Stephen Bates (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) is one of the three petitioners who are trying to dislodge what may be Watergate’s last secret: the special prosecutor’s report to the House as it considered impeachment of President Nixon. The judge put the report under seal in 1974, and it has stayed that way ever since. Bates filed the petition on Sept. 14 in collaboration with Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and the editor in chief of Lawfare, an online publication that specializes in national security legal policy issues, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush Administration. Bates is a law professor who, as a federal prosecutor working for Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, co-wrote the report to Congress recommending that Mr. Clinton be impeached. The three are represented by Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group.
Nicholas Hirshon (William Paterson University) will celebrate the publication of his book, We Want Fish Sticks: The Bizarre and Infamous Rebranding of the New York Islanders, by the University of Nebraska Press on December 1. The book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation at Ohio University, chronicles the wacky story of the National Hockey League team in the mid-1990s, when the franchise abandoned its original logo—a map of Long Island with the bold letters “NY”—in favor of a cartoon fisherman similar to the mascot for Gorton’s frozen seafood. The book’s title alludes to a chant that fans of opposing teams used to taunt the Islanders.
Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri-Columbia) has published a book chapter with two recent Mizzou doctoral graduates in journalism — Carlos A. Cortés-Martínez of the Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia, and Joy Jenkins of the Reuters Institute for Journalism Studies at the University of Oxford in England. They analyzed stories in SoHo, a Colombian men’s publication that’s been compared to Esquire, GQ and Playboy. The authors investigated the place of female reporters in South America in the sphere of Gonzo — a field traditionally studied through the works of Western, male journalists. The chapter, titled “La Revista Prohibida Para las Mujeres: Gonzo By Women in SoHo Magazine of Colombia, South America,” appears in Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Robert Alexander and Christine Isager and published by Bloomsbury.
Tom Mascaro (Bowling Green State University) has been awarded American Journalism’s “Article of the Year” for his study that appeared in the spring issue of the journal. “The Blood of Others: Television Documentary Journalism as Literary Engagement” argues documentary journalists have been too narrowly defined as strictly journalists. Mascaro posits documentarians, like their counterparts in literature, intimately engage with and immerse themselves in the topics they research, which warrants examining documentaries as both acts of journalism and engaged literature. Mascaro was recognized for his work at the American Journalism Historians Association’s National Convention in Salt Lake City.
Victor Pickard (University of Pennsylvania) has a new article in the International Journal of Communication titled “The Strange Life and Death of the Fairness Doctrine: Tracing the Decline of Positive Freedoms in American Policy Discourse.” One of the most famous and controversial media policies ever enacted, the Fairness Doctrine suffered a final deathblow in August 2011 when the Federal Communications Commission permanently struck it from the books. However, the Doctrine continues to be invoked by proponents and detractors alike. Using mixed methods, Pickard’s study historically contextualizes the Fairness Doctrine while drawing attention to how it figures within contemporary regulatory debates.
