The Discussion

Reporters confer at the Washington Post
Scene 14: The victory party after the judge declares that the Pentagon Papers may be published. The lawyer, Brian Kelly, offers a toast -- and a note of caution.
SULLIVAN: The Post has a great future ahead of it. The Pentagon Papers victory made it a world class competitor, just as Ben hoped. And the courts have said: "Well, except in certain cases, we ain't going to be the gatekeepers." So, the courts aren't allowed to do it, and the government can't be trusted to do it. That leaves you guys. Can you be the gate-keepers? We know you have the guts to say yes. Have you got the guts to say no? At what point do you draw the line on stolen documents? Do you sanction stealing? How far will you go with anonymous sources? To what ends do you go to feed the tape worm? Do you ask? Do you want to know?

Top Secret generates an entire host of questions. The above are posed to the reporters, but the courts, the government officials and American people must also find answers of their own to the questions raise by the drama. As part of furthering the Discussion, universities across the country will be sponsoring presentations, panels, film-showings, actor Q&A sessions, and other events associated with the performance. Information about those exchanges will be found here as those conversations evolve. For example, click here to watch "The Fine Line: History on the Boards", a panel discussion held as part of the University of Nebraska's "Echoes of Project X" Symposium on the Pentagon Papers.

Scheduled Participants:

David Demarest, former White House Communications Chief and current Stanford Vice-President will be speaking at the Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. on October 28. Demarest served four years as an assistant to President George H. W. Bush and member of the White House senior staff. As White House communications director, he worked directly with the president, the White House chief of staff and the Cabinet, and in that capacity managed a broad range of White House communications activities, including presidential speechwriting, public liaison, media relations and intergovernmental affairs. Upon concluding his duties at the White House, Demarest served as executive vice president and director of corporate communications at BankAmerica Corp. and then as executive vice president for global corporate relations at Visa International. He founded AspenLine Reputation Strategies, a specialized reputation management and communications consulting firm based in Sausalito, Calif.

   

 Philip Taubman, New York Times reporter, editor, former associate editorial page editor, and former Washington Bureau Chief and will be speaking at the Stanford University production in Palo Alto, Calif. on October 28.

Taubman, former deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times, has written about national security and intelligence issues for more than 20 years. After joining The Times in 1979, he covered the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy organizations as a reporter in Washington during the Carter and Reagan administrations, winning two Polk Awards. As a correspondent and bureau chief for the newspaper in Moscow in the late 1980s, he chronicled the changes that unfolded in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. He returned to Washington in 1989, where as deputy Washington bureau chief he directed the bureau's coverage of the Persian Gulf war and America's changed place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He served as deputy national editor of The Times from 1993-95. Since 1995, Taubman has coordinated the foreign policy commentary of The Times' editorial page and has written dozens of editorials about the CIA and intelligence issues. Earlier in his career, Taubman wrote about sports, education and business for Time magazine and Esquire. He graduated from Stanford University in 1971, where he majored in modern European history and was editor of the campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily. He served as a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, 1978-82.
 

 Pamela Karlan, Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Law, and Associate Dean for Research and Academics at Stanford Law School will be speaking at the Stanford University production in Palo Alto, Calif. on October 28.

A productive scholar and award-winning teacher, Pamela S. Karlan is also the founding director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Professor Karlan is the co-author of three leading casebooks on constitutional law and related subjects, as well as more than four dozen scholarly articles. She is a widely recognized commentator on legal issues and is frequently featured on programs such as the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, she was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

 

 Jeffrey Callison, host of “Insight” on KXJZ will lead a Forum@Mondavi Center conversation with UC Davis faculty members at 5pm on Oct. 29. at University of California, Davis

Callison was born in Scotland; he moved to California in 1989. He started his radio career soon after at NPR-affiliate KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz.  Jeffrey joined Capital Public Radio in 1996.  He served as News Director for several years before being named Insight's first host in 2004.

 

 

Peter Lichtenfels, chair of the UC Davis Department of Theater and Dance will host a post-performance question and answer session with the actors after the Oct. 30 show at University of California, Davis.

Peter Lichtenfels has a long and internationally renowned reputation as a theatre director and artistic director, with directing credits ranging from new theatre, to opera, to musicals, to main stage productions. Recognized as one of the most skillful dramaturges in English theatre, his directing experience then expanded to continental Europe and North America , his most recent production being Sartre's The Flies for the Stratford Festival of Canada (2003).

