Journalism Fellows Introduced at Shorenstein Barone Center

The former senior diplomatic correspondent for ABC News and the former editor of The Oakland Tribune are among the six new fellows introduced to the Harvard community yesterday afternoon at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

The fellows will spend the year interacting with students and faculty while working on research projects that involve everything from the differences between European and American journalism to the blurring line between entertainment and news.

Michael Delli Carpini, Barrie Dunsmore, Don Kellermann, Paolo Mancini, Jacqueline Sharkey and Pearl Stewart will present some of their research at roundtables throughout the semester.

"I don't consider myself a war correspondent," Barrie Dunsmore, the ABC News correspondent said. "I've always been very nervous about being shot at."

Dunsmore said the way the news media covers battlefields has changed drastically--"from the 60's when it would take many days [to make the information available] to the liberation of Kuwait which was covered, at least in part, live."

Dunsmore said he will be working on "some form of guidelines for covering war."

"I don't pretend I'm going to find the silver bullet, the solution, but I do hope to stimulate dialogue," he said.

* Carpini, the chair of Barnard College's political science department, will focus on "what Americans know about politics." He said he will use content analysis and focus groups talking about the issue of crime in his research.

* Mancini, an associate professor of political science at the University of Perugia in Italy, will be examining the relationship between mass media system and the political system, as well as European and American models of journalism.

* Kellerman, a former vice president for the Times Mirror Center, which he noted was the only organization to predict the results of the 1994 election correctly, will use surveys and focus groups to gage not just the public's view of the press, but the press' view of itself, he said.

* Sharkey, who said she considers herself a working journalist as well as a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, said she will be "investigat[ing] a new threat to the First Amendment."

"The U.S. News media is being judged by legal standards of other countries," she said. "There is pressure on the First Amendment in an era when our signals cross borders."

"Stewart, who was the only African-American female editor of a major paper in the country during her tenure at the Oakland Tribune, will examine why so few minority women rise to the top levels of journalism and what happens to those women do make it to the highest positions.

"I became interested in finding out about what was happening somewhere down the ladder," Stewart said, noting that newsrooms often have many female minorities but few in leadership positions.

In addition, she said many executives are "leaving the business, so there are fewer role models...and also fewer mentors."