of this democracy – exposing the anti-Communist demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy; the institutionalized racism in the South and the civil rights struggle; the misrepresentations and atrocities committed by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War; the wholesale abuses of power in what became known as the Watergate scandal; the various abuses of corporate power over many decades; and specific abuses of U.S. power in post-9/11 America.

The program is sponsored by the NPC Journalism Institute. In addition to the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the project was supported by the Center for Public Integrity and its support organization, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

Moderator:

Chuck Lewis, executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and professor of journalism at American University.

Panelists:

Bill Kovach, former Washington bureau chief, New York Times, former editor, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former curator, Nieman Foundation; co-founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, co-author of The Elements of Journalism and two other books.

Dana Priest, author and national security reporter for the Washington Post; winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, for her Post stories about the secret CIA prisons and her stories, with Anne Hull, exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital.

Barry Sussman, editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard University; the special Watergate editor at the Washington Post overseeing the reporting of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and others; author of The Great Coverup and two other books

RSVP at [email protected]