About the lecture

On his first day as an assignment editor for CNN, David T. Z. Mindich was told that a fire in a welfare hotel does not have the same news value as a fire in the Waldorf Hotel.  This provoked a decades-long investigation of news values, including how journalism is impacted by national identity, bigotry, and what Mindich calls "cultural proximity."  The author of a book on journalistic objectivity, Mindich will outline how battles between "fake news" and truth played out in the coverage of lynching in the 1890s, pitting mainstream journalists against the crusading reporter Ida B. Wells.  These issues are still current today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, and the calls to tell more inclusive and truthful stories. 

About the speaker

Mindich is the chair of the journalism department at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University; before that, he was a journalism professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, where he served nearly a decade as chair.  The author of two books and numerous articles, Mindich was named Vermont Professor of the Year in 2006. For the 2015-2016 academic year, he was on sabbatical, living in New York City and working as a visiting scholar at New York University.  

Before becoming a professor, Mindich worked as an assignment editor for CNN and earned a doctorate in American Studies from New York University. He has written articles for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wilson Quarterly, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications.