Murray Fromson

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.