Name: Tom Bivins

Where you work: I teach in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon where I hold the John Hulteng Chair in Media Ethics and Responsibility. I split my time between courses in media ethics and media history.

Where you earned your Ph.D.:  I received my Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in Telecommunication and Film (part of the Speech Department), and taught at the University of Delaware for four years before returning to Oregon.

Current favorite class: My favorite class currently is called Satire, Ethics, and Free Speech. It’s a wide-ranging, sometimes raucous, exploration of an often controversial subject.

When uncovering unanswered questions into journalism’s past, with notable interest towards the Black press in the nineteenth century, Dr. Bernell Tripp, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Florida, has followed the advice of her mentor David Sloan: “when the puzzle pieces don’t fit together, you should question.”

We recently chatted by about the impetus of her work, her most recent research project, and how her research informs her teaching.

Q: How did you come to your area of scholarship?

A: I enrolled in a journalism history course at the University of Alabama under David Sloan. One of the key notions of the course was to ask “why do things happen?” I had a fascination with the nineteenth century during the Yellow Journalism era and started with the question of “where was the Black press?”

Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.

In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as “the Shakespeare of Hollywood” with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state.

The University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications hosted AEJMC’s 44^th Southeast Colloquium March 7-9, in conjunction with the school’s Media & Civil Rights History Symposium.

The Colloquium program consisted of research paper sessions and panels from six AEJMC divisions, including History. Cayce Myers (Virginia Tech) chaired the research competition for the History Division, which had two paper sessions at the conference.