A panel of Knight-Wallace Fellows and the deputy director for The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) will share their stories about the biggest data leaks in history, the establishment of global networks for investigative reporters and the seismic impact of collaborative journalism.
The Eisendrath Symposium honors Charles R. Eisendrath, former director of Wallace House, and his lifelong commitment to international journalism.
It is produced with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Michigan Radio is a co-sponsor of the event.
Will Potter, a 2016 Knight-Wallace Fellow and Marsh Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan, will moderate the discussion.
Panelists:
Bastian Obermayer is a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow and deputy head of the investigative unit for Süddeutsche Zeitung, the largest national daily newspaper in Germany. He is the reporter initially contacted by the anonymous source of The Panama Papers. Obermayer is also the author of several books, the most recent of which is the story of The Panama Papers.
Marina Walker Guevara is the deputy director of The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). A native of Argentina, she has reported from a half-dozen countries and her investigations have won more than 25 national and international awards. Walker Guevara managed some of journalism’s most consequential investigations on global corruption including The Panama Papers, which involved more than 370 reporters from 107 media organizations in 76 countries. Other investigations include Swiss Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks and Offshore Leaks.
Edouard Perrin was a 2016 Knight-Wallace Fellow and is a documentary investigative reporter for Premières Lignes Télévision in Paris. He is the reporter who revealed Luxembourg’s secret tax deals with major international corporations in 2012, the story that morphed into Luxembourg Leaks. He produced two documentaries on the topic, earning him several awards and a criminal indictment in Luxembourg. Acquitted in June 2016, Luxembourg appealed the initial decision and retried Perrin in December 2016. A new verdict is expected on March 15, 2017.
Laurent Richard is a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow, investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of Premières Lignes, a television production and news agency based in Paris. He oversaw Premières Lignes Télévision’s coverage of the Luxembourg Leaks in 2014. Richard is currently developing a collaborative journalism network devoted to publishing the work of reporters who are threatened, jailed or killed.
Michigan Radio is a co-sponsor of the event.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit knightfoundation.org.
The Livingston Lectures present journalists Lisa Gartner, Michael LaForgia, and Nathaniel Lash and education policy expert Tabbye Chavous for a panel discussion on “Failure Factories,” the Tampa Bay Times investigative series about what happened after the Pinellas County School Board voted in 2007 to abandon racial integration in favor of a neighborhood school system, the policy changes prompted by the reports and the current shape of racial segregation in schools across the county.
In 2007 the Pinellas County School Board abandoned integration, promising schools in poor, black neighborhoods more money, staff and resources. None of those were delivered. In 2015 Tampa Bay Times’ reporters Lisa Gartner, Michael LaForgia and Nathaniel Lash analyzed data from seven years of school disciplinary records and found a precipitous decline in student performance as well as alarming rates of violence in five elementary schools following the 2007 decision. Their investigative series received attention from the U.S. education Secretary and led to several reforms
Lisa Gartner is a writer on the enterprise team at the Tampa Bay Times. In 2016, she and Times reporters Cara Fitzpatrick and Michael LaForgia won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for “Failure Factories.” The series also won the Livingston Award, the Polk Award for Education Reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal, among other honors. Gartner joined the Times in 2013. She grew up in Wellington, FL, and attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. After graduating in 2010, she joined The Washington Examiner to report on education in the D.C. metro area. At the Times, Gartner covered Pinellas County Schools and higher education.
Michael LaForgia is investigations editor at the Tampa Bay Times. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting – in 2014 for exposing problems in a Hillsborough County homeless program and in 2016 for the “Failure Factories” series, for which he also won a Livingston Award. He joined the Times in 2012.
Nathaniel Lash joined the Tampa Bay Times in 2015 as an intern and became a data reporter. He was a fellow at The Center for Investigative Reporting, an intern at Newsday and a news applications developer at The Wall Street Journal. A Livingston Award winner, Lash graduated from the University of Urbana-Champaign with a degree in news-editorial journalism.
