Edward Wasserman Lecture
Channel: Susan Gerbic
Date: 22/06/2017

Wasserman had no slides - so I only took audio. 

“Fake News” came to prominence in the last political election, but journalistic ethics, source reliability, and trust have been evolving for as long as people sought to distinguish fact from fiction.

This talk will cover the different definitions and categorization of fake news, its attributes, origins, and evolution, and what its practitioners hope to accomplish. Learn about actions that you can take to identify and discuss truth in media.


Edward Wasserman is professor of journalism and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before coming to Berkeley in 2013 he was for 10 years the Knight Foundation professor of journalism ethics at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. He writes and speaks widely on media rights and wrongs, technological change, and media ownership and control. His academic specialties include plagiarism, source relations, confidentiality, and conflict of interest.

From 2001 to 2016 he wrote a biweekly column that was distributed nationally on the McClatchy-Tribune wire. He was a member of the executive board of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) and serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Media Ethics. He has spoken to professionals and academics throughout the U.S. and in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, Sweden, Qatar, and China.

Wasserman’s career in journalism began in 1972. He worked for news organizations in Maryland, Wyoming, Florida, and New York. He was CEO and editor in chief of American Lawyer Media’s Miami-based Daily Business Review chain, executive business editor of The Miami Herald, city editor of The Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, and editorial director of Primedia’s 140-publication Media Central division in New York.

Wasserman received a B.A. cum laude in politics and economics from Yale, a licence in philosophy from the University of Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne), and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, where he studied media politics and economics.