Mark your calendars: John Stauber is coming to Park

I wanted to give you all a head's up as early as possible that John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and the magazine PR Watch, will be in the Park School on Thursday, March 16, for a reception and a public presentation.

The reception will begin at 3:15 p.m. in Park 220, followed by his remarks and a q-and-a in the Auditorium from 4 to 5 p.m.

Stauber is an investigative journalist, an editor, the founder of the non-profit Center for Media and Democracy, and publisher of the newsmagazine PR Watch -- in short, of interest to students throughout the Park School and across campus. I hope to see you all there.

Thanks.
Dianne

John Stauber founded the non-profit Center for Media & Democracy and its quarterly newsmagazine PR Watch in 1993 and since has served as the Center's executive director. He is an investigative writer, public speaker and democracy activist whose leadership on controversial public issues began in the 1960s when he was growing up in a Republican family in Marshfield, Wisconsin, the home town of President Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird. In high school Stauber dedicated himself to an autodidactic education and organized to stop the U.S. war in Vietnam and for the first Earth Day. Since then he has begun or worked with many citizen advocacy and public interest groups at the local, national and international levels. They include:
• Coalition for Economic Alternatives, founder (1973-79)
• Peoples Bicentennial Commission, national co-director (1975-76)
• Citizens National Forest Coalition, co-founder (1978-79)
• Friends of the Earth, consultant (1978-79)
• Citizen/Soldier, consultant (1978-79)
• Stop Project E.L.F., co-director (1979-84)
• Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua, development director (1985-88)
• Foundation on Economic Trends, consultant (1988-93)
• Neighbors Against Hog Factories, co-founder (1996)
• Center for Food Safety, advisory board (current)
• Organic Consumers Association, advisory board (current)

• Action Coalition for Media Education, advisory board (current)

In collaboration with Sheldon Rampton, he has co-authored five books:
• Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry'' (1995)
• Mad Cow U.S.A. (1997)
• Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future (2001)
• Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (2003)
• Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State (2004)

Stauber's articles, op-eds and interviews have appeared in various periodicals and websites including In These Times, The Progressive, The Sun, Alternet, and Common Dreams. He has contributed research and writing to books by others including G.I. Guinea Pigs (1980), Secrets and Lies (1999) and Stop (2003). As an investigator and writer on a variety of issues, he has been featured, interviewed or quoted in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, USA Today, Business Week, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, BBC, CBC radio and tv, Democracy Now! and many other news media. Stauber also blogs for the Center for Media and Democracy, and you can view a 2002 video interview with him. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. His email address is: john AT prwatch.org .