Peter ran the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh during the expansion years of the 1980s and then became the Executive Director of the Leicester Haymarket, where he created an important international dance festival, a vibrant community theatre, a European base for experimental performance and groundbreaking main stage productions.

An accomplished teacher of acting and verse, Peter is also a critical writer and editor of a wide range of theatre commentary, particularly on the conditions of modern British and European theatre practice. He has just co-edited the Arden Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet (2004), written a theatre commentary on The Merchant of Venice, and several articles on Shakespeare and the stage.

 

Anthony Lewis, former columnist for the New York Times, will participate in a panel discussion in conjunction with the performance at the University of Nebraska, on October 30 at 7:30 p.m. presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium. Anthony Lewis was a columnist for The New York Times from 1969 to 2001. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize.
He was born in New York City in 1927. He attended the Horace Mann School in New York and Harvard College, receiving a B.A. in 1948.

From 1948 to 1952 he was a deskman in the Sunday Department of The Times. In 1952 he became a reporter for The Washington Daily News. In 1955 he won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles in The News on the dismissal of a Navy employee as a security risk -- dismissal without telling the employee the sources or nature of the charges against him. The articles led to the employee’s reinstatement.
In 1955 Mr. Lewis joined the Washington Bureau of The New York Times. In 1956-57 he was a Nieman Fellow; he spent the academic year studying at the Harvard Law School. On his return to Washington he covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and other legal matters, including the Government’s handling of the civil rights movement, for The Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Supreme Court in 1963. He became chief of the Times London Bureau in 1964. He began writing his column from London in 1969. Since 1973 he has been located in Boston. He travels frequently, in this country and abroad. He is the author of three books: Gideon's Trumpet, about a landmark Supreme Court case on indigent representation; Portrait of a Decade, about the great changes in American race relations, and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment. Mr. Lewis was for fifteen years a Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School, teaching a course on The Constitution and the Press. He has taught at a number of other Universities as a visitor, among them the Universities of California, Illinois, Oregon and Arizona. Since 1983 he has held the James Madison Visiting Professorship at Columbia University.

Robert O’Neil, Fund for Independence in Journalism president, will participate in a panel discussion on Oct. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in connection with the engagement at the University of Nebraska, presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium.

Robert M. O’Neil became founding director of The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in 1990, after serving five years as president of the University of Virginia. He continues as a member of the University’s law faculty, teaching such courses as First Amendment and the Arts, Speech and Press, Church and State, and Free Speech in Cyberspace, as a University professor.

After serving as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., O’Neil began his teaching career in 1963 at the University of California Law School at Berkley, where he chaired the Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom.

He is currently director of the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative, and serves on the Board of Consulting Editors of Trusteeship, journal of the Association of Governing Boards. He recently served as a trustee or director of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), the Fort James Corp., the Commonwealth Fund and the Media Institute, and the editorial board of the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Journal. He chaired the boards of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government and WVPT Public Television. He is a member of the National Advisory Board of the American Civil Liberties Union.

He chaired Committee A (Academic Freedom and Tenure) of the American Association of University Professors from 1992-99, of which he was general counsel in 1970-72 and again in 1990-92. He currently chairs AAUP Special Committees on Academic Freedom and National Security in Time of Crisis and the Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans Universities.

He is the author of several books, including The Rights of Public Employees (second edition, 1993), Classrooms in the Crossfire (1981), and Free Speech in the College Community (1997), The First Amendment and Civil Liability (2001), and Academic Freedom in the Wired World (forthcoming fall 2007) as well as many articles in law reviews and other journals.

John Bender, UNL Journalism professor, will participate in a panel discussion on Oct. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in connection with the engagement at the University of Nebraska, presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium.

Bender is Associate Professor of News-editorial & James C. and Rhonda Seacrest Fellow at the University of Nebraska’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications.

 

 Eric Berger, UNL law professor, will participate in a panel discussion on Oct. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in connection with the engagement at the University of Nebraska presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium.

Professor Eric Berger joined the faculty in University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s Law Faculty 2007.  He received his B.A. with Honors in History from Brown University, and his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Kent Scholar and an Articles Editor on the Columbia Law Review.  After law school, Professor Berger clerked for the Honorable Merrick B. Garland on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  He then practiced in Jenner & Block’s Washington, D.C. office, where he worked on litigation in several state and federal trial and appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court.  Professor Berger’s matters there included cases involving lethal injection, gay marriage, the detention of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay, and internet obscenity. 

Professor Berger’s scholarly interests include constitutional law and federal courts, with a focus on domestic and foreign courts’ discretion to remedy constitutional violations. 

Walter Pincus national reporter for the Washington Post, will deliver a lecture at the University of Nebraska, at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 31, presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium 

Born in Brooklyn, Walter Pincus worked as a copyboy at the New York Times after graduating from Yale University. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955 and served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in Washington from 1955-1957. After his discharge, he worked on the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal's Washington edition. He left in 1959 to become Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. In 1963, he moved to the Washington Star before joining The Washington Post, where he worked from 1966 to 1969. From 1972 to 1975, he was executive editor of The New Republic. He covered the Watergate Senate hearings, the House impeachment hearings and the Watergate trial, writing articles for the magazine and op-ed pieces for The Washington Post. In 1975, he returned to The Washington Post to write for the national staff of the newspaper.

 When he resumed writing for the newspaper, he also was permitted to work as a part time consultant to NBC News and later CBS News, developing, writing or producing television segments for network evening news, magazine shows and hour documentaries.

Pincus has taken two 18-month sabbaticals from journalism. Both were spent directing investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under its then-chairman, Sen. J. William Fulbright. The first was into foreign government lobbying (1962-63) and the second into U.S. military and security commitments abroad and their effect on U.S. foreign policy (1969-70). Both investigations led to legislation. The first in a revision of the Foreign Agents Registration Act; the second in a series of limiting amendments on defense appropriations bills that culminated in the Hatfield-McGovern legislation to end the Vietnam War. 

At The Washington Post, Pincus has written about a variety of national news subjects ranging from nuclear weapons and arms control to political campaigns to the American hostages in Iran to investigations of Congress and the Executive Branch. For six years he covered the Iran-contra affair. He covered the intelligence community and its problems arising out of the case of confessed spy Aldrich H. Ames, allegations of Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons laboratories.

Pincus has won several newspaper prizes including the George Polk Award in 1977 for stories in The Washington Post exposing the neutron warhead; the 1961 Page One award for magazine reporting in The Reporter, and a television Emmy for writing on the 1981 CBS News documentary series, Defense of the United States. In 1999 he was awarded the first Stewart Alsop Award given by the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers for his coverage of national security affairs. In 2002 he was one of six Post reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

 

Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, will be delivering a public address on Nov. 1 at the University of Nebraska, presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium. He will also be delivering an address  on Jan. 28 at 7:30 pm in conjunction with the University of Iowa.

Ellsberg was born in Detroit in 1931. After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King's College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.
 
From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, a landmark in decision theory which was recently published. In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs), John McNaughton, working on Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification on the front lines.
 
On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, he worked on the Top Secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
 
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Daniel has continued to be a leading voice of moral conscience, serving as a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, government wrongdoing and the urgent need for patriotic whisteblowing.
 
To encourage national security whistleblowing, Daniel launched the Truth-Telling Project in 2004 with “A Call to Patriotic Whistleblowing.” The Project aims to reach current government insiders, journalists, lawyers, lawmakers, and the American public with an urgent appeal for revealing the truth about government cover-up and lies before the next war.  Collaborating with the ACLU, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), the Project on Government Oversight, and other organizations, the Truth-Telling Project provides a personal and legal support network for government insiders considering becoming truth-tellers.

 

 

 Geoffrey Cowan, Top Secret playwright and former Dean of the USC Annenberg School, will be hosting pre-performance and post-performance discussions at the Nov. 2 show at the University of Nebraska, presented as a part of the ‘Echoes of Project X’ Symposium

 

Geoffrey Cowan is a University Professor and holder of the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he also directs the Center on Communication Leadership. He served as dean of the USC Annenberg School from 1996 to 2007. He teaches courses and conducts research in media, law and society and public diplomacy. In 2007, he was elected to be the Walter Lippman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before coming to USC, Cowan served under President Clinton as director of the Voice of America and director of the International Broadcasting Bureau. In other public service roles, Cowan served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, chaired the Los Angeles commission that drafted the city’s ethics and campaign finance law, and chaired the California Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices. He is an award-winning and best selling author whose books include See No Evil: The Backstage Battle Over Sex and Violence on Television and The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer. With Leroy Aarons, he co-wrote Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, a play about the tension between a free press and government secrecy that will be featured in a national tour during the 2007-08 season. During the 2007-2008 academic year he will be a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

 

Daniel McAuliffe, president of the State Bar of Arizona will present a noon lecture on Nov. 6 on his experience as Department of Justice Lawyer during the Pentagon papers case.
 

