Past Fellows and Visiting Faculty

Spring 2000 Fellows

Murray Fromson has had a career in journalism and journalism education for the past 50 years. After five years as director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he stepped down in June 1999 to take a year-long sabbatical to write a memoir about the Cold War. Both as a correspondent and producer, Mr. Fromson covered some of the major news events of the last half century, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars; the Brezhnev years of the former U.S.S.R.; conflicts in Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, as well as developments in China. As a staff correspondent for The Associated Press, NBC News and CBS News, he was based in various Asian capitals, Moscow, Chicago and Los Angeles from 1951 through 1978. In the United States, he reported presidential politics, civil rights, the anti-war movement and the Conspiracy Trial in Chicago. When the Nixon Justice Department threatened to subpoena journalists’ notes and television outtakes in the late 1960s, Fromson proposed the formation of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press. He joined the USC faculty in 1982, where he conceived and directed the Center for International Journalism, a mid-career fellowship program for working journalists. A Shorenstein Fellow in the Washington, D.C. office, Fromson is analyzing U.S. news coverage of China during the Cold War.

Elisabeth Gidengil is Hiram Mills Professor and director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University. She was educated at the London School of Economics, New York University and McGill University. Her research centers on voting behavior and public opinion in Canada, with a particular interest in gender and representation. She has been a member of both the 1993 and 1997 Canadian Election Study teams and is co-author of Making Representative Democracy Work, The Challenge of Direct Democracy and Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election. Her current research focuses on the impact of gender on television news portrayals of political candidates. Recent work includes studies of sex differences in the imagery used in reporting on male and female candidates and sex differences in sound-bite selection. Her research project will examine whether television journalists’ choice of language is conditioned by the sex of the candidate being reported.

Lynette Lithgow was born in Trinidad but spent most of her life in the UK. Much of her career was with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), having presented television news programs for the BBC regionally, nationally and internationally. She also worked for Granada Television in Manchester and Tyne-Tees Television in Newcastle. Her overseas postings were with Radio Television Brunei and with CNBC Asia, based in Singapore, where she was Editorial Training Manager/Senior Anchor. Some of the luminaries who faced her nightly questioning include President Kim of South Korea, Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, former Indonesian President B. J. Habibie, New Zealand former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and the deposed Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, in an exclusive interview only hours after he was sacked. She completed a book exploring the impact of culture and history on Asian management styles, published by John Wiley & Sons in February 2000. Lithgow read Jurisprudence at Oxford University. She examined the role of the media in promoting women in Asian political dynasties.

Susan Moeller is director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda and professor at Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. She was the director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University and an assistant professor in the American Studies Department. She has a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization and an M.A. in history from Harvard, and a B.A. from Yale. Previously she taught for three years at Princeton, for two years as a Fulbright professor in Asia, and for a year at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state. She is the author of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (1999) and Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989). Prior to her academic career, Moeller was a photojournalist and writer, contributing to numerous publications including The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Boston Globe, Ms. magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian and World Monitor. Most recently she was the media columnist for The Christian Science Monitor and is currently a consultant to several online news sites. Her research project will concentrate on images of children in the American media. Paper PDF

Peter Molnar graduated from the Faculty of Law at Lorand Eotvos University (ELTE) in Budapest in 1987, and earned an M.A. in aesthetics from ELTE in 1994. From 1990–98, he was a member of the Hungarian Parliament and served on the committees on culture and press, as well as on the committee on the constitution, and on the subcommittee which drafted media legislation for Hungary. Molnar has lectured on media law at Janus Pannonius University and on speech law and freedom of information law at ELTE. Publications include “Challenges of the Information Super Highways and Central European Experiences” (forward to the Hungarian edition of Monroe Price’s Television, the Public Sphere and National Identity, 1998); and “Transforming Hungarian Broadcasting” (Media Studies Journal, fall 1999), among other articles. Molnar will examine freedom of speech and expression regulation and its impact on journalism in the Central European context.

Stanley Renshon is professor of political science at the City University of New York, coordinator of its program in Political Psychology and a certified psychoanalyst. He was a postdoctoral fellow in psychology and politics at Yale. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He did his graduate work in clinical psychology at Long Island University and completed his psychoanalytic training at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology where he received his certification in 1991. Renshon is the author of many papers and seven books, including High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition, which won APSA’s Richard E. Neustadt Award for the best book on the presidency, and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis’ Gradiva Award for the best biography. He is also the author of The Psychological Assessment of Presidential Candidates, an examination of the issue of psychological suitability in the presidency and how to judge it. Renshon’s research topic is “Election 2000: Is Character Still Relevant?”