CAS Communications Blog

A panel discussion 6:00pm Monday, April 6th, 2009 at C. Walsh Theatre

Broadcast Journalists have been praised for breaking important news stories and criticized for breaking political candidates. Is the role of television news in our democracy to present politically neutral information or to provide informed opinion? 

Charles Kravitz, President of NECN, has had a distinguished career as a television news director at several stations in Boston. 

Dana Rosengard is assistant professor of Broadcast Journalism in the department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University.  Prior to his academic career, Dana was a producer for WCVB news. 

Robert Rosenthal is chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University. He is an international consultant specializing in strategic communication, with a core emphasis on institutions subject to government regulation. A specialist in the field of political communication, Rosenthal is a frequent guest on radio talk shows and television newscasts. 

Reservations will be accepted starting March 20 at 617-720-7600.

Thursday, April 2nd, 6:00 p.m. Suffolk University, C. Walsh Theatre, 55 Temple Street

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property analyzes Nat Turner’s slave rebellion of 1831 and its aftermath in American memory. The film explores the many interpretations of the event, including William Styron’s controversial 1967 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and the deep racial divisions that it exposed. What is the distinction between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? The debate over the meaning of Nat Turner has been at the heart of race relations in the United States for the past 178 years.

CHARLES BURNETT is a MacArthur Award-winning American filmmaker. Major films include Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield, To Sleep with Anger, NightJohn, The Wedding, The Annihilation of Fish, and Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation. He is co-writer and director of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property.

FRANK CHRISTOPHER is an award-winning producer, director, writer, and editor whose major film credits include Fei Hu: The Story of the Flying Tigers, In the Name of the People, and the PBS series Remaking American Medicine. He is currently at work on a film about the explorer Samuel de Champlain. He co-wrote and co-produced Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property.

KENNETH S. GREENBERG, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Suffolk University and distinguished professor of history, has authored Honor and Slavery, as well as Masters and Statesmen. He is the editor of Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory and of Thomas R. Gray’s original The Confessions of Nat Turner. He co-wrote and co-produced Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property.

Reservations will be accepted starting February 4 at 617-720-7600.

This film is presented in conjunction with The Ford Hall Forum, a partner of Suffolk University and the nation’s oldest free public lecture series.

A lecture by Josh Silver, Free Press: 6:00pm, Tuesday, March 31, 2009
@ The Boston Athenæum, 10 1/2 Beacon Street

Josh Silver argues that the media policies made in Washington, D.C. are the cause of corporate programming on radio and TV, fake news that fails to inform, slow, overpriced Internet service, and struggling public media.  His organization, Free Press, calls for media that give the American people quality news and programming, reflect our country’s diversity, meet the information needs of local communities, and support our democracy.  Silver will discuss important current policy debates and how individuals can get involved in the public policies that shape our media system.  .

Josh Silver is the executive director and co-founder of the nonpartisan media policy reform organization Free Press.  He previously served as campaign manager for public funding of elections in Arizona and as the director of development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  Silver publishes frequently on media, campaign finance, and other public policy issues.

A reception will follow this lecture.  Reservations will be accepted starting March 11 at 617-720-7600.

A lecture by Bruce Cumings, of the University of Chicago

Tuesday, March. 24, 2009 2:30pm Munce Conference Room, Archer 110 20 Derne Street, Boston

Bruce Cumings’ research and teaching focus on modern Korean history, 20th century international history, U.S.-East Asian relations, East Asian political economy,and American foreign relations. His first book, The Origins of the Korean War, won the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association, and the second volume of this study won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association. He is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming), and is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,and Le Monde Diplomatique. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. He was also the principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS 6-hour documentary, Korea: The Unknown War. In 2003 he won the University’s award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, and in 2007 he won the Kim Dae Jung Prize for Scholarly Contributions to Democracy, Human Rights and Peace. He has just completed Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power, which will be published by Yale University Press. He is working on a synoptic single-volume study of the origins of the Korean War, and a book on the Northeast Asian political economy.

This event is a presentation sponsored by the Barbara and Richard M. Rosenberg Institute for East Asian Studies.  For more information about the Institute, please visithttp://www.suffolk.edu/college/30058.html.  For more information regarding this event, please contact 617-573-6316 or casnews@suffolk.edu.