McAuliffe served as Trial Attorney in the United States Department of Justice, from 1969-1971 and became Deputy Assistant Attorney General. From 1971-1973, and in that capacity argued against the prosecution of The Pentagon Papers case. He is a graduate of Fordham University, Harvard Law School, and is a partner at Snell & Wilmer, a law firm in Arizona, and President of the State Bar of Arizona.

 


Charles Lewis, president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, will hold a noon lunch on Nov. 7 as part of the “Government Accountability and a Free Press” series held in conjunction with the later Top Secret performance at the University of Illinois.

Charles Lewis is the founding president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism. Lewis founded and for 15 years was executive director of the nonprofit investigative reporting organization the Center for Public Integrity, which produced roughly 300 reports and 14 books during his tenure, garnering 35 national journalism awards. In 1997, he began the Center's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the world's first working network of premier investigative reporters, currently 95 people in 48 countries.

In 2003, the Center posted secret Patriot II draft legislation against the explicit wishes of the Justice Department, and eight months later, published online the major U.S. government contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq, revealing Halliburton to be, by far, the largest beneficiary. PEN USA, the respected literary organization, gave its 2004 First Amendment award to Lewis, "for expanding the reach of investigative journalism, for his courage in going after a story regardless of whose toes he steps on, and for boldly exercising his freedom of speech and freedom of the press."

In 1998, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. From 1977 to 1988, he did investigative reporting for ABC News and was a producer assigned to senior correspondent Mike Wallace at CBS News's 60 Minutes. He began in journalism at age 17, working nights in the Wilmington (DE) News-Journal sports department. A native of Newark, Delaware, he received a bachelor's degree with honors and distinction in political science at the University of Delaware in 1975, and a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

Co-author of five Center books, including the bestseller, The Buying of the President 2004, Lewis is writing his sixth book for HarperCollins, about power, the news media and the public's right to know. He serves on the board of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the National Press Club. Lewis co-founded a new nonprofit enterprise tracking corruption around the world, Global Integrity, and he is a member of its Advisory Board.

He is a Distinguished Journalist in Residence at the American University School of Communications in Washington and recently completed a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2005 he was a Ferris visiting professor of journalism at Princeton University.

 

Judith MillerJudith Miller, former New York Times reporter will participate in a  panel discussion on Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. as part of the “Government Accountability and a Free Press” program and later Top Secret performance at the University of Illinois.
 

Judith Miller is a bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter for The New York Times.

Ms. Miller ended her 30 year career with The New York Times in November 2005 after spending 85 days in jail to defend a reporter's right to protect confidential sources -- twice as long as any other American reporter has ever been confined for this cause. Since being released, she has been advocating the enactment of a Federal shield law to protect the relationship between reporters, their sources and the public's right to know.

In 2002, Ms. Miller was part of a small team that won a Pulitzer Prize for “explanatory journalism” for a January, 2001 series on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That same year, she won an Emmy for her work on a Nova/New York Times documentary based on articles for her book, Germs. She was also part of the Times team that won the prestigious DuPont award that year for a series of programs on terrorism for PBS’s Frontline. She has discussed a wide range of national security topics on such programs as 60 Minutes, Oprah Winfrey, CNN, ABC's Night Line and Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show, David Letterman, and The Charlie Rose Show.

A bestselling author, Ms. Miller has written four books and contributed chapters to several others. Her most recent book is Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Ms. Miller joined The New York Times’ Washington Bureau in 1977, where she covered the securities industry, Congress, politics, and foreign affairs, particularly the Middle East. In 1983, she became the first woman to be named chief of the Times' bureau in Cairo, Egypt, responsible for covering the Arab world. In 1986, she became the Paris correspondent, traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. In 1987 and 1988, she returned to Washington as the Washington Bureau's news editor and deputy bureau chief.

Sanford Ungar, author of The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle Over the Pentagon Papers, will be leading an hour-long discussion and call-in program on statewide Iowa Public Radio and participating in a post-reenactment panel discussion on Jan. 29 in conjunction with the performance at the University of Iowa.

Sanford Ungar, President of Goucher College since 2001, was director of the Voice of America, the U.S. government’s principal international broadcasting agency, for two years, and from 1986 until 1999, was dean of the School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. Between 1980 and 1983, Mr. Ungar was the host of several programs on National Public Radio, including the award-winning "All Things Considered." He has also been Washington editor of The Atlantic, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and a staff writer for The Washington Post. He was a correspondent for United Press International in Paris and for Newsweek in Nairobi, and for many years contributed to The Economist.

