Author and Media Critic Jeff Cohen to Speak at Bard on Monday, March 19

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR AND MEDIA CRITIC JEFF COHEN TO SPEAK AT BARD ON MONDAY, MARCH 19 Jeff Cohen’s Talk, “An Insider’s Critique of Mainstream Media,” Will Be Followed by a Question-and-Answer Session ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Jeff Cohen, media critic and highly acclaimed author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, will present a lecture, “An Insider’s Critique of Mainstream Media,” at Bard College on Monday, March 19. Free and open to the public, the lecture begins at 7:00 p.m. in room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building. Hosted by Jonathan Becker, associate dean of the college and associate professor of political studies at Bard, Cohen’s talk will be followed by a question-and-answer session. In his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, Cohen takes the reader inside TV news and the biases, timidity, and tabloidism that dominate it. Few media critics have been afforded an intimate on-the-job view of the outlets they condemn, but Cohen—who founded the media watch group FAIR—spent years at CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. In the run-up to the Iraq war, he was a senior producer on Phil Donahue’s show at MSNBC, where he witnessed war-enabling bias and censorship firsthand. MSNBC management terminated Donahue’s show and Cohen’s position three weeks before the Iraq invasion. The late columnist Molly Ivins described Cohen’s dissection of cable TV news as “both irresistibly funny and civically painful…from uproarious anecdotes to those that make you wince.” Best-selling author and professor emeritus at Boston University Howard Zinn writes: “Jeff Cohen has given us a lively, funny, serious, and ultimately devastating look at the corporate media, which he had a unique opportunity to observe from the inside. When future historians search for a description of the major media in our time, they will have his book as a primary source.” Jeff Cohen is an author, lecturer, and media critic who founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986. He was an on-air commentator and senior producer at MSNBC in 2002 and 2003, a weekly panelist on Fox News Channel from 1997 to 2002, and a co-host of CNN’s Crossfire in 1996. His columns have been published in dozens of dailies, including USA Today, Newsday, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Atlanta Constitution. He was a regular columnist at Brill’s Content. In the mid-1990s, he co-wrote the nationally syndicated “Media Beat” column. In 2003, he was the communications director of the Kucinich for President campaign. ###

This event was last updated on 03-20-2007

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