The Real News: Journalist Advisory Committee

The Real News: Journalist Advisory Committee

• Phillip Adams (Australia), Filmmaker, presenter of Late Night Live on Radio National and Radio Australia and a columnist in The Australian. He has written and presented many TV series. His books include Adams Versus God, The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, Retreat From Tolerance, Talkback and A Billion Voices . He is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney.

• Roberta Baskin (USA), has won 75 journalism awards, including two duPont-Columbia University Awards and two George Foster Peabody Awards for investigative reporting. She was senior Washington correspondent for Now with Bill Moyers, senior producer for the ABC news magazine 20/20, chief investigative correspondent for the news magazine 48 Hours, and contributed special reports to the CBS Evening News.

• Paul D. Boin (Canada), Assistant professor of Communications Studies at the University of Windsor. Boin is the founder of the Real News Network. www.RNNnews.info

• Tanja Bosch (South Africa), Station Manager of Bush Radio in Cape Town, Africa's oldest community radio station. She completed her PhD in Mass Communication as a Fulbright Scholar at Ohio University with a dissertation on community radio and community identity in South Africa.

• Ben Cashdan (South Africa), Author, lecturer, documentary filmmaker, he was an economic advisor in the office of President Nelson Mandela. He produces films for SABC, BBC and Channel Four.

• John Cherian (India), Journalist and Deputy Editor of Frontline, India's largest English language national magazine. www.flonnet.com

• Afsan Chowdhury (Bangladesh), Director of Advocacy and Human Rights at BRAC in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Development work and journalism with UNICEF, BBC, CNN, and Deutsche Welle. He studied the impact of satellite TV with the Media South Asia Project.

• Jeff Cohen (USA), Founder of FAIR, the New York-based media watch organization. He has been a commentator on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and senior producer on MSNBC's "Donahue." He is an IWT - The Real News consultant on developing its carriage campaign.

• Kelly Crichton (Canada), Television journalist, senior news executive and award winning Executive Producer for more than 30 years. In Crichton's two years as Executive Producer of CBC's flagship nightly newshour "The National," the program twice won the Gemini for best newscast.

• Pamela de Maigret (USA), Filmmaker, producer and journalist. De Maigret has created and produced documentaries, television series and movies-of-the-week, including co-writing her own life story for CBS. Previously a foreign correspondent and US Congress liaison, she is currently researching and writing a book about the political disenfranchisement of the moderate center in American politics, in part drawing on her own experience as a life-long Republican activist.

• Tom Fenton (UK), whose long career as a foreign correspondent for CBS News covered more than three decades of world events, is now a leading critic of the journalistic failures that left Americans unprepared for 9/11, and the author of Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News and the Danger to Us All.

• Larry Fink (USA), Professional photographer for 40 years. His work has appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of both two Guggenheim Fellowships and two NEA grants, and is a professor of photography at Bard College.

• Laura Flanders (USA), Air America radio host and journalist. She is the author of Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting. Flanders was the Founding Director of the Women's Desk at the media-watch group FAIR. www.lauraflanders.com

• Bryn Freedman (USA), an award-winning journalist, writer, and producer, is currently an Executive Producer at GRB Entertainment. In addition to teaching journalism to graduate students at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, Bryn was charge of research and development for a Youth News initiative aimed at producing innovative online and broadcast news programs for 12- 22 year olds.

• Amy Goodman (USA), Host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now!, a TV and radio show she helped launch in 1996. She began her career in community radio at Pacific's WBAI in New York and produced their Evening News for ten years. www.democracynow.org

• Ferial Haffajee (South Africa), Editor, Mail & Guardian newspaper, and a leading political commentator.

• Ron Haggart (Canada), was Co-Executive Producer on Face Off and counterSpin for CBC Newsworld. He worked as a Vancouver Sun reporter, columnist with The Globe and Mail, and Executive Producer of Local Informational Programming for CityTV and Senior Producer of the fifth estate on CBC.

• Adrian Harewood (Canada), Toronto based writer and broadcaster. He hosts the television programs The Directors, Literati and The Actors and was a host of CBC Newsworld's counterSpin.

• Zane Ibrahim (South Africa), Managing Director of Bush Radio, "mother" of community radio in South Africa.

• Janine Jackson (USA), Program Director of the national media watch-group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and co-hosts and produces FAIR's syndicated radio show, CounterSpin. www.fair.org/counterspin

• Rob Jamieson (Malawi), Editor of The Chronicle, awarded the title "Number One Investigative Newspaper in Malawi" by the National Media Institute of Southern Africa.

• Mark Karlin (USA), Founder and publisher of BuzzFlash.com, a pro-democracy news and commentary Internet site that draws up to 5 1/4 million visitors a month. www.buzzflash.com

• Allan King (Canada), Acclaimed filmmaker whose films include Warrendale and Dying at Grace. Formerly the President of the Directors Guild of Canada.

• Tawana Kupe (South Africa), Head of Media Studies at the Wits University's School of Literature and Language Studies. Taught Media and Communication Studies since 1993 at the University of Zimbabwe, University of Oslo, in Norway and at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, in South Africa.

• Lewis Lapham (USA), Editor of Harper's Magazine, has several books of essays to his credit including Money and Class in America, Hotel America and Waiting for the Barbarians. www.harpers.org

• Josee Legault (Canada), Montreal-based political columnist, author and political scientist. She is a daily radio panelist and a regular media analyst and commentator.

