Contact: Russ White, University Relations, (517) 355-2281, whiterus@msu.edu

11/9/2004

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press correspondent Walter Mears will present the annual Frederick S. Siebert Lecture at Michigan State University on Wednesday, Nov. 10.

Mears will speak at 4 p.m. in Room 147 of the Communication Arts and Sciences Building on the MSU campus. His address – “Forty Years of Presidential Campaigns” – is free and open to the public.

Mears retired from the AP in 2001 as vice president and Washington columnist. Over his 45 years with the AP, Mears won a Pulitzer Prize and covered every presidential campaign and election from 1964 to 2001.

Mears joined the AP in Boston in 1955 while a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He became the AP's first correspondent in Montpelier, Vt., and transferred to Washington in 1961.

In Washington, Mears served as a special correspondent, chief political writer, chief of bureau and chief of the Senate writing staff. He won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign and election. He was named an AP vice president in 1978. Mears served as executive editor of the AP from 1984 to 1989 before returning to the Washington bureau.

He is the author of “Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning, A Reporter's Story” and the co-author of “The News Business” and “The New News Business,” with former NBC anchor John Chancellor.

The MSU School of Journalism established the Siebert Lecture series in 1968 in honor of Frederick S. Siebert, director of the School of Journalism from 1957 to 1960 and dean of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences from 1960 to 1967. The lecture provides an annual forum for discussion about freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Siebert was a distinguished teacher and scholar who published important works on the history of the First Amendment and participated in a number of well-known First Amendment cases in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The lecture is co-sponsored this year by The State News and the College of Communication Arts and Sciences.