BA, University of Denver. Rosenthal retired in June 2016 from his position as editorial page editor of The New York Times, after overseeing the newspaper’s opinion sections for more than nine years. As editorial page editor, he created the Op-Docs series, a forum for short documentaries that was the first of its kind and has won a Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, and two Academy Award nominations. The editorial department also created a pioneering space for transgender Americans to share their stories and be seen, part of a series on transgender rights that changed Pentagon policy. Rosenthal was a podcaster and Op-Ed columnist for the Times until 2018 and the editor of The New York Times Book of Politics: 167 Years of Covering the State of the Union, published in October 2018. In the fall of 2017, he was the Visiting Edward R. Murrow Lecturer of the Practice of the Press and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he taught a class on Race, Politics, and the Media. In the spring of 2017, he co-taught a class in international reporting at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and was professional in residence at the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, also in 2017. In 2015, Rosenthal led the creation of a series of editorials on the scourge of firearms in the United States, including the first page-one editorial that The Times had published in nearly a century; the series was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing. He was also the primary editor of The Times’s special daily section, “A Nation Challenged,” following the 9/11 attacks; that section won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2002. Before serving as editorial page editor of The Times, Rosenthal was deputy editorial page editor starting in August 2003; assistant managing editor for news from September 2001; and the foreign editor beginning in May 1997. While foreign editor, he also served as national editor of The Times for six months in 2000, supervising coverage of the presidential election and the postelection recount. He joined The Times in March 1987 as a Washington correspondent and was the paper's Washington editor beginning in November 1992. While in Washington, he covered the first Bush administration, the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections, and the Persian Gulf War. He also supervised coverage of the 1994 and 1996 national elections. Before arriving at The Times, Rosenthal worked at The Associated Press, where, since July 1986, he was its bureau chief in Moscow after three years there as a correspondent for the wire service. His other assignments with The AP included editor on the foreign desk in New York from April 1982 until June 1983 and reporter in the Denver bureau from October 1978 until April 1982. Born in New Delhi, Rosenthal attended high school in New York. In college, he was a sports stringer for the Associated Press from January to April 1976 and a police reporter for The Rocky Mountain News from October 1976 to June 1977. Rosenthal is currently at work on a memoir about his life and career while also teaching graduate and undergraduate courses. He is also editor-in-chief of Bulletin, an online news startup in Sweden. SLC, 2022–
Undergraduate Courses 2023-2024
Politics
Civil Unrest and the American Media
Open, Seminar—Fall
During the New York Civil War draft protests, the publisher of The New York Times, a founding member of Lincoln’s Republican Party, put Gatling guns in his office windows on Printing House Square and announced that any protester who approached his building would be shot. This seminar will explore what the American media have done since then in covering and analyzing civil unrest. Hyperbolic? Not really. We will start with a discussion about what exactly constitutes civil unrest in the first place and then look at how the media have defined civil unrest over the decades and presented it to their readers, listeners, and viewers. We will explore, among other things, antiracism protests; antiwar protests; protests on behalf of women’s rights and gay, lesbian and transgender rights; and, on the flip side, public protests against alcohol consumption, against abortion rights, against gun regulation, for segregation, and finally, the attempted coup on January 6, 2021. We will look at what is covered, who is covered, what language is used, who is quoted, and who is not quoted to explore the impact of news coverage on protest movements and the impact of those movements on the news coverage. We’ll read newspapers and magazines; watch television reports and documentaries, movies, and TV shows; and explore the role of social media and its corporate owners. You’ll need research skills; we will be looking at original media sources that may be more than 100 years old or 10 seconds old. Students will be required to read, watch, or listen to at least two news sources a day and will be responsible, on a rotating basis, for sharing their findings with the class. There will be two 1,500-word essays, as well as your conference paper. Most readings will be in the media, but there also will be some reading from scholars who have studied the subject and framed it for our purposes. This should be challenging and a lot of fun.
Faculty
Previous Courses
Politics
Racism and the Media in America
Open, Seminar—Spring
There was a reason why Edmund Burke famously called the press “the Fourth Estate” of government during a debate in Parliament in 1787 and why it remains true. For all of its self-proclaimed and often real independence, the press is as much a part of the power systems that run society, politics, and the economy as the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary; political and social organizations; churches and corporations. With that in mind, this course will examine the role of the press (now newspapers, radio, TV, and an endless array of digital outlets) in the creation and perpetuation of anti-Black racism in the United States. Even with the most well-meaning attempts to stay above the fray, the media is not merely a passive pipeline for events and data. It constructs the news and, in doing so, is as much a part of the institutions of racism as any other group with power and privilege in a racist society. We look at the flow of American history and its constant current of anti-Black racism, from the pre-Civil War to the present day, through the prism of the nation’s evolving news media. How does the media reflect the social, economic, and political currents of the day? And how, in turn, does the media influence them? This is not a practicum class in journalism; but we will ask questions about journalistic practices, institutions, and language structure to see how the language and agenda of racism were reflected in journalism. Did journalists, in turn, perpetuate that language and, in fact, foster it, whether wittingly or passively? Did the media help sustain overt and systemic racism, even as many covered—with obvious approval—things like the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement of today? Most American news organizations have stopped using the overt language of racism, although new descriptions are just as bad in some cases. But beyond that, is there an inherent racism of language? Has modern English, for our purposes as used in the media, been another lever of systemic racism? How do news reporters navigate the current world of propaganda and disinformation in which truth is said to have no value? Readings for this class will primarily be original news and opinion content from the late 19th century until today. We will analyze the structure and nature of media coverage using specific events: the racist massacre in Tulsa; lynching and Jim Crow; the police-instigated violence in Watts in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s; the FBI’s Cointelpro attack on the Black Panther Party; Black Lives Matter protests; the war in Vietnam; football players and other athletes demonstrating for equal rights; and others. The seminar will conclude with each student teaching his/her research project to the class, using the framework of our work together during the semester.