Tabbye M. Chavous is the director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) and a Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her expertise and research activities include social identity development among black adolescents and young adults; and diversity and multicultural climates in secondary and higher education settings and implications for students’ academic, social, and psychological adjustment.
Moderated by Brian Jacob, Walter H.Annenberg professor Education Policy, professor of economics and co-director of the Education Policy Initiative and Youth Policy Lab.
This is co-sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Education Policy Initiative and the School of Education.
A panel of national journalists and a political science expert will offer analysis about the presidential election and the tempestuous aftermath during a public discussion at the University of Michigan.
The focus will be on criticism of the media, what journalists, pollsters and political experts missed, and the path forward in covering an unprecedented presidency and divided country.
Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House at U-M, said it is important to hear from reporters who have covered the presidential election from the beginning.
“It is even more important to turn our attention to what comes next,” Clemetson said. “We are entering uncharted waters. As much as news organizations need to to examine their coverage priorities, news consumers need to become astute in assessing the flood of information coming at them and the role and function of a free press in society.”
The panel includes alumni of the U-M Knight-Wallace Fellowships for Journalists who covered the campaign and will report on the transition, as well as a former Livingston Awards winner and a U-M expert who follows elections and voting behavior.
Panelists:
● Craig Gilbert is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington bureau chief and author of “The Wisconsin Voter” political blog. He has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and has written extensively about the electoral battle for the swing states of the industrial Midwest. Gilbert was a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow.
● Vincent Hutchings, U-M professor of political science, is an expert on public opinion, elections and voting behavior. He studies demographic change and its effect on voting behavior and how campaign communications are designed to appeal to various group identities.
● Tracy Jan is a national political reporter who covered the campaign for The Boston Globe. She focused primarily on the GOP, including Christian evangelicals, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. This month, she joins The Washington Post to develop a new beat on the intersection of race and the American economy. Jan was a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow.
● Laura Meckler is a staff writer with The Wall Street Journal where she covered the Democratic presidential primary and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She has reported on presidential politics, the White House, changing American demographics, immigration and health care. In 1999, she received a Livingston Award for national reporting.
● Katie Zezima is a political reporter for The Washington Post where she covered the Obama White House years. She chronicled the campaigns of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Texas Senator Ted Cruz from start to finish and before switching to enterprise reporting on social issues riling the election in its final months. Zezima was a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow.
Jon Morgan, an editor in the Washington bureau of Bloomberg News since 2010, will serve as moderator. He was a 2001 Knight-Wallace Fellow.
The event is being presented by Wallace House and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts.
“Russian Trolls: Is an Underground Online
Army Manipulating U.S. Politics?”
November 30, 2016 | 7:00 PM
WGBH, Yawkey Theater
One Guest Street
Boston, MA
Event is free.
Reception with speakers following the discussion. RSVP required»
The Livingston Lectures present an evening with David Greene, host of NPR’s “Morning Edition;” Adrian Chen, winner of the 2016 Livingston Award for International Reporting; Vasily Gatov, media researcher and author; and Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer of PBS’s Frontline.
In 2015, journalist Adrian Chen’s New York Times Magazine story unveiled a shadowy internet trolling organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, and raised the subject of the Russian government embracing social media to influence public opinion. For that story, Chen received the 2016 Livingston Award for International Reporting. The panel will discuss Russia’s current role in the U.S. presidential election and examine how power and money work to distort social media, a presumably pro-democratic tool.
David Greene is co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Previously, Greene was an NPR foreign correspondent based in Moscow covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics, east to Siberia. Greene has been a Livingston Awards judge since 2013.
Adrian Chen is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Previously he wrote about the internet and technology for New York, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.
Vasily Gatov is a Russian media researcher and author based in Boston. He has more than 28 years of professional experience in domestic and international media and is currently working on a book about censorship in Russia.
Raney Aronson-Rath is the executive producer of PBS’s Frontline. Under her leadership, Frontline has won every major award in broadcast journalism. For more than a decade, she has been a Livingston Awards judge.
A prominent voice from the campaign trail, Molly Ball appears regularly as an analyst on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” PBS’s “Washington Week,” CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR. She is the recipient of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism and the Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis for her coverage of political campaigns. The lecture addresses the upheaval of the U.S. political establishment and examine whether this is a fleeting or enduring phenomenon.
Ball previously was a staff reporter for Politico, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun and The Cambodia Daily. She began her journalism career working for newspapers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
She earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yale University. As a Knight-Wallace Fellow at Michigan, 2009-2010, she studied economic policy, government spending and taxation in Nevada and the effects of rapid population growth.
The annual lecture honors Knight-Wallace alumni whose subsequent careers exemplify the benefits of sabbatical studies at U-M. It is named for the late Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980-1986 and a distinguished journalist for The New York Times.
Knight-Wallace alumni, university colleagues and journalism luminaries honor Charles R. Eisendrath’s legacy to journalism.
By STEVE FRIESS ’12
In a massive events space on University of Michigan’s North Campus elegantly arrayed with energetic servers buzzing around, Dave Farrell ’93 offered up a worthwhile reminder of how far the Knight-Wallace Fellowships have come.
Today, of course, the program is renowned for its international travel to South America and Turkey, so Farrell wanted to explain to the 400 attendees at an April 15 fête for retiring Director Charles Eisendrath his role in how those exotic trips became a part of the deal.
“Farrell,” Eisendrath told the then-Detroit News staffer, “go down to the university transit hut and sign out the biggest van you can find.” He did as he was told, returning to the newly acquired Wallace House with a cargo vehicle. A little later, Farrell drove the van “with fellows stuffed in the back” to Detroit.
David Farrell ‘93 recalls Eisendrath and the Fellowship’s first “news tour.”
“Our destination was to find a guy who nailed a hubcap to a tree and called it art,” Farrell told the audience.
From such humble beginnings, the program swelled along with the prestige of the Livingston Awards, and Eisendrath became an icon of journalism. No explanation was necessary, for example, for the cakes perched as each table’s centerpiece coated in white fondant frosting and bedecked by a candy bowtie. Over dinner, university administrators and faculty, former Fellows and other colleagues stretching all the way back to 1970s reminisced and honored the larger-than-life human nucleus of two of the profession’s most important programs.
“I have no bleeping idea what course of study Eisendrath pursued,” said Charles Wolfson, a Fellow from “CBS News”, along with Eisendrath in the class of 1974-75. “I have this vague recollection that Charles spent some time at the School of Natural Resources. Maybe he was on the cutting edge of learning about what we’d come to know as climate change. But he was probably trying to figure out how to grow more cherries per acre on his farm.”
Eisendrath, who came to University of Michigan from his job as a foreign correspondent for Time, would never leave. He taught journalism and took over as director of the school’s now-gone masters program in 1980. That year he also became founding director of the Livingstons.
One of his students, commentator Jack Lessenberry of Michigan Public Radio, recalled Eisendrath’s teaching style – which felt familiar to anyone who had been a Fellow. “Charles gave us some simple instructions, threw us in the deep end and expected us to swim on our own,” said Lessenberry, head of journalism at Wayne State University.
“In my 20s and not at all sure what I wanted to do with my life, Charles Eisendrath showed me how to be a journalist and taught me the important and most fun profession in the world,” he intoned in his signature NPR style. “He did more to shape me professionally than anyone else and has been an important part of my life ever since.”
Farrell turned his attentions mostly to recognizing Eisendrath’s wife, Julia, whom he described as “the diamond we found in the fellowship year.” The “program’s first lady,” he said, “has the gift of communicating in such a way that makes everyone she talks to feel as though they are the only and the most important person in the world. When you talk to Julia, you know she really listens and when she speaks to you, you know she’s speaking from her heart.”
Julia Eisendrath, first lady of Wallace House and den mother to three decades of Knight-Wallace Fellows.
The tributes filled two hours and included testimonials from University of Michigan Provost Martha Pollack, University of Michigan Regent Kathy White, Council of Michigan Foundations CEO Robert Collier, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, former fellows Tracy Jan ’15 and Rachel Dry ’13, Wallace House associate director, Birgit Rieck and ragtime pianist extraordinaire Bob Milne, who led the outgoing fellowship class in a rousing original composition called, “The Man in the Hat.”
