On Writing About Africa - Charlayne Hunter-Gault July 17, 2008

Favorite:

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2007/11/07/Solutions_The_Future_Political_Landscape

Award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault criticizes racist and sensationalist reporting on Africa.

-----

On the 60th anniversary of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.

Historians, scientists, philosophers, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, image-makers, and public figures will debate in three separate sessions the current state of political discourse - and journalism's response to it - on the dawn of a bitterly contested presidential campaign - NYPL

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a journalist, having worked with CNN, NPR, and PBS. She was the first African American woman admitted to or graduated from the University of Georgia. She is also the author of the autobiography In My Place, which reflects on African American life in the 1940s and 50s and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. Charlayne Hunter-Gault recently left her post as CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent, which she had held since 1999, to pursue independent projects. Before joining CNN, she worked from Johannesburg as the chief correspondent in Africa for NPR from 1997 to 1999.

Hunter-Gault was the chief national correspondent for the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS from 1983 to 1997. She had joined the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent. In 1989, she was also the correspondent for MacNeil/Lehrer Productions' five-part series, "Learning in America." During her tenure at the NewsHour, she won two Emmys and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on the series "Apartheid's People." She also received the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.