Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor of Knight Ridder, will keynote a lecture and symposium at Stanford on the challenges of telling news accurately in the face of government pressures and a changing media environment.
In the three years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, which Hoyt oversees, has been recognized as one of the few mainstream U.S. news organizations that examined skeptically the Bush administration's stated rationale for the invasion.
Hoyt will discuss that coverage and other topics when he delivers the annual John S. Knight Lecture on Monday evening, May 15. The title of his talk is "News in the Age of Bush, Blogs and Bombs."
The following day Hoyt will take part in a discussion of the issues raised in his talk. He will be joined by Luis Fraga, associate professor of political science at Stanford, and Joan Walsh, editor in chief of Salon.com. James Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, will moderate the discussion.
The lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 15, in Kresge Auditorium. The symposium will begin at noon on Tuesday, May 16, in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall. The Knight Fellowships program sponsors both events. Both are free and open to the public.
As Washington editor, Hoyt supervises the Knight Ridder chain's Washington coverage and its international coverage as well. That coverage has been cited by, among others, the New York Review of Books and American Journalism Review for its focus on the sketchy intelligence that was being used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Author Michael Massing, in his critical examination of pre-invasion mainstream news reporting in the New York Review of Books, wrote, "Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration's justifications for war." The coverage has been honored with a number of awards.
Ironically, the Knight Ridder Washington bureau will cease to exist as a separate entity when the McClatchy Company completes its purchase of Knight Ridder Inc. later this summer. The bureau will be absorbed into the McClatchy Washington bureau, and Hoyt will continue as a consultant to McClatchy.
Hoyt began his Washington journalism career in 1970 as a correspondent for the Miami Herald and later was a national correspondent, news editor and bureau chief. He also was business editor at the Detroit Free Press, managing editor of the Wichita Eagle and from 1993 to 1999, vice president/news for Knight Ridder. He shared a Pulitzer Prize with Robert S. Boyd for revealing mental illness in the background of Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Thomas Eagleton.
Luis Fraga is associate professor of political science at Stanford. He received his A.B., cum laude, from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Rice University. His primary interests are urban politics, politics of race and ethnicity, educational politics, and voting rights policy. In 1989-90 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, and in 2003-04 he was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where he worked on a study entitled "Gender and Ethnicity: The Political Incorporation of Latina and Latino State Legislators," based on the first-ever nationwide survey of Latina/o state legislators in the U.S.
Joan Walsh is editor in chief at Salon.com, the award-winning Web site. Her work has appeared in many national newspapers and magazines, from the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun to Vogue and the Nation. As a columnist for San Francisco Magazine, she won Western Magazine Awards in 2004 and 2005 for her writing about local politics. Before starting at Salon, she worked for many years as a consultant to national and regional foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and California's James Irvine Foundation. She is on the Advisory Board of the University of Maryland's Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy and a member of the board of directors of PolicyLink, an Oakland-based research and advocacy group.
The Knight Fellowships program brings outstanding mid-career journalists, 12 from the U.S. and six to eight from other countries, to study at Stanford for an academic year. It has sponsored an annual lecture since 1988. Beginning in 2004 it expanded the event to include a symposium the day following the lecture.
James Bettinger, professor (teaching) of communication, is director of the Knight Fellowships, and Dawn Garcia is deputy director.