Will Potter, KWF ’16, spoke on behalf of the group – Eisendrath’s last crop – to explain how an Ann Arbor speakeasy called The Last Word would now offer an honorary drink, the “Thunderous Round,” which is made of Traverse City whiskey, cherry liqueur, agave syrup, bitters and “a splash of mediocre sherry.” Eisendrath’s evaluation of the seminar offering at Wallace House.
To end the festivities, Eisendrath called up each Wallace House staff member to thank them with gifts and praise for their longtime support, and introduced the incoming Wallace House director, Lynette Clemetson. A Fellow in 2009-10 and most recently a senior director at NPR, she donned the chestnut-hued Worth & Worth straw Fedora that he gave her as a “symbol of continuity.”
Clemetson used the occasion to announce that the Knight Foundation was pledging $50,000 towards an annual symposium on international journalism at the University in honor of Eisendrath’s keenest interest.
“To listen to all you’ve created, to be the beneficiary of what you’ve created and know it has strengthened me and my career and enabled things I did after the fellowship … to be able to come back is the greatest honor for the greatest man who has done so much for me,” she said to close out the night.
Over 200 Knight-Wallace alumni came from far and near to celebrate with Eisendrath, including many from the class of 2011-2012.
Dean Baquet, The New York Times; Christiane Amanpour, CNN; John Harris, POLITICO; David Greene, NPR
By STEVE FRIESS ’12
Pushing back against those who insist that the media and its American audiences are unserious and myopic, four of journalism’s top leaders used an April 15 forum honoring outgoing Wallace House Director Charles Eisendrath to insist foreign news has actually never been so relevant, popular or well-executed.
Practices are evolving as new technology provides opportunities for traditional print, TV and radio outlets to learn and deploy one another’s disciplines, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet acknowledged to an audience of nearly 1,000 at Rackham Auditorium and those watching online. Despite the cutbacks, the result of that transformation is that “foreign reporting is far better today than it’s ever been.”
“I walk into a newsroom every day that not only has the great foreign correspondents but also has a huge video unit that thinks about things differently,” Baquet said emphatically. “There is so much immediacy now. After the Paris attacks, I’m competing not only with my traditional competitors like CNN but with The Guardian. I’m competing minute-by-minute with the European papers in the countries that are under attack. For all the difficulties, it’s better than it ever was.”
Baquet sat beside CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour and POLITICO’s co-founder and editor-in-chief John Harris as NPR’s “Morning Edition” co-host David Greene moderated the 90-minute discussion titled “Beyond America: The Case for Foreign News.” University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel introduced the quartet, all of whom are Livingston Award judges.
Before turning the stage over to the speakers, Schlissel paused to recognize Eisendrath for his four decades of contributions to the university and to the profession of journalism.
“We are able to celebrate this afternoon among so many top journalists and supporters because of Charles’ singular determination,” Schlissel said. “One of Charles’ great talents is his ability to see the university holistically and as such has had an incredible knack for finding those experiences that would enrich the Fellows’ time with us. Charles is also always willing to share his own expertise and he’s a wonderful ambassador for the university.”
As the discussion ensued, the panelists began assessing the state of affairs for international coverage. Harris, whose company last year launched POLITICO Europe and won praise for its coverage of the Brussels terror attacks in March, questioned the premise of the event’s title and, in fact, what precisely qualifies as “foreign news.”
“There is no important issue domestically that doesn’t have an international dimension,” Harris said. “If there was an attack on midtown Manhattan or Washington D.C. of the sort that happened in Brussels … is that an international story or a local story?”
Livingston Judge Christiane Amanpour of CNN
That’s not to say there aren’t problems and concerns. Amanpour, who came to prominence after covering the Persian Gulf War and whose work covering the Bosnian War earned a Livingston Award in 1992, expressed frustration with major news outlets slashing budgets for overseas reporting and bemoaned the fact that the areas on the globe where journalistic attention is most needed are also where it is most difficult to find out what’s happening.