6:00pm Wednesday, March 25, 2009 @ The Boston Athenæum, 10 1/2 Beacon Street

For more than two centuries, America’s newspapers have been the public’s primary source of information about our government.  As circulation and staffs shrink, there are significant implications for democracy, which is dependent upon an informed public.

Bruce D. Butterfield is an assistant professor and professional journalist in residence in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University.  Butterfield spent 16 years as a staff writer for the Boston Globe, where he covered national labor issues and was an investigative reporter on the newspaper’s Spotlight Team.  A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has won numerous major awards for his reporting.

Cullen Murphy is the editor-at-large of Vanity Fair magazine and was, for two decades, the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly.  Murphy’s articles and essays have appeared in many publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the New Republic, Slate, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, American Heritage, and Smithsonian. His most recent book is Are We Rome?, which he wrote, in part, at the Boston Athenæum.

Robert E. Rosenthal is chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University.  He is an international consultant specializing in strategic communication, with a core emphasis on institutions subject to government regulation.  A specialist in the field of political communication, Rosenthal is a frequent guest on radio talk shows and television newscasts.

Joan Vennochi writes regularly about national and local politics for the Boston Globe, and also covers issues relating to business, law, and culture.  She began her career at the paper as a researcher on the Spotlight Team, the newspaper’s investigative unit, and shared in a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the team for local investigative reporting.

Reservations will be accepted starting March 12 at 617-720-7600.

Saturday, March 14th, 12:00 noon Boston Athenæum, 10½ Beacon Street

This six-time Oscar-nominated 2005 docudrama chronicles how, in the mid-1950s, Edward R. Murrow and his “See It Now” producer, Fred Friendly, helped to bring an end to the tyranny of the blacklist and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-Communist hearings. 

The film will be introduced by DAN KENNEDY, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University. He writes for the Guardian (U.K.), CommonWealth Magazine and the Boston Phoenix, and is a regular panelist on WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press,” hosted by Emily Rooney. His blog, Media Nation, is online at medianation.blogspot.com.

Reservations will be accepted starting January 29 at 617-720-7600.

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A Ford Hall Forum Event on Tuesday March 5th, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Old South Meeting House:

For the past 28 years, the Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award has honored individuals or organizations that demonstrate extraordinary commitment to promoting and facilitating the thoughtful exercise of our right to freedom of expression. This year, the Forum will honor Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent forNewsHour. She joins us tonight to receive the award and share her thoughts on her life, her work, and what freedom of speech means today.

 

Prior to the Award Ceremony and discussion, we hope you will join us for a reception at 5:00 p.m. at the offices of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky, and Tye LLP on the 22nd Floor of 100 Cambridge Street. Wine and appetizers will be served.  

Tickets to the reception can be reserved here.

 

All events are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.  No registration is necessary. Visit our website for archives, video, directions, and information.    Plus… Ford Hall Forum on Facebook.

Saturday, February 28th, 12:00 noon Boston Athenæum, 10½ Beacon Street

Director Michael Ritchie and executive producer/star Robert Redford explore the machinations and manipulations of media-age political campaigns in this cynical political drama. With an Oscar-winning screenplay and appearances by real-life reporters and politicians, The Candidate takes a biting look at the nature of politics.

The film will be introduced by Boston Athenæum member and Emerson College screenwriting professor DIANE LAKE. Lake had a previous career as a political consultant in Iowa and has been a working screenwriter since 1993, writing screenplays for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, and Paramount. 

Reservations will be accepted starting January 29 at 617-720-7600.

Suffolk Alum, Jonathan Mendez arrived on campus this Valentine’s Day weekend to sell items from his clothing line, “It Says Love”.  Mendez was featured in a college news story this past year.  Take a look at these photos of him on campus, and enjoy the article written in June, here!

7/25/2008

Mendez hopes to some day see his shirts sold in shops and boutiques, but is adamant that the intent of his design remains true: With love, all things are possible.

In 2006, when Jonathan Mendez, a Quincy resident and recent Suffolk graduate, received a sketch of his childhood home from his sister, Olivia Chamberland, he didn’t think that the kind gesture would lead anywhere in particular. But with a solid education and a positive message, the siblings have developed a fledgling apparel company that they hope to expand into a thriving business.

The siblings used the sketch as inspiration. The feeling of love the two shared for one another and for the home in which they grew up propelled them. “Love has no boundaries, no borders, no restrictions,” Mendez says. “It is a universal language expressed in every vernacular. Love breaks the barriers of our lives. Continue Reading »