Linda Greenhouse

Supreme Court correspondent of the New York Times.

Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq

“Embedded” is a collection of deeply emotional and highly personal accounts of covering the Iraq War. Many of the world’s top war correspondents and photographers speak candidly about life on the battlefield. Here are articulate and heartfelt descriptions of fear and firefights, of bullets and banalities, of risking death and meeting deadlines.

With over sixty interviews conducted in Kuwait and Iraq shortly after many returned home, Katovsky and Carlson allowed these journalists to step outside their professional role as journalists and examine the lethal allure of combat reporting.

The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes

Paul M. Kellstedt explains the variation in Americans’ racial attitudes over the last half-century, particularly the relationship between media coverage of race and American public opinion on race. The analyses reveal that racial policy preferences have evolved in an interesting and unpredicted (if not unpredictable) fashion over the past fifty years. There have been sustained periods of liberalism, where the public prefers an active government to bring about racial equality, and these periods are invariably followed by eras of conservatism, where the public wants the government to stay out of racial politics altogether. These opinions respond to cues presented in the national media. Kellstedt then examines the relationship between attitudes on the two major issues of the twentieth century: race and the welfare state.

Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People

Althaus’ analysis of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality (in opinion surveys) leads to surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is dispensed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect opinions disproportionately.

Dangerous Business: When Workers Die

The New York Times investigative series and Frontline documentary, “Dangerous Business,” found that hundreds of employers have killed their workers by willfully disregarding basic safety rules. Their work prompted a criminal investigation into safety and environmental records, leading to indictments, and to OSHA announcing steps to strengthen the oversight and punishment of persistent violators.

Seymour Hersh

Hersh, whose 1969 story on Lieutenant Calley and the My Lai massacre won the Pulitzer Prize and brought him to national prominence, has been exposing the wrongdoing of public figures for more than four decades.

The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, and Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor and senior correspondent, report on a growing crisis in American journalism. From the corporatization that leads media moguls to slash content for profit, to newsrooms that ignore global crises to report on personal entertainment, these veteran journalists chronicle an erosion of independent, relevant journalism. In the process, they make clear why incorruptible reporting is crucial to American society. Rooted in interviews and first-hand accounts, the authors take us inside the politically charged world of one of America’s powerful institutions, the media.

Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age

Integrating a broad range of current research on how people learn (from political science, social psychology, communication, physiology, and artificial intelligence), Doris Graber shows that televised presentations—at their best—actually excel at transmitting information and facilitating learning. She critiques current political offerings in terms of their compatibility with our learning capacities and interests, and she considers the obstacles, both economic and political, that affect the content we receive on the air, on cable, or on the Internet.

Crisis in the Catholic Church

Investigative reports from the Boston Globe exposed the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Christiane Amanpour

Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent at CNN, won the 2002 Goldsmith Career Award for her groundbreaking coverage of war and conflicts around the world. Her talk at Harvard Kennedy School discussed foreign coverage in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks.