About the lecture

We live on the cusp of civil war. We have ignored history and our lawyers on the right and the left have created a version of the First Amendment that includes doctrines like 'business free speech' while we have abandoned the old tradition that electronic media is fundamentally different. Journalists interested in creating and consuming real reporting need to focus on the fact that an internet that has escaped regulation is driving us to the brink. Technology is a double edged sword. How we bring the current chaos under control is going determine our future. 

About the speaker

Lowell Bergman is the Emeritus Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where he he founded the school’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) in 2006. Retiring from the chair in 2019, he continues as president of the board of Investigative Studios. Founded in 2017, this nonprofit production company affiliated with UC Berkeley is dedicated to supporting the IRP and continuing the tradition of creating original public interest journalism. Bergman spent three decades working in national television news with ABC, then CBS’ 60 Minutes and PBS’ documentary series Frontline. His work has been honored with multiple Emmys, duPonts and Peabodys. His 60 Minutes investigation of the tobacco industry was dramatized in 1999 in the Academy Award-nominated feature film The Insider. In 2004, The New York Times received journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for Bergman's work with David Barstow and two Berkeley graduate students on “A Dangerous Business.” Bergman was a New York Times correspondent until 2008 and a senior producer and consultant to Frontline until 2015.