An accomplished author, Mr. Ungar has published six highly acclaimed books including The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers, which won the George Polk Award in 1973.

Mr. Ungar obtained his bachelor's degree in government magna cum laude from Harvard College and a master's degree in international history from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Rotary Foundation fellow.

Mr. Ungar is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

 
 

Randall Bezanson author of How Free Can the Press Be?, will participate on a panel discussion, following a reenactment of portion of the Pentagon Papers by students in his constitutional law class, on Jan. 29  on Jan. 29 in conjunction with the performance at the University of Iowa. 

Following his graduation from the Iowa Law School, Professor Bezanson served as a clerk to Judge Robb of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and, during the 1972 term (1972-73), as a clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court. Following his clerkship with Justice Blackmun, Professor Bezanson joined the faculty of the Iowa Law School, where he remained until 1988, serving also as a vice president of The University of Iowa from 1979-84. In 1988 Professor Bezanson moved to Virginia to become Dean of the Washington & Lee University School of Law. He served as Dean of W & L from 1988 to 1994, returning to the Iowa faculty in the fall of 1996.

Professor Bezanson's teaching centers on constitutional law, freedom of speech and press, and mass communication law, but he also teaches in the fields of administrative law, law and medicine, law and journalism, and torts. He presently teaches Constitutional Law, The First Amendment, and Seminars on Freedom of the Press, the Religion Guarantees, and Law and Technology. 

Professor Bezanson's scholarship spans the fields of administrative law, constitutional law, first amendment theory, defamation and privacy law, law and medicine, and the history of freedom of the press. He has published in many law reviews and journals, including the California Law Review, the Illinois Law Journal, the Iowa Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review. In 1987 he published, with coauthors Gilbert Cranberg and John Soloski, Libel Law and the Press, Myth and Reality (Free Press, Macmillian), a book that has received wide attention and was given the National Distinguished Service Award for Research in Journalism in 1988 by the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi. His book Reforming Libel Law (Guilford Communication series, 1992), which Professor Bezanson co-edited with John Soloski, Director of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is used in undergraduate and graduate journalism programs throughout the country. Professor Bezanson's book Taxes on Knowledge in America: Exactions on the Press from Colonial Times to the Present (1994, U. Penn. Press), explores the history of taxation of the press in England and America. His most recent books are Speech Stories: How Free Can Speech Be?, published in 1998 by the New York University Press; Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company (2001), coauthored with Gil Cranberg and John Soloski of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and supported by the Open Society Institute of New York; and How Free Can the Press Be? published in 2003 by the University of Illinois Press.

 

Carolyn Dyer will be participating in a post-reenactment panel discussion on Jan. 29 in conjunction with the performance at the University of Iowa.

Carolyn Dyer's current research interests are the reporting of sex crimes, feminist perspectives on media law, and fostering reading among girls and women. She teaches gender and mass communication, legal research methods, law and the media, and advanced reporting and writing courses (freelance, depth, and specialized).

After receiving a B.A. degree in government, Dyer worked as a journalist for six years. She also has an M.A. degree in journalism with a concentration in higher education and a Ph.D. degree in mass communications with concentrations in history and law.

Before joining the Iowa faculty in 1978, she worked as teaching assistant, lecturer, and visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and as assistant professor at Colorado State University's Department of Technical Journalism. She did postgraduate work at the Family and Community History Center at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1979.

Dyer worked as a newswoman for WJPG-AM in Green Bay, Wis., reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette, and capitol correspondent at the Madison news bureau of the Green Bay Press-Gazette and Appleton Post-Crescent. Her articles have appeared in Journalism and Communication Monographs, Journalism Quarterly, Georgetown Law Journal, Communications and the Law, Sexual Coercion and Assault, and Journalism History. In 1987, she developed The Iowa Guide: Scholarly Journals in Mass Communication and Related Fields, which currently is in preparation for a new online version scheduled for debut in 2002. She coordinated the 1993 Nancy Drew Conference at The University of Iowa and co-edited the book Rediscovering Nancy Drew, which is based on the proceedings. She also has published articles on 19th-century newspaper history. Her current research focuses on news coverage of rape and of mental illness.

In 1999 Dyer received a first place award in the Third Annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Web Site Design Competition for the web site created for her Information Gathering course. She has also won research awards for her work on newspaper history, gender and media law, and Nancy Drew.