Neal Gabler

Neal Gabler is an author, cultural historian, television commentator and teacher. He is the author of a number of best-selling and prize-winning books, including An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood; Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity; Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality; and Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Gabler is a regular contributor to numerous publications and served as a panelist on “Fox News Watch” from 2002 until 2007. He has been the host of the PBS movie review program Sneak Previews; American Movie Classics; Reel to Real on the History Channel; and he is currently the host of Reel Thirteen on WNET, for which he won an Emmy in 2009. Gabler graduated from the University of Michigan and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other awards. He is a Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Society and Entertainment at USC and a visiting professor at SUNY Stony Brook. Gabler’s project at the Shorenstein Center, as part of a biography of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, traced Kennedy’s press coverage over time, to understand the influences that determined the coverage, and to theorize about what that coverage suggests about the press and politics.