• Avi Lewis (Canada), Broadcast journalist, documentary filmmaker (The Take), host and producer of counterSpin on CBC Newsworld, where he presided over more than 500 televised debates.

• Eric Margolis (USA/Canada), Author, syndicated international foreign affairs columnist for the Sun National Media Chain (Canada) and regular foreign affairs columnist for Dawn, Pakistan's leading English language newspaper. He is a frequent TV and radio commentator on foreign affairs and Contributing Editor to American Conservative Magazine, Washington DC.

• Gavin MacFadyen (UK), Director the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London and a television producer formerly with Granada Television's World in Action, BBC 24 Hours, the Money Programme, Panorama, Channel 4 Dispatches, ITV, ABC, and PBS.

• George Monbiot (UK), Weekly columnist for The Guardian. He is the author of the bestselling books Captive State, The Age of Consent, and Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. Among many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award, presented to him by Nelson Mandela. He is visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University. www.monbiot.com

• Andre Morriseau (Canada), Secretariat for the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards. Former broadcast journalist (Aboriginal Voices Radio Network), producer/host (Nation 2 Nation) and chair of the imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival.

• Mishuk Munier (Bangladesh/Canada), has filmed throughout South East Asia as a news and documentary cameraman for BBC World Service, ARD1 and Fox/StarTV. Head of News Operations for the first private terrestrial network in Bangladesh, Ekushey TV (ETV) and taught broadcast journalism at the University of Dhaka.

• David Newman (Israel), Professor of Political Geography and a Senior Research fellow at Ben Gurion University in Israel, where he founded the department of Politics and Government. Editor of the International Journal, Geopolitics, and former columnist for the Jerusalem Post.

• John Nichols (USA), Washington correspondent for The Nation, associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, and co-founder of Free Press. Nichols has covered four U.S. presidential elections, along with elections and political activism in Britain, Ireland, Israel, India, Palestine, El Salvador, Jamaica and South Africa. He is the author, with Bob McChesney, of It's the Media, Stupid and Jews for Buchanan.

• Robert Parry (USA), Renowned investigative reporter who exposed the Iran-Contra scandal while working at Associated Press, founder of the Internet's first investigative Zine, Consortiumnews.com, and author of four books, including Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.

• Francine Pelletier (Canada), Independent documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, former host of CBC's flagship current affairs show, The Fifth Estate.

• Greg Philo (UK), Professor of communications and Research Director of the Glasgow University Media Group. Co-author of the books Bad News, More Bad News, Really Bad News on media issues such as television coverage of the developing world and audience reception of television news. www.gla.ac.uk

• N. Ram (India), Journalist and Editor-in-Chief, of the The Hindu, Frontline, Business Line, and The Sportstar.

• Bill Roberts (Canada), President and CEO of VisionTV. Previously was Secretary General of the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), Senior Director-General of International Affairs of TVOntario and managed the secretariat of the World Broadcasting Unions.

• Danny Schechter (USA), Founder and Executive Editor of MediaChannel and founder and Vice President/Executive Producer of Globalvision, Inc. A journalist on CNN and ABC, is the author of The More You Watch, The Less You Know, and Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception (book and film). www.mediachannel.org

• Jonathan Schell (USA), Writer and journalist, Peace and Disarmament Correspondent for The Nation magazine, a fellow at the Nation Institute, visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School, was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1967 to 1987, author of The Fate of the Earth, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

• Peter Scowen (Canada), Ideas editor, Toronto Star, was Editor-in-Chief of two weekly alternative newspapers (Hour and The Mirror, both in Montreal), and covered Quebec's National Assembly for CBC Radio. Author of Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows.

• Norman Solomon (USA), Author and syndicated columnist, including Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. He is Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts in the US, and an associate of the media watch group FAIR.

• Kim Spencer (USA), President and co-founder of LINK TV, a 24-hour non-commercial, viewer-supported television channel in 25 million US homes. He has made documentary films and TV specials on global issues, and was a coordinating producer of ABC News Prime Time Live.

• Jenny Toomey (USA), Executive Director of the Future of Music Coalition, activist, musician. Co-ran Simple Machines independent record label. Former writer for The Washington Post, Village Voice and CNET.

• Siddharth Varadarajan (India), Journalist and commentator and Deputy Editor of The Hindu, was columnist with The Times of India. After studying economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, he taught at New York University for several years before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995.

• Gore Vidal (USA), Author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays and short stories, more than two hundred essays and a memoir. In 1993, a collection of his criticism, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award. He has written many films including the classics Ben-Hur (1959) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). He received an award from the Cannes Film Festival for best screenplay for The Best Man.

• Kenneth Walker (South Africa/USA), Owner of Lion House Productions. Previously the Africa Bureau Chief for National Public Radio. Covered the White House for the Washington Star and ABC News and anchored USA Today: The Television Show.

• Patrick Watson (Canada), Writer, director, actor, TV host and interviewer, was co-producer of the CBC series Close-up and produced and hosted CBC's flagship show This Hour Has Seven Days. Watson is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a former Chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

• Celia Wexler (USA), Vice President for Advocacy for Common Cause. A former journalist, Wexler has played a key role in developing Common Cause's lobbying and grassroots strategies on media reform.