The backlash, she said, proves that “foreign news is so important that very important people want to shut us up. So, ISIS is cutting our throats. Governments don’t give us visas to go in. Militias make reporting difficult. Other governments shut us out by drumming up false charges or putting us in prison. We have to double down on foreign coverage and sending people out there.”
It’s not just foreign governments. Baquet pointed out that because even the United States now wages war using drones, illegal prisons and undercover operations, “We know much less about where the United States is engaged than we have in recent memory.”
Still, Baquet insisted, the public thirsts for the insights and information that outlets spend millions of dollars gathering and presenting. Long-form pieces and reports from such places as Europe and the Middle East are often the best-read Times articles, he said. “The dirty secret is that people always wanted foreign news,” he said. Alluding to the forum’s title, he continued, “I don’t actually think there’s much of a debate anymore. It’s the most important public-service oriented news we cover.”
Even so, Greene noted that as news organizations have closed their foreign bureaus over the two past decades, Harris is expanding POLITICO in Europe. POLITICO’s audience, Harris reasoned, “knows that the world is closer and has said ‘if you do something in Europe, count us in.'”
Some audience members, however, challenged the panel’s sunny view of the state of foreign news and Americans’ appetite for it. During a Q-and-A period, KWF ’12 Aisha Sultan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked the group why the U.S. media seems to go to saturation coverage for terror attacks that occur in Europe but not, for instance, Pakistan.
Amanpour admitted that this troubles her as well: “We don’t have the resources to do that kind of wall-to-wall coverage everywhere these things happen. But then, should we be doing that kind of wall-to-wall coverage anywhere on just one story? It does raise quite a lot of issues.”
Greene and Baquet noted that part of the issue is how newsworthy the incidents are – attacks in Pakistan are very common but quite rare in France or Belgium – and what sort of access is even possible. The Times, Baquet said, has been kicked out of Pakistan but has dozens of reporters across Europe able to pivot to a major story there.
“We covered the Paris attacks by sending our entire show there and hosting it there for an entire week,” Greene recalled. “We couldn’t do that in Islamabad.”
That train of thought also led to one of the most amusing exchanges. Amanpour recalled how, in 1997, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died within days of one another. Guilt over how intensely the death of the glamorous British royal figure was covered led many Western media outlets to give the funeral of the elderly Nobel-winning nun a lot more attention than she might have received absent the Diana mania.
After the panel discussion, Michigan students had a chance to talk with Dean Baquet.
Baquet acknowledged that this was true, but then quipped: “Princess Diana was young and killed in an accident. Mother Teresa was very old. There was not a shock that she died. If Mother Teresa had died speeding down a highway in Paris being chased by paparazzi, we would have gone nuts covering that, too!”
The panelists were generally hopeful, noting that their perches as Livingston judges give them a sense of the immense young talent continually joining the profession. These upbeat observations seemed to delight viewers on social media, as when Amanpour noted that “longform is actually getting a new life” and Harris observed that more substantive pieces break through the clutter because “you’re never going to be faster than Twitter.” Dozens of people, of course, tweeted these lines.
The Livingston Awards and University of Michigan hosted “Guards with Guns: Are America’s Security Guards a Safeguard or Hazard?” at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on January 12, 2016.
Moderated by David Greene, Livingston judge and host of “Morning Edition,” NPR, Livingston Award co-winners Shoshana Walter and Ryan Gabrielson discussed the findings of their Center for Investigative Reporting investigation on the haphazard system of lax laws and weak screening standards for armed security guards. Their series “Hired Guns,” won the 2015 Livingston Award for National Reporting.
The Council on Foreign Relations and the Livingston Awards presented “On the Ground: The Dangers of Reporting from the Middle East” in New York City.
Livingston Awards winner Matthieu Aikins joined Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent, “60 Minutes,” and Sebastian Junger, contributing editor, Vanity Fair and author, “The Perfect Storm” and “War” for a panel discussion on the risks of reporting on conflicts and wars in the Middle East. Moderated by Kevin Peraino, former Middle East correspondent, Newsweek and author, “